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Jessica Payson, PhD

Unformatted, pre-print version.Published in International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 29, Iss. 2 (Fall 2015).

A Third Aspect of Individual Responsibility for Justice: The Responsibility to Organize

ABSTRACT: Iris Marion Young has written a compelling account of individuals’ normative responsibilities for structural justice. While I agree with much of Young’s account, in this article I argue that there is an underexplored aspect of Young’s account regarding the link between individuals’ shared responsibility for justice and the normative demand that individuals engage in collective action towards just structural reform. I argue that Young has neglected an important aspect of individual responsibility for justice that links the aforementioned responsibilities together – namely, the responsibility to organize. Recognizing this responsibility is crucial for understanding the real work of structural justice efforts in the nonideal world.

KEY WORDS: collective action, individual responsibility, shared responsibility, justice, nonideal theory

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In this essay I respond to Iris Marion Young’s “social connection” model of

responsibility. Young argues that individual responsibility for justice is shared, and that the

shared nature of the responsibility leads fairly straightforwardly to a responsibility to engage in

collective action. I argue that the connection between individual responsibility and collective

action is not direct and is not primarily to do with efficiency. While I agree with Young that

responsibility is shared and that collective action is necessary, I argue that there is a further

aspect of individual responsibility for justice, a responsibility that gives rise to but is not the

same as responsibility for collective action. This is a responsibility to participate in organized

groups. Individuals are responsible not only for engaging in collective action, but also for

supporting and maintaining the very organizations from which collective actions may arise. The

reason for this responsibility is not only or even primarily to affect just material reform; rather, it

is to collaborate in building the meaning of what “just” reform means. Whereas Young’s

account of the connection between shared responsibility and collective action implicitly assumes

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an ideal world, my account of the link and the third aspect of responsibility allows a fuller

understanding of the nature of individual responsibility in a nonideal world.

Responsibility for Justice and the Need for Collective Action: Young’s Account

My account, in keeping with Young’s, addresses specifically structural injustice –

injustices that are the result of complex, often transnational, social-structural processes. Such

injustices are formed not by discrete interactions, and do not take the form of singular events, but

instead result from the pooling together of many actions over a period of time. As Young

explains the term, “social structures” name the pattern of institutions and practices that both

connect and distinguish individuals from one another by positioning them in various roles. As

individuals take up these roles, individuals’ actions are combined and channeled toward the

realization of complex social projects – education, production, protection, and so on. Structures,

then, supply an organizational background providing ways for individuals, through established

roles, to work toward ends otherwise outside their capabilities. While these ends might include

important social needs, they might also entail elements that are harmful or unfair to their

participants. When structures function unjustly, they function not only to position individuals

but to position them in unacceptable ways, placing entire categories of persons at risk for

homelessness, for example, or exploitation, starvation, physical violence, and so on.

For Young, individual actions within structures are not only empirically relevant for

explaining how structures operate. These empirical connections also imply a specific kind of

normative responsibility. Young’s “social connection” model of responsibility is meant to

describe the responsibility that applies to individuals in structures who may not intend to harm

others, but nevertheless participate in processes that end up doing so in predictable and alterable

ways through their ordinary, everyday actions. Although individuals take actions within a pre-

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established structural background, the structural background is also maintained by individual

actions. Structures are not simply abstract forces external to and constraining of individuals, but

rather, are embodied by individuals. If structures endure over time it is not because they are

static, but to the contrary, it is because they are constituted and reconstituted over time by

recursive individual actions that form practices. While individuals typically do not intend to

perpetuate their structures, and are often unaware of their participation, individuals nonetheless

tend to act in ways that reproduce the structures they were born into and with which they are

most familiar. Structural function, on some level, cannot be understood as separate from

individual actions, historic and current; rather, it is maintained by the expectations, rules, and so

on that are lived out by ordinary individuals in their everyday lives. It is only through changes in

these daily attitudes and routines that structural justice can be achieved.

As Young explains, the responsibility that applies to individuals within unjust structures

– the responsibility elicited from “social connection” – differs from the perhaps more familiar

liability-based models of responsibility in several respects. Foremost among these differences is

that the social connection model does not aim to isolate particular individuals for blame, but

rather, recognizes that injustices result from the aggregate effects of millions of individual

actions, leading to a shared and forward-looking responsibility. “Each individual is personally

responsible for outcomes in a partial way, since he or she alone does not produce the outcomes;

the specific part that each person plays in producing the outcome cannot be isolated and

identified, however, and thus the responsibility is essentially shared.”1 Although we must take

account of past practices, it is largely impossible to trace the causal connections that produced

particular harms, and so the emphasis is more on altering these practices than assigning fault.

Young seems to connect the shared and forward-looking nature of responsibility fairly

1 Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 110.

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straightforwardly to the need for collective action. “[T]he forward-looking responsibility can be

discharged only by joining with others in collective action. This feature follows from the

essentially shared nature of the responsibility.”2 On elaboration, Young seems to appeal to

reasons of efficiency to explain why the shared forward-looking responsibility should lead to

collective action:

“Our forward-looking responsibility consists in changing the institutions and processes so that their outcomes will be less unjust. No one of us can do this on our own… [A] single shopper would not change the working conditions of those toiling in sweatshops by refusing to buy all items she had reason to believe were produced under unjust conditions. The structural processes can be altered only if many actors in diverse social positions work together to intervene in these processes to produce different outcomes.”3

I accept Young’s empirical description of the source of injustice and her normative claim that

individuals therefore share responsibility for justice. And I of course accept Young’s empirical

claim that collectives are capable of structural reform and individuals taken singularly are not.

What I question is the implicitly singular reason for the collective action, namely, that it is the

most efficient (and, indeed, only) way to fulfill the shared responsibility.

Two Senses of “Justice” – Ideal and Nonideal

Young’s account implies two related yet distinct individual responsibilities: the

responsibility qua participant in structures to make those structures just, and the responsibility

qua member of an organized collective to work towards structural reform. Call the first

responsibility “R1” and the second “R2.” Young’s above claim is that R2 is the means through

which individuals act on the responsibility referred to by R1. As such, R2 serves a primarily

instrumental purpose. This connection, I argue, is underexplored; further articulation of the

connection is necessary for understanding the work of structural justice in a nonideal world.

2 Ibid., 111.3 Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Social Philosophy & Policy 23, no. 1 (2006): 102-130, at p. 123. See also Young, Responsibility for Justice, 111.

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Logically speaking, the connection risks committing an equivocation error: the responsibility for

justice that people take when they participate in collective action (R2) is not the same

responsibility that attaches to them via their structural positioning (R1). Though individuals may

participate in successful collective action and so fulfill R2, they do not necessarily thereby also

fulfill R1. As I will describe below, Young’s account implicitly relies on two distinct

conceptions of justice – justice in the ideal sense and justice in the nonideal sense. Her account

of individuals’ normative responsibilities for justice risks conflating these two senses.

Distinguishing ideal from nonideal conceptions of justice becomes particularly important

when we are discussing, like Young is, specifically structural justice. Structural justice is an end

that individuals share with one another and can only be achieved when enough individuals act

jointly together. However, an individual who resists structural injustice will be in a minority,

precisely because the injustice she faces is structural. Structural injustice can be seen as

necessarily entailing extensive noncompliance: while individuals are not irrelevant to explaining

changes in socio-political structures, they are also not irrelevant to explaining structural

endurance. Individuals tend to identify with their structural roles and their associated norms and

expectations, and tend to accept and re-enact the practices with which they identify. So, for

example, Charles Mills writes that an “epistemology of ignorance” is constructed in the shaping

of the racial order that instructs certain individuals to see themselves as white, and others as

nonwhite and inferior.4 Whites become incapable of recognizing certain facts about the world

and others – for example, that nonwhites have their own culture and history, that nonwhites have

the same cognitive capacities as whites, and so on. Ignorance is not accidental to racist

structures, but is rather a constitutive part of it. Even given a recognition of one’s structural

surroundings and positions, moreover, it may not be immediately apparent what to do to resist

4 Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18-19.

