I argue for the existence of a ‘ratcheting-up effect’: the behavior of moral saints serves to increase the level of moral obligation the rest of us face. What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do. Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of (...) sacrifice a person can realistically bear. Exposure to moral saints thus ‘ratchets-up’ our obligations by combating a type of ignorance that would otherwise defeat those obligations. (shrink)

In the fourteenth letter to Lucilius, Seneca explains how to avoid physical danger and discomfort: the worst threats to the body come not from nature but from men in power; therefore safety lies in not giving offence. Ad philosophiam confugiendum est : the study of philosophy incurs neither envy nor contempt, provided that the philosopher pursues it peacefully and without ostentation.

Susan Wolf famously claimed that the life of the moral saint is unattractive from the “point of view of individual perfection.” I argue, however, that the unattractive moral saints in Wolf’s account are self-defeating on two levels, are motivated in the wrong way, and are called into question by real-life counter-examples. By appealing to a real-life case study, I argue that the best life from the moral point of view is not necessarily unattractive from the individual point of view.

Three pictures of integrity have gained philosophical currency. On the integrated self picture, integrity involves the integration of "parts" of oneself into a whole. On the identity picture, integrity means fidelity to projects and principles constitutive of one's core identity. On the clean hands picture, integrity means maintaining the purity of one's agency, especially in dirty hands situations. I sketch each picture and suggest two general criticisms. First, integrity is reduced to something else with which it is not equivalent--to the (...) conditions of unified agency, to the conditions for continuing as the same self, and to the conditions for having reason to refuse cooperating with evil. Second, integrity is understood as a personal, but not also a social virtue; this limits the analysis of what integrity is and why it is a virtue. In the last section, I suggest a way of understanding integrity as the social virtue of standing before others for what, in one's best judgment, is worth persons' doing. (shrink)

In the fourteenth letter to Lucilius, Seneca explains how to avoid physical danger and discomfort: the worst threats to the body come not from nature but from men in power; therefore safety lies in not giving offence. Ad philosophiam confugiendum est : the study of philosophy incurs neither envy nor contempt, provided that the philosopher pursues it peacefully and without ostentation.

Elizabeth Swann: Wait! You have to take me to shore.According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren—.