The paper examines the plausibility of analytical dispositionalism about practical reason, according to which the following claims are conceptual truths about common sense ethical discourse: i) Ethics: agents have reasons to act in some ways rather than others, and ii) Metaphysical Modesty: there is no such thing as a response independent normative reality. By elucidating two uncontroversial assumptions which are fundamental to the common sense commitment to ethics, I argue that common sense ethical discourse is most plausibly construed as committed (...) to the denial of metaphysical modesty, and thereby as committed to the existence of a response independent normative reality. (shrink)

Most accounts of integrity agree that the person of integrity must have a relatively stable sense of who he is, what is important to him, and the ability to stand by what is most important to him in the face of pressure to do otherwise. But does integrity place any constraints on the kind of principles that the person of integrity stands for? In response to several recent accounts of integrity, I argue that it is not enough that a person (...) stand for what he believes in, nor even that he is committed to and stands for what, in his best judgement, is morally right. In our web of moral concepts integrity is internally related to a host of virtues which exclude weakness of will and dogmatism, and presuppose trustworthiness. Integrity requires that the principles stood for must be those that a morally good, morally trustworthy agent would stand for, and that the agent himself is morally trustworthy. (shrink)

Systemic discrimination produces individuals with a degraded self-concept who therefore may not care about autonomy or set ends compatible with human flourishing. Under systemic discrimination, the dominant conceptual and evaluative framework does not enable the oppressed to articulate their humanity or the rationality of aspiring to full human flourishing. And the injustice of that system may be fully visible only from a perspective outside of that system.

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)