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reinforcing structural functioning. Precisely because structures tend to lay out “paths of least

resistance” for individual actions, the easiest or most apparent actions usually are also those that

reinforce established structural patterns. Structural injustice results from a vast number of

mutually reinforcing individual actions; the injustice could be eliminated if, hypothetically,

individuals were to agree to a plan to stop the injustice and follow through accordingly.

However, if individuals tend to not notice structural injustices nor opportunities for resistance,

they are very likely to continue in the practices that support and perpetuate injustice.

The effect of noncompliance is not simply to increase compliant individuals’

responsibilities quantitatively. If there is not an adequate level of compliance surrounding one’s

action, not only may one’s action not be effective; it may also no longer count as an action that

contributes to justice. As Tamar Schapiro argues, wrongdoing on the part of others might

function to alter the integrity of one’s actions.5 Drawing from Rawls,6 Schapiro explains that

“practice rules” are logically prior to the actions falling under them – the action of “hitting a

home run,” for example, only makes sense within the rules of baseball.7 Others’ noncompliance

within the practice, however, can make it such that a compliant individual within the practice is

no longer able to meet the standards of that practice. To take Schapiro’s example, suppose that

you attempt to negotiate with another party who, unbeknownst to you at the outset of your

discussion, aims not to negotiate with you but rather to keep you talking in order to buy time.

“Outwardly, he goes through the motions of listening and responding to your arguments, but [during the negotiation] you [become] aware that he is really just trying to manage you, to work around you like an obstacle, without really engaging with the substance of your claims. Given this situation, what is the proper way to describe your own actions? Are you negotiating, or are you just babbling on? If it makes sense to raise this question, this suggests that we take there to be some threshold beyond which the noncompliance of

5 Tamar Schapiro, “Compliance, Complicity, and the Nature of Non-ideal Conditions,” The Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 7 (2003): 334-335.6 John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” The Philosophical Review 64, no. 1 (1955): 3-32.7 Schapiro, “Compliance, Complicity, and the Nature of Non-ideal Conditions,” 334-335.

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another can have a bearing on the integrity, and not merely the efficiency, of your rule-governed action.”8

The possibility that Schapiro raises is that, by no fault of your own, you may perform a different

sort of action than you intend. Moreover, you remain bound by the practice rules of negotiation,

rules that your action cannot meet. That is, it is not the case that you have completed an action

that belongs to some other practice, albeit a practice not of your choosing. There is still enough

of the “constitutive background” in place (perhaps certain legal criteria are met) such that you

are still engaged in the practice of “negotiating,” and not, for example, that of “domination.”9

And so, due to others’ noncompliance, your ideal action has become something else, and

something unjustifiable by the standards that bind it.

While Schapiro seems to imply that the instances her analysis applies to are rare, it seems

that parts of her analysis carry over to the everyday lives of individuals working toward justice.

Comparable to the rule-governed practices that Schapiro discusses, structures establish a

background against which actions make sense and that sets standards for evaluating those

actions. Additionally, structures, like rule-governed practices, can withstand some amount of

noncompliance without breaking. This allows that an individual might find herself in a structure

wherein the rules of the structure are binding on her actions, and yet others’ noncompliance

radically alters the meaning of her action such that it is no longer in conformity with structural

norms. To apply Schapiro’s analysis to a case of structural justice, consider that in an ideal

world, justice demands that no person receive differential treatment based on race.10 There is

sufficient background in place such that rules of fairness, equality, and so on still hold; even with

a fairly critical view of the wide extent of racism in the socio-political order, it still must be

8 Ibid., 337.9 Ibid., 338-339.10 Race might, moreover, cease to exist.

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concluded that we are in the game of “justice” and not in some alternate game of “conquest.”

Yet the actions that would be called for in the ideal, race-less world – ignoring persons’ race

when making hiring decisions, for example, and so rejecting affirmative action policies – would

be of an entirely different character and lack justification within the actual, nonideal world.11

The reason for this is in large part due to noncompliance with the rules of a race-less world –

given that race features pervasively in socio-political structures, individuals’ current roles and

practices tend to reinforce racial differentiations, whether they intend this or not. To ignore race

in the context of structures that perpetuate racialization and racism is not to do one’s part toward

justice, but is instead to become a “tool of evil.”12 My contribution to ignore race if all others do

as well depends on others’ compliance – not only for its success but also on its very meaning and

justification. Without sufficient compliance in place, I can no longer say that the ideal action is

an appropriate way of “taking responsibility,” since that ideal action no longer has the same

meaning.

A Third Aspect of Responsibility for Justice: The Responsibility to Organize

Young’s suggested instrumental reasons are not sufficient to link R1 to R2. The shared

responsibility (R1) is to achieve justice in structures – justice in the ideal sense. The collective

responsibility (R2) is to promote structural change that is more rather than less just. This latter

meaning of justice is adapted to a nonideal world and is not necessarily equivalent to justice in

the ideal sense. If R2 is indeed called for – as it must be, if we want structural change – it cannot

arise directly from R1. There must, then, be a third aspect of individual responsibility for justice

that stands between R1 and R2 – that explains what individuals who accept R1 are immediately

11 The example of affirmative action as necessarily nonideal is drawn from Lisa Tessman, “Idealizing Morality,” Hypatia 25, no. 4: (2010): 797-824, at p. 812.12 Schapiro adopts this term from Christine Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 15, no. 4 (1986): 325-349.

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responsible for doing, and that also accounts for the need for collective action. I argue that this

responsibility, R3, is to participate in organized social justice-oriented groups. This participation

will likely involve the performance of collective actions, thus R2 – however, the responsibility to

play a role in the collective action is an off-shoot of R3 and is not a direct expression of R1.

While both R3 and R2 require an individual to participate in groups, the reasons for the

participation differ in each case. R2 is result-oriented; the responsibility is to bring about just

change. However, given nonideal conditions, the meaning of a just collective action is not

immediately available as a shared ideal of a socio-political community. Instead, the meaning has

to be built. If individuals wish to participate in action that meaningfully counts toward justice

(R2), they must first create that meaning. Constructing this meaning is the purpose of R3.

Indeed, without R3, ordinary individuals could not rightly be said to have justice-based

responsibilities for any specific R2 action. It would not necessarily be true, for example, that an

individual consumer ought to stop buying brand X clothing produced through sweatshop labor.

Moreover, it would not necessarily be true that all individual consumers of brand X, insofar as

they are compliant with responsibilities of justice, ought to cease their support. The reason for

this is that compliant individuals in the context of structural injustice form what Virginia Held

calls a “random collection” – “a set of persons distinguishable by some characteristics from the

set of all persons, but lacking a decision method for taking action that is distinguishable from

such decision methods, if there are any, as are possessed by all persons.”13 Individuals are

“collected” in the sense that each individual holds a certain significant feature in common with

the others, yet they are “randomly” collected in the sense that there is no principled reason why

these particular individuals and not others should share this feature. Compliant individuals

13 Virginia Held, “Can a Random Collection of Individuals Be Morally Responsible?” The Journal of Philosophy 67, no. 14 (1970): 471-481, at p. 471.

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within structural injustice share a kind of moral knowledge and interest, but they do not share

practical expectations of one another. They have no pre-established connections between them

that could enable them to coordinate their actions toward justice – quite to the contrary, the

individuals’ pre-existing expectations for behavior tend to support injustice. As such, the

knowledge of the random collection is equivalent to the knowledge of each individual therein.

While any given individual might decide what she will do to resist injustice, she cannot

reasonably be expected to know what others will do and how their actions will interrelate with

hers. This lack of knowledge means that the random collection is not capable of responding as a

collection. Despite their common recognition of injustice and opportunities for resistant joint

action, the members of the random collection cannot be said to be responsible for performing any

specific action.

But what follows from these remarks is not that individuals have no responsibilities for

injustice: rather, it is that they have responsibilities to form the collective that renders its

members capable of collective action. As Held argues, in circumstances when it is clear that

action is called for and that the action requires joint efforts, and yet the actions that should

constitute the joint efforts are non-intuitive, individuals within a random group become

responsible for organizing.14 While no individual can know what she ought to do within a joint

14 In Held’s words, “when the action called for is not obvious to the reasonable person, a random collection may not be held responsible for not performing the action in question, but, in some cases, may be held responsible for not forming itself into an organized group capable of deciding which action to take” (ibid., 476). Held uses the language of “holding responsible” rather than “taking responsibility,” and she attributes the responsibility to the random collection rather than individuals. I would say that the relevant responsible agents are the several individuals within the random collection, not the random collection itself. For it does not make sense to say that the “random collection” is responsible for organizing itself when the “random collection” has no agentic (specifically, decision-making) capabilities. In addition, I do not necessarily agree that individuals who fail to organize themselves are candidates for backward-looking ascriptions of responsibility (“holding responsible”), but to take a position on this would be outside the scope of my paper. What I take from Held is merely that individuals have capabilities to organize and a resulting responsibility (in my account, a forward-looking responsibility) to do so.

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action when she does not know what others will do, any reasonable individual will know that this

therefore calls for finding out what others will do. Held describes a scenario involving a random

collection of three pedestrians. The pedestrians witness a building collapse and see someone

trapped under the wreckage; they know that something ought to be done, and they know that

together they are capable of lifting the heaviest obstructing beams. However, they must

coordinate their actions, as no two are capable of lifting any one beam by themselves. In this

scenario, no one individual nor the random group as such can be said to be capable of and so

responsible for rescue. Yet it would be wrong to say that the pedestrians have no responsibilities

vis-à-vis the trapped person. While it is not obvious which of the beams to lift, it is obvious that

some beam should be lifted. It is also obvious that they must work together; they then become

responsible for forming themselves into an organized collective capable of deciding on a joint

action.

R3, then, enables R2 to take place in a qualitative sense. The purpose of R3 is not only or

necessarily to make a particularly strenuous or difficult task easier to accomplish. The more

fundamental effect of R3 is to make the actions entailed in R2 meaningful. Organized groups are

of course important for what they can accomplish (rescuing the trapped individual, in Held’s

example), but they are also important for offering opportunities for individuals to perform

actions that qualify them as taking responsibility for justice. Organizations enable new sorts of

activities for their participants (“picking up beam 1” rather than “standing about,” e.g.) and they

allow this activity to be understood as valuable (“rescuing” rather than “straining one’s back,”

e.g.). Even if a solo individual might have heroic intentions – a pedestrian in Held’s example

might struggle to lift a beam by himself without waiting for the others – without material

support, the intentions result in actions that are at worst mistaken and at best quixotic. We might

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recognize what the agent wanted the action to be, but we also must recognize that the action is

not in fact of its intended nature.

As I emphasize the importance of the organizing that pre-dates a collective action, I am

not denying that collective action is indeed a necessary component of taking responsibility for

justice. R3 does not diminish the importance of R2: to the contrary, it necessitates R2. As

valuable as it is to participate in organization, organization must be directed towards an end other

than itself if it is to attain its value. My claim here is similar to Jon Elster’s criticism of

participatory theories of democracy. While participation may give rise to the most valued

aspects of democracy, Elster argues, the values will not come to be unless there is something

substantive participants aim to achieve. “The non-business part of politics may be the more

valuable, but the value is contingent on the importance of the business part.”15 To reframe

Elster’s point for my purposes, individuals who accept R1 follow through by organizing with one

another. Given a nonideal world in which there is no ready-made conception of justice nor

roadmap as to how to achieve it, the primary work of justice is to support and work with

organizations. This claim, however, is made from an external, observer perspective. From the

first-person perspective, the reason why individuals support an organization is not simply for the

sake of organization itself, but rather, because they believe that in doing so they might bring

about important socio-political change. The non-material value of organization – the promotion

of an issue as an issue of justice – is (borrowing Elster’s term) a “by-product.” The by-product

may be crucial for promoting fundamental structural change, but we would not get it if the

organizations were not oriented around practical goals.

15 Jon Elster, “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” Foundations of Social Choice Theory, ed. Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 103-132, at p. 125.

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The Narrative Value of R3

R3 is necessary in order to link R1 and R2 and so motivate action without losing the

distinction between ideal and non-ideal justice. I have yet to explain, however, the significance

of R3 from an individual level. Indeed, my above remarks on the necessity of R2 might seem to

suggest that individuals engaging in R2 must not be aware of the rival importance of R3. It is

necessary to clarify, then, that I take both R2 and R3 to be individual responsibilities understood

from the first-person perspective. While the more immediate responsibility of engaging in a

collective action will likely be at the forefront of an acting individual’s mind, this need not

exclude additional responsibilities from an individual’s broader sphere of consciousness. R3, I

claim, is present within this broader sphere and as such is relevant for how an individual ought to

think of her normative relation to justice. R3 can be thought of as operating along the lines of

what Eugene Troxell calls the “orientation” and “collateral” dimensions of responsibility.16 The

“orientation” dimension requires an individual to be aware not only of the significance of the

action or project at hand, but also the further ends that the immediate action or project is meant

to facilitate. The “collateral” dimension of responsibility requires an individual to understand

that “any individual behavior in which we may engage as we initiate a given action may give rise

to several different chains of events concurrently, or collaterally, with the events leading to the

desired state of affairs.”17 In order to exercise responsibility as one engages in a particular action

(including a collective action), one must maintain a sense of the larger purpose that motivates the

action (e.g., structural justice) and the parallel processes that one’s intended actions participate in

– e.g., the formation of organized procedures. Organization is, then, a by-product – but that does

not then exempt it as an object of responsibility. To the contrary: full exercise of responsibility

16 Troxell, Eugene A. 1994. “On Having a Sense of Responsibility,” Journal of Social Philosophy 25, no. 2 (1994): 5-28.17 Ibid., 19.

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requires an awareness of not only one’s immediate projects but also their secondary results and,

moreover, their compatibility with an overarching motivating end.

From the first-person perspective, R3 demands that individuals take responsibility not

only for specific organized campaigns but also for the narrative context in which the campaigns

participate. Campaigns provide a network of responsibilities for their participants and in doing

so also convey moral understandings about, for example, what is important, who ought to see to

it, and by what appropriate means. As Margaret Walker explains, a system of responsibilities

“not only aims to secure outcomes (for the most part), but to keep reproducing the specific

shared understandings, and the awareness of them as shared, in which the system consists.”18 In

the context of structural injustice, understanding oneself as responsible for these shared

understandings is particularly important. As argued above, most individuals participate in

structural injustice not because they are trying to shirk their responsibilities, but rather, because

they believe they are fulfilling them; individuals are noncompliant not because they are trying to

avoid responsibilities, but rather, because they do not know what their responsibilities are. In

this context, it becomes crucial to disseminate alternate moral frameworks that present resistant

possibilities and expectations for just actions. Insofar as organized campaigns demonstrate

alternate possibilities for action and the importance of choosing some over others, they support

the conditions that can challenge the narrative source of widespread noncompliance.

Individuals take responsibility for justice by participating both in collective actions (R2)

and in their surrounding narratives (R3); understanding responsibility in this way allows a fuller

understanding of the sorts of actions we might think of as contributing towards justice. R3, for

example, allows us to understand why an individual might justifiably choose to partake in less

18 Margaret Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 101.

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rather than more strategically efficient efforts. Consider the sorts of responses one might take

against the Westboro Baptist Church.19 Given a heterosexist and homophobic socio-political

environment, the protests are not seen as harms and are instead treated as protected free speech.

Part of their harmful nature, then, can be seen as coming from their reinforcement of heterosexist

socio-political conditions that exclude lesbians and gays from public life. Justice requires

intervening in the heterosexist framework that casts the exclusion of lesbians and gays as a

legitimate public opinion worthy of consideration.20 However, individuals who are upset by the

protests are expected to register their disagreement by simply looking away, in keeping with the

characterization of the protest as mere opinion. Or, perhaps, individuals may be expected to

form a counter-rally as if to “balance” one opinion with another. In both cases, individuals

would be playing roles that reinforce the larger heterosexist structural framework that legitimizes

exclusion of lesbians and gays from public life. In contrast, in some instances counter-protestors

have refused the role of bystander and the framework of “free speech” altogether by joining in to

the protest with such signs as “God Hates Signs” or “I was promised doughnuts.” Other counter-

protestors have intervened by surrounding the protesters while wearing “angel wings” (sheets

draped over a metal piping structure) in order to block the protest from view. These sorts of

responses probably do not lead straightforwardly to practical change. However, they

successfully recast the meaning of the anti-gay protests in a way that allows individuals to resist

the harmful “free speech” narrative. If we think that these sort of counter-protestors are taking

responsibility for justice – despite their having chosen against more practical strategic options –

19 The Westboro Baptist Church is notorious for staging anti-gay protests in public spaces in order to garner media attention (perhaps their most notorious slogan: “God Hates Fags”).20 It is beyond my scope to argue for this account of hate speech here. See Katharine Gelber (2010) for an argument that understands hate speech broadly along these lines.

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then we might also recognize that part of responsibility for justice is narrative rather than

straightforwardly causal in nature.

Recognition of R3 might explain why individuals can sometimes justifiably choose less

practical tactics over more effective alternatives. It might also explain why individuals can be

said to take responsibility for justice even when they participate in efforts that fail to achieve

their ends. As an example, consider an Amnesty International campaign to stay the death

penalty for a particular individual. It might seem meaningless for someone to have collected

letters for the campaign if the campaign was unsuccessful and the execution went through.

There is no “partial” success on the level of the collective aim. If we recognize that there was

value in the campaign nonetheless, however, it might be because we realize that the meaning of

the campaign is not exhausted by its practical aim. Because of individual actions taking part in

Amnesty International’s campaigns, it is possible to say that the organization has a certain

number of supporters in multiple locations, that they collected so many thousands of letters, and

so on. The organization behind the campaign can recognize and narrativize the efforts and

integrate them into a larger moral framework, promoting participants’ broad moral understanding

that human rights exist and that the death penalty is a human rights violation. If we believe that

the participants in these kinds of campaigns meaningfully contribute towards justice, even

campaigns in which failure seems likely, we may recognize the specifically narrative component

of responsibility for justice.

The Implication of Inevitable Failure

I have argued that the responsibility immediately following the acceptance of R1 is R3

rather than R2. If R1 were thought to directly lead to R2, it would appear as if individuals could

straightforwardly discharge the responsibility for justice in the ideal sense by promoting a

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different, nonideal, kind of justice. R3 allows us to avoid this conflation. As one contributes to

organized collective efforts, one not only promotes just structural change (“just” in the nonideal

sense); one also supports the development of moral understandings that facilitate greater

compliance. Insofar as structural injustice is rooted in extensive noncompliance, R3 allows us to

promote the conditions for justice in the ideal sense.

As R3 avoids the equivocation error, however, it also leads to an additional complication.

If R2 was thought to directly follow from R1, it might seem that individuals could fully

discharge their responsibilities of justice. If ideal and nonideal senses of justice are conflated

and the nonideal sense is given primacy, it would be least theoretically possible to fulfill one’s

responsibilities of justice, given some substantial amount of time and effort, whatever that

amount may be. R3 speaks against this possibility. By reminding us of the difference between

ideal and nonideal senses of justice, R3 also reminds us of an inevitable gap – a gap between

what individuals understand themselves as responsible for (viz. structural justice) and what they

are capable of accomplishing. Structural justice requires full compliance; while individuals can

promote this ideal through R3, full compliance and the justice that accompanies it cannot be

reasonably expected in the foreseeable future. And so long as there is significant

noncompliance, no on-the-ground campaign can achieve the sort of justice called for by R1. On

some level, individual responsibility for justice is never finally fulfilled.

The implication of inevitable failure, however, is not a flaw in my account. With

extensive injustice in the world, it is important to retain a sense of the ideal and how much

further we must go to achieve justice. We must recognize that what is currently achievable

(what Lisa Tessman calls a “feasible ideal”) is not necessarily also what is best (what Tessman

calls a “worthy ideal”). If this qualitative gap implies some degree of inevitable failure, it also

18

avoids the problem of adaptive preferences. “We need two ways of thinking about normative

ideals, and we must know the difference between them, so that we do not mistakenly believe that

the best that we think of as attainable under nonideal conditions is the best simpliciter.”21 If we

were to mistakenly believe that what we can do is also what is best, we could avoid a sense of

inevitable failure but at the cost of abandoning our highest ideals – and with them, a sense that

we ought not settle. When the best we can do is quite bad in some respects, this is too high a

cost. For to re-label what is merely contingently attainable as also “good enough” is to disable

recognition that things should be better and so also impede the disposition to continue in our

efforts.

Jessica Payson, PhDDepartment of PhilosophyBentley University--Draft only: please do not cite without permission--

THE “META” LEVEL OF INTEGRITY: INTEGRITY IN THE CONTEXT OF STRUCTURAL INJUSTICE

Abstract: This essay argues for a new, “meta,” level of integrity that is created by the context of structural injustice. The essay will draw from Margaret Walker to bring out a defining social value of integrity, namely, its ability to facilitate reliable response to harms caused by “moral luck.” The essay will then argue that, when bad luck is caused by complex social-structural function, traditional advice for maintaining one’s integrity fails to provide adequate guidance; following such advice facilitates unjust social-structural function, and so unreliability in response to harm. The essay will address this problem by arguing that in the context of structural injustice, a “meta-level” meaning of integrity emerges. This new meta-level of integrity, unlike the more traditional first-level integrity, does not instruct an individual to disassociate herself from structural harms; instead, it instructs an individual to manage the way in which she participates in unjust social structures. Meta-level integrity, unlike first-level integrity, does not facilitate an end to structural harm, but it does promote a reliable presence of social justice movements within unjust structures.

21 Tessman, “Idealizing Morality,” 813.

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Integrity is important, Margaret Walker (2003) argues, because it helps to create communities in

which we can trust one another to respond appropriately to serious harms. Walker’s account has

broad similarities to other feminist approaches to integrity that see integrity as having not only

individual but also social value. In addition to whatever value integrity might bring to an

individual herself – internal consistency, self-awareness, and so on – the practice of integrity is

also valuable to the community in which she lives. For Victoria Davion (1991), for example,

“integrity” can help an individual to remain the same person over time while undergoing radical

changes in worldviews, including gaining feminist consciousness. For Cheshire Calhoun (1995),

“integrity” is a social virtue that provides individuals guidance as they collaborate with others to

arrive at inclusive consensus regarding justice and good. I agree with Walker and with this

broader, largely feminist, approach to integrity. I am concerned, however, that the literature has

yet to sufficiently address the effect of living in a structurally unjust society on integrity. If a

person’s integrity cannot be understood by considering only her innermost characteristics (her

internal desires and/or the formal relations holding between them) – if understanding a person’s

integrity requires also an examination of her social relations – the normative features of the

background structures that shape these social relations will matter. If social structures are unjust,

the social relations that support them cannot help but perpetuate serious and systematic harms

(see Young 2011). How can an individual be said to have integrity when her actions are

inevitably directed toward structural ends she does not support?

The following paper will address this question in four parts. First, in section one, I will

provide a working definition of integrity that defines its key value as facilitating reliable

response to harm. I will argue in section two that structural injustice challenges integrity’s

20

ability to facilitate such response. I will argue in section three that a new meaning of “integrity”

emerges in this context; in the context of structural injustice, a person who wishes to show her

resistance to structurally-produced harm ought not practice integrity in its more familiar sense

but ought instead practice “meta-integrity.” Meta-integrity does not instruct an individual to stop

participating in harm, but rather, to manage the way in which she participates. In the fourth and

final section, I will explain some key differences between the practice of meta-integrity and the

practice of the more familiar first-level integrity, and in doing so also distinguish my account

from other feminist-theoretical accounts that may otherwise seem similar to mine (specifically,

Davion’s and Calhoun’s). In my explanation, I will also bring out the somewhat different, but

still reliability-centered, social value of meta-integrity.

1. Integrity and Reliability

One of the primary reasons integrity is valuable is because it promotes a community in

which individuals can trust one another to reliably respond to harm. Margaret Walker brings out

this point while drawing from moral luck literature: in our ordinary lives we quite often accept

the fact that moral luck exists, that is, that we might become involved in significant harms

despite our best intentions. Taking Bernard Williams’ (1981) example, suppose a “lorry driver”

unintentionally kills a child who darted in front of his vehicle; whatever else we think that the

driver should do, that the driver “shrug it off” would strike us as quite impermissible. Because

we acknowledge the reality of moral luck, we often hold moral expectations for individuals who

become faultlessly implicated in harms; we understand that if they do not respond, the harms

they are implicated in may go unaddressed. Fulfilling responsibilities in the face of moral luck,

Walker argues, demands the exercise of specific virtues, foremost among which is integrity –

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“the capacity for reliably maintaining a coherent moral posture” (2003, 31-32).22 An agent with

integrity resists the co-optation of her moral agency, or being made to support something

inconsistent with her claimed values. Where her agency becomes implicated in harm, she does

not walk away, but to the contrary, responds to the harm thus following through on her

commitments. An individual with integrity can be counted on to respond to a situation of moral

luck – not so much because she believes that she caused it, but rather, because she does not stand

for it. Integrity is valuable to a community, then, because it provides a source of reliable

response to harm; response is not contingent on the harm having a clearly identifiable individual

cause.

Even in accounts of integrity that are less socially-oriented than Walker’s, reliability

remains a defining feature. Harry Frankfurt’s (1987) account of integrity, for example, requires

little or no reference to an individual’s social context. For Frankfurt, “integrity” refers to the

inner relations holding between an individual’s desires. The agent who is most “wholehearted,”

most fully in ownership of herself, is the agent who avoids inconsistencies and ambivalence in

the ordering and endorsing of her desires. Frankfurt’s view has been criticized for being overly

individualistic, considering only the formal relations holding within an individual’s desire-set

and neglecting to assess the value a community places on those desires. For Frankfurt, an

individual who is whole-heartedly committed to her own personal pleasure, for example, might

have just as much integrity as a thoroughly-committed social justice advocate. (See McFall

1987, 9-11, for this line of criticism.) While I agree with this criticism and believe that

Frankfurt’s account is overly formal, I also believe that his account captures something important

about integrity. The consistency and non-ambivalence that is central to Frankfurt’s account

22 Walker also names the virtues of lucidity and grace, but she allows that these might be aspects

of integrity (2003, 28).

22

alludes to an individual whose behavior is predictable. An individual who is inconsistent or

unsure of her desires (a “wanton” individual in Frankfurt’s words) is not fully in control of her

decisions and as such cannot be counted on to stand by or act on any particular value; whether

the individual would live up to a given value would be determined largely by arbitrary factors. A

person who is whole-hearted, on the other hand – even if she is whole-heartedly committed to an

immoral or non-moral project, e.g., hedonism – can be counted on to do as a hedonist does, and

as such, can be managed by others appropriately. To the extent that Frankfurt’s account captures

something important about integrity, I argue, it is this element of reliability in behavior.

The emphasis on reliability as a central element of integrity does not imply that an

individual with integrity must be rigid and unchanging in her commitments. To the contrary, an

individual might change even her most deeply held commitments while maintaining her

integrity, so long as these changes are themselves expectable given her larger personal trajectory.

This is because integrity does not refer merely to the content of a given set of commitments,

taken as static; rather, it refers to a “process through which one grows and changes” (Davion

1991, 184). To have integrity is to maintain a kind of narrative coherence in this process. As

Davion puts it, the “process from one moment to the next will be connected; it is literally a

process from which no part could have been taken and still yield the same result, namely, one’s

becoming the person one is at any given moment. There will be a certain consistency and

coherence in the process” (185). While Davion’s immediate purpose is to show that a self with

integrity may also be a multiplicitous self, my intentions here are somewhat different. For me,

Davion’s description of integrity as narrative coherence says as much about multiplicity and

change as it does about continuity and stability. Having integrity does not necessarily mean that

one’s values remain identical over time, but it does mean that at least the most fundamental of

23

one’s commitments resemble one another from one moment to the next. Without this

resemblance, changes would likely seem to be more of a loss of personhood than its continuance,

deterioration rather than growth. An abrupt and radical change threatens both the development

of one’s personal narrative as well as one’s reliability.

Neither does an emphasis on reliability imply close-mindedness on the part of the agent

with integrity. An agent may be receptive to others’ moral perspectives, and may even amend

her own moral judgments in order to align with others’ views, so long as she does so for her own

reasons (and not, e.g., because she was bullied or bribed, Calhoun 1995, 249). As Calhoun’s

account of integrity explains, “integrity is not just a matter of sticking to one’s guns” (259) but is

instead about taking seriously one’s deliberative role within a wider moral community aiming to

answer important moral questions. Practicing integrity requires one to “take a stand for, and

before, all deliberators who share the goal of determining what is worth doing” (257). While an

individual ought to put forward her best personal judgments, she must also be aware that her

judgments are fallible. As such, an individual with integrity will balance confidence in her

judgments with openness toward others’ criticisms. Should an individual find that her initial

moral perspective is, in her own best judgment, less defensible than an alternative view, integrity

does not demand a stubborn adherence nonetheless; to the contrary, it demands revision. Unless

and until this better alternative is offered, however, an individual ought to stand by her original

judgment. The individual with integrity will be willing to revise her judgments, but whatever

judgments she has will be well-considered and she will be unwilling to abandon them for

anything but the best reasons.

2. The Effect of Structural Injustice on Integrity

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I have described integrity as having a defining feature of facilitating reliable response to

harm. I take the moral component of this definition – namely, response to harm – as a given.

Accounts that do not include it, such as Frankfurt’s, have been widely, and I believe rightly,

criticized. To the extent that an account like Frankfurt’s can nevertheless be recognized as an

account of integrity, I argue, it is because of the reliability in values that the account includes.

Even accounts that decentralize consistency in values, I have argued – namely, Davion’s and

Calhoun’s – do not challenge the value of reliability so much as reframe it. Davion’s account

replaces the need for a long-lasting set of specific fundamental values with the need for a

coherent narrative weaving together and developing a person’s values; Calhoun’s account

specifies the source of consistency in values, namely, well-considered reasons and not, e.g.,

arrogance or dogmatism. For these accounts too, then, an individual with integrity can be relied

on to respond to serious moral harm. An individual who does not either threatens the positive

development of her personal narrative (in Davion’s terms) or fails to rise to the challenge of

“standing for something” (in Calhoun’s).

The feature of reliably responding to harm, however, becomes complicated when

considered in the context of structural injustice. For in the context of structural injustice, one

may find oneself implicated not only in “natural” luck but also in what Lisa Tessman (2005)

calls “systemic” luck (and what Claudia Card (1996) calls the “unnatural lottery”). Both

systemic and non-systemic luck are forms of moral luck: both sorts of luck imply that one may,

by no fault of one’s own, become normatively implicated in harm and gain responsibilities in

light of this. In cases of systemic luck, however, one’s connection to harm is enabled by one’s

participation in unjust social structures. One’s participation in structural injustice is, in a

significant sense, a matter of luck: one has no control over the nature of the social structures one

25

is born into, and one can do very little to change them. Yet one’s participation in unjust

structures is not for that reason outside the realm of one’s responsibilities. As Walker’s

interpretation of Williams’ lorry driver example makes clear, “responsibilities outrun control”

(247). An agent within unjust social structures remains a relevant, even if unintentional,

contributor toward structural harms. Just as non-systemic sources of luck can threaten one’s

moral standing (e.g., the wrong place and time can force a lorry driver to hit a child), so too can

social-structural forces (e.g., global capitalism can force one to buy from sweatshops).23 It is in

such unchosen yet morally urgent situations that an agent with integrity is expected to respond,

and respond in appropriate ways.

While an agent with integrity is expected to respond to both natural and systemic forms

of moral luck, the content of the responsibilities attached to systemic luck is different from that

attached to natural luck. When luck is not natural and unavoidable, but is instead created and

distributed through socio-political structures, establishing practices of reliability requires not

only addressing instances of bad luck but also amending the sources of such luck. Indeed, to

respond only to particular instances may end up leaving the structural status quo in place, and so

also maintain social-political unreliability. An individual attorney’s pro bono work for a low-

income client, for example, does very little to change that client’s tenuous access to the legal

system and other social services. While it is of course praiseworthy to respond compassionately

to someone who is particularly vulnerable to one’s choices, the existence of systemic luck leads

us to recognize that some persons are made particularly vulnerable to others’ agency – the

appropriate goal is not merely to respond to particular others, but is in addition to remove certain

categories of vulnerabilities altogether. For individuals to be assured that there will be adequate

response to harms that were not caused by isolated individuals but were instead produced in

23 See Young 2006 and 2011 for sweatshop labor as an example of structural injustice.

26

systemic ways, individuals must not respond reliably merely to particular instances but must also

respond to the unjust structures that produced them.

One might think that the recognition of systemic luck does not so much problematize the

practice of integrity so much as it supplements integrity with a separate set of responsibilities.

More specifically, one might think that the recognition of systemic luck merely adds to the

demand for integrity the further demand for structural justice. The first is a matter of individual

behavior, the second is a matter of social design. Conceivably, the two demands could be carried

out by quite different people. So long as there were some sorts of public officials charged with

social-structural policies, e.g., individuals in their ordinary lives would not need to consider their

demands of responsibility to be influenced by considerations of systemic luck. In this line of

argument, attention to systemic luck would not matter centrally to integrity literature; at most, it

would give additional importance to social policy work, but it would not fundamentally alter the

content of responsibilities for ordinary individuals in their everyday lives.

The above, however, is not my argument. I argue that recognition of systemic luck

should lead to a significant change in our understanding of the moral demands of ordinary

individuals. Individuals themselves must try to change the way in which they participate in

unjust structures, and not simply “outsource” responsibilities related to structure to designated

others. The reason for this is that, in the context of systemic luck, it becomes necessary for a

person with integrity to see her own agency as tied up in the structural processes producing the

luck. Although no individual taken in isolation has control over structurally-produced harms,

each individual nonetheless contributes toward such harms. Even if an individual responds to a

particular structurally-produced harm, she continues to be implicated in a structure that

predictably and alterably perpetuates similar harms elsewhere. It would be inconsistent, and so

27

threaten the reliability of an agent’s moral commitments, for an agent to respond to a particular

instance of harm while uncritically continuing her participation in social-structural processes that

produced that harm and will continue to produce similar instances. In the context of systemic

luck, integrity demands that an agent recognize that it is not only nature, but also social-

structural function, that may use her agency as a tool in service of ends she does not support. To

maintain a stable moral core, an agent must resist against co-optation of her agency, either

natural or systemic.

The latter systemic sort of co-optation, however, adds significant complications to the

former natural sort. To have integrity, one should not merely conform to external standards, but

rather, should personally commit to some set of values. The lorry driver who responds to harm,

for example, does not do so because he was “assigned” responsibility by a third party. Rather, he

responds because he “takes” responsibility, accepting that it would violate his own standards of

morally decent behavior were he to do otherwise.24 Once one recognizes one’s agency as

implicated in structural functioning, however, this distance between one’s own moral agency and

external sources of authority is altered. Self-consciously positioning oneself within an unjust

structure requires seeing how one’s agency is solicited and channeled into far-ranging effects – it

demands recognition that one does not simply choose one’s values, but rather, that at least some

aspects of one’s moral core are influenced by larger structures. In a white supremacy, for

example, one cannot help but integrate some degree of racism into one’s ordinary conduct.

While the lorry driver does not need to consider the source of the bad luck he becomes

implicated in or his role in sustaining it, and can assure himself that he is not the kind of person

who countenances such an awful situation, this is not the case for an individual responding to

24 For a distinction between “assigning” and “taking” responsibility, see Card on “backward-”

and “forward-looking” responsibility (1996, 21-48).

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racist social structures. One can resist racist attitudes and behavior, but one cannot fully

disassociate from their sources and claim that one is not the sort of person who supports them –

hence the offensiveness of proclaiming, “I don’t see race.” In response to systemic luck, the

practice of integrity both demands that one see oneself in structures and – as soon as one does

this – that one realize that one does not, in fact, stand by all that one would like to. Exercising

integrity paradoxically leads one to recognize that one does not fully have it.

Even having settled on a certain range of personal values, acting from these values

presents further complications to the practice of integrity. I have claimed that integrity in

response to systemic luck demands that one try to amend the sources of such luck. This sort of

work requires one to join with others in organized efforts. Yet organizations’ efforts are affected

by the same sorts of oppressive influences that affect individuals’ choices. As intersectionality

theory makes clear, social movements are often successful insofar as they are also exclusive.

Support for issues affecting “women,” for example, turns into support for the most privileged

categories of women while leaving in place or worsening the situation for others.25 Absent the

possibility of any vanguard group, it seems that successful political action will also come with a

degree of “dirty hands.” Yet to refuse to participate in socio-political movements at all is to

remain passive while one’s agency is appropriated by unjust structures, and so presents another

kind of threat to integrity. It seems that in showing integrity and taking responsibility in the face

of systemic luck, and so working with others to intervene in structural functioning, one

simultaneously makes compromises that threaten one’s integrity.

3. A Second, “Meta,” Meaning of Integrity

25 See Crenshaw 1991 for a landmark work in intersectionality theory that draws out the theory’s

implications for political activism.

29

Recognition of a specifically systemic kind of luck implies that individuals, to maintain

integrity, must recognize their positions in unjust structures. When persons are vulnerable to one

another’s agency in unjust and predictable ways, it is not enough for an individual to merely

respond to particular instances in which this vulnerability is made apparent but must also address

the structural sources that keep such instances of vulnerability coming. The sort of normative

demands that fall to individuals in this context rely not on recognition of causal sufficiency or

necessity, but rather, integrity – individuals who respond to systemic luck do not necessarily

consider themselves to have caused systemic harms but rather have constructed moral selves

such that they will not allow themselves to be used toward the production of such harms. While

recognition of one’s participation in unjust social structures is necessary for integrity, however,

the recognition simultaneously problematizes integrity. Recognizing one’s position within social

structures complicates the practice of integrity, both in self-consciously claiming one’s

commitments and in consistently acting on their behalf. As a result, it seems that one should

have two senses of one’s moral core. On the one hand, it seems that integrity demands that one

deny oppression any place in one’s set of values, saying, for example, “I am not a racist – no

matter what the socio-political circumstances, no matter how much I would benefit, I do not

endorse such values.” On the other hand, it seems that one should modify this sort of claim in

light of one’s place in social-structural processes, owning that one is in fact racist in ways that

deeply inform one’s attitudes and behaviors. One should not think well of this fact – as the first

sort of claim made clear – but it seems that integrity nonetheless requires that one acknowledge it

in order to avoid practicing bad faith. Similarly paradoxical, it seems that integrity demands that

one participate in social-political movements that compromise one’s values – or, perhaps, refuse

to participate and so also fail to resist the unjust structural status quo as effectively as one could.

30

In a sense, I have argued that integrity is impossible in a nonideal world. No matter what

one does or how one thinks of one’s values, one will be lacking integrity in some respect. I will

now argue, however, that the same feature that makes integrity paradoxical in a nonideal world –

viz., unjust social structures – also enables a new, “meta” sense of integrity. The meta level of

integrity guides an agent in responding to her failures in integrity on the first level, with the goal

of creating a resistant (if not unproblematic) relation to injustice and promoting the reliable

presence of social justice movements (even if not fully reliable social structures).

My claim is that in the context of structural injustice, integrity has not one but two

meanings – first-level and meta-level. My account is different, then, from Lynne McFall’s

(1987) account, which similarly identifies a tension involved in the practice of integrity, and

similarly suggests that there may be two different versions of integrity resulting from this

tension, but does not put one version in meta relation to the other. This is in part because

McFall’s account and mine focus on different sources of tension involved in integrity. McFall

focuses on the potential conflict arising between what she calls “personal” commitments and

external “moral” constraints. To have integrity, it is necessary not only that one maintain a

certain set of values and principles, but also that those values and principles be considered by

others as important. Building on the difference between personal and external moral

expectations, McFall suggests that there may be reason to think that there is “personal” integrity

on the one hand and “moral” integrity on the other. Depending on the perspective one takes –

partial and personal, or impartial and universal – one may come to have different conclusions

regarding what integrity requires of one. Ultimately, McFall suggests, one must resolve the

dilemma by choosing between one perspective or the other – making all integrity-promoting

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actions “personal” in a sense. “Moral” integrity becomes a subset of “personal” integrity: the

latter can exist without the former, but the former cannot exist without the latter (16).

In my account, integrity is not only a matter of balancing personal and moral values.

Even if one were to “personally” hold to “moral” values, one’s integrity would still be threatened

due to a further source of tension – namely, one’s simultaneously internal and external relation to

social structures. Iris Marion Young’s work on responsibility for justice brings out this dual

relation well. On the one hand, social structures pre-exist and constrain individuals: structures

“are the products of previous actions, usually products of many coordinated and uncoordinated

but mutually influencing actions. Those collective actions have left determinate effects on the

physical and cultural environment, effects that condition future action in specific ways” (Young

2006, 113). On the other hand, individuals are not wholly determined by their structures: it is

“misleading… to reify the metaphor of structure, to think of social structures as entities

independent of social actors, lying passively around them and easing or inhibiting their

movement. On the contrary, a social structure exists only in the action and interaction of

persons; it exists not as a state, but as a process” (Young 2006, 112). The internal relation one

has to unjust social structures challenges one’s ability to have integrity in either of the senses

McFall identifies; so long as one is implicated in unjust social structural function, one will be

challenged in both the “personal” kind of integrity that aspires to full ownership of one’s self and

the “moral” integrity associated with upholding ideals of justice.

Moreover, and in contrast to McFall, the two perspectives do not lead straightforwardly

to two contrasting versions of integrity. In my account, integrity requires attention to both the

internal and external relation one has to social structures simultaneously: one must see oneself

both as part of the problem (internal to structures) and as someone capable of resistance

32

(someone sufficiently external in some way as well). To see oneself as simply one or the other

would be to lack integrity entirely. It would be to see oneself as entirely internal to social

structures and so incapable of promoting justice or, alternatively, entirely external and so

disinterested in the sources of structural harm. One would either fail to see that one is involved

in structural injustice, or fail to recognize that one can do something about it. Each perspective,

then, is lacking in some way – but each, too, contains a corrective for the other. Reliable

response to structural harm requires that one sustain both perspectives of oneself, maintaining

them in dynamic relation to one another. Doing so, I argue, constitutes the meta-level practice of

integrity. The same thing that problematizes integrity in one sense, then, opens up integrity in

another “meta” sense. To return to this essay’s initial reference to Walker, integrity is about

appropriate response to events outside of one’s control. I am now recommending that one see

one’s participation in social structures as among these uncontrollable events. That one

participates in unjust structures is inevitable. But how one participates is not, and integrity on the

meta-level regards the appropriate response to one’s participation.

4. Practicing Meta-Level Integrity

I have argued that participation in unjust social structures inherently problematizes the

practice of integrity, since integrity requires one to take a reliable stance against harm and

participation in unjust social structures makes such a stance inauthentic. It is also, though, no

fault of the agent’s own that she was born into the particular social structures she is in, and given

the pervasiveness of social structures exit is impossible. The sheer fact of one’s participation

should be counted as a kind of “bad luck” – an unfortunate event to which an agent with

integrity is expected to respond. Given the problematizing effect of participation on integrity,

the agent’s lack of integrity should also be taken as unavoidable bad luck, and thus also call for

33

appropriate response. Integrity becomes meaningful again, but now in a meta-sense: meta-

integrity instructs an agent to respond appropriately to her failures of integrity on the more basic

level. The practice of meta-integrity is structurally similar to first-level integrity: the most basic

elements are that an individual, first, acknowledge her part in the harm and, second, respond

appropriately. In what follows, I will bring out the content of the two steps in a way that

distinguishes the practice of meta-integrity from that of first-level integrity and connects meta-

integrity to a kind of reliability appropriate to a structurally unjust world.

Acknowledging One’s Part in Harm

Perhaps the most important distinguishing aspect of meta-integrity is the

acknowledgement that one does not have integrity in its more basic sense. Meta-integrity is not

a way of “gaining back” one’s basic integrity, nor excusing oneself from its requirements. Meta-

integrity requires an agent to acknowledge that she consistently participates in social structures

she believes are unjust. She understands that she may respond to her social-structural position,

but this view does not cancel out her understanding that she is simultaneously internal to

structures and shares responsibility for the harms they perpetuate.

In a way, my account of meta-integrity is similar to Davion’s account of what I am now

calling first-level integrity. Both accounts recognize that an agent with integrity might be

expected to maintain dual understandings of her self. But our accounts describe the duality

within the self as coming from different places, generating different implications for the ability

of an agent to have first-level integrity. Davion is centrally concerned with establishing a

meaning of integrity that is compatible with intersectionality, and so “can be promoted by

feminists who do not want to marginalize the experiences of people who need to participate in

more than one culture in order to preserve what they value in their identities” (189). She argues

34

that her description of integrity-as-narrative coherence fulfills this purpose: if integrity is a

process and not a fixed state, a self might contain many divergent aspects of identity so long as

there is still “at least one fundamental goal in common – the preservation of the identity of the

being as multiplicitous” (190). Insofar as the continuance and development of a sense of self

requires a sense of membership within community, and insofar as at least some selves belong to

more than one community, it is not only acceptable but also crucial that at least some individuals

participate in plural communities. If an individual claims membership in communities with

divergent values, the individual’s self may not be “unitary” but it will still be unified around the

common goal of preserving and developing the multiplicitous self that it is.

Davion helpfully defines integrity in a way that makes it compatible with the internal

inconsistencies that my account of meta-integrity requires. However, the specific kinds of

inconsistencies that my account addresses are compatible with integrity only on a meta-level. In

my account, the conflicting views one has of oneself trouble one’s integrity on the first-level, for

they require one to acknowledge one’s ongoing participation in unjust structures. In my account,

multiplicity arises not only from the positive, identity-confirming aspects of the plural

communities one counts oneself a part of, but also from the aspects of one’s communities that

threaten one’s sense of self. A person who counts herself as part of a broader community that

includes at least some practices that reinforce structural injustice ought to recognize her

participation within unjust practices. And insofar as the person takes a stand against such

practices, she also takes a stand against some aspects of herself. To fail to recognize one’s

participation is to fail to recognize the reality of moral luck; it is akin on a theoretical level to the

lorry driver “shrugging off” his role in the traffic accident. Davion’s account underplays the

extent to which, even balancing between multiple perspectives of oneself, one may nevertheless

35

fail to have integrity. This is because having integrity is not only a matter of sustaining a

coherent personal identity; it is also about maintaining a certain kind of personal identity,

namely, the kind that takes a reliable stance against harm. If it is impossible to do so, self-

awareness of the kind Davion and I both advocate requires acknowledging the impossibility and

thereby acknowledging, too, one’s failures in first-level integrity.

That said, striving for coherence in the way Davion recommends is appropriate guidance

for the meta-level of integrity. For Davion, the central demand of integrity is that an individual

“monitor her own development” so that she can then create a coherent personal narrative: “When

a person takes care to monitor her own development, the process of becoming can be seen as a

whole process rather than simply as a set of random events” (185). On the meta-level of

integrity, what is important is not that one refuse to participate in injustice; to the contrary,

participation is acknowledged as inevitable. What is important is that one monitor how one

participates – that one see one’s choices in participation as part of a larger process and not as

“random events” with no bearing on one another or one’s narrative as a whole. Applying

Davion’s account to the meta-level, we can see that integrity is not threatened simply by acting

in ways that support unjust structures; it is threatened by the pattern that these decisions form

within one’s broader narrative. To practice meta-level integrity is to look out for these patterns;

it is to cohere one’s choices around more rather than less resistant narratives.

As an example of choosing between more and less resistant kinds of social-structural

participation, consider that it is impossible for an individual to fully reject all of her unjust socio-

political privileges. Even if a white person does not want to receive race-based privileges, for

example, she will still be recognized as white by others and given certain advantages for it. She

will, for example, find it easier to criticize racist social structures without allegations of “bias.”

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Even as she speaks out against racist injustice, then, a white person cannot help but participate in

and benefit from racist social structures. It would be strange, however, to claim that a white

person who speaks out against racism therefore lacks integrity. If it seems that speaking out is

appropriate –if it seems that one should criticize injustices that grant one privilege, despite and

perhaps even because of the credence that one will be given – then it seems that there are

acceptable and even recommendable ways of using one’s privilege. Though one must participate

in unjust structures, one may still make choices in how one participates; meta-level integrity

requires that one monitor one’s choices in participation with the aim of developing them around

the story of, say, an “ally” rather than that of a “bystander.”

This narrative approach to meta-level integrity allows for a kind of reliability, though not

of the kind first-level integrity aims at. Meta-level integrity sacrifices first-level integrity’s

ambition of fully disassociating oneself from harm – of reliably responding to any harm that

comes one’s way. However, it retains the feature of reliability in another sense. Though one

must admit that one’s actions, taken one at a time, will each contribute to structural injustice,

one’s overall narrative need not. One can be counted on to attend to the ways in which one’s

actions, taken together, support or resist larger structural function and – given this understanding

– strive toward more resistant narratives. While one cannot eliminate structural injustice in this

way, one can at least promote the continuing presence of social justice movements. When one

coheres one’s actions around a particular narrative, one also reinforces the normative standards

by which that narrative makes sense. If one cannot end racist injustice and eliminate the concept

of the “racist,” for example, one can at least lend one’s support to anti-racist communities from

which the concept of the “white ally” may continue to evolve as a possibility.

Responding Appropriately

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The second step in the practice of integrity is responding appropriately to harm. This step

becomes complicated on the meta-level of integrity, for here, one can no longer expect a

correspondence between what one considers an appropriate response and what most others will

consider as such. This is because on the meta-level, the harm one wishes to resist is not entirely

external to oneself nor entirely external to others within one’s moral community. That is,

structural harm is a shared endeavor; even if an individual wishes to acknowledge the ways that

her everyday expectations connect her to injustice and modify them appropriately in light of this,

there is no guarantee that others will have the same acknowledgement nor go about adjusting

their expectations of the individual to fit. In fact, given the enduring nature of structural

injustice, one can safely assume they will not. In this context, when not only one’s own but also

others’ agency is a part of the problem that one wishes to resist, resistance to harm is

simultaneously resistance against what the vast majority of others think is right.

Part of the work of resisting against structural harm, then, is also convincing others that

one’s resistance is appropriate. The goal is to help build new normative expectations. In this

respect, my account is similar to Calhoun’s account of what I now call first-level integrity. For

Calhoun, what it means to practice integrity is to work with others to arrive at the best possible

answers to shared moral questions. The person with integrity will not assume that the questions

are already answered, nor will she back down from a position that she genuinely believes is right

for the mere reason that others disagree. The individual with integrity, then, will not assume that

our established moral standards are beyond dispute; she will be willing to question even the most

fundamental of our moral assumptions, given good enough reasons. And should she find a good

reason – e.g., resisting structural harm – she will be willing to argue for her view against

extensive disagreement.

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Calhoun’s account supports mine by showing that integrity includes a sense of

responsibility to others. However, my account emphasizes the specifically nonideal context in

which individuals undertake their responsibilities and, as a result, advocates for different kinds of

responsibilities that are specific to the meta-level of integrity. For Calhoun, to have integrity is

basically to follow the rules of ideal deliberative ethics – to put forward one’s best judgments,

present these views accurately to others, listen to others’ feedback and respect others’

perspectives as equal in value to one’s own. The aim in doing so is “to render… a judgment

endorsable by all” (257). In my account, however, where the moral question one wishes to

discuss regards resisting structural harm, straightforwardly aiming for universal agreement may

impede one’s ability to formulate an appropriate response. This is because of the warped

deliberative context in which deliberators are located. Structural injustice is in part characterized

by hegemonic discourse – shared assumptions about what is worth discussing, who can

participate, what sorts of contributions are valuable, and so on that collectively serve to maintain

an unjust status quo. In this context, agreement may not signal authentic consensus between

honest and capable deliberators interested in justice; it may, instead, signal inadequate attention

to deeply-rooted falsifications, distortions, and so on that function to uphold injustice. If one

aims to gain a fuller understanding of one’s role in perpetuating structural harm and

opportunities for resistance, it seems that one ought to problematize rather than conform to

established deliberative standards.

If one aims to find a genuinely resistant action, one should not aim directly to create

consensus around values that one considers fully endorsable. One should instead aim to create

agreements within more limited parts of one’s community, and one should be willing to

compromise one’s values for the sake of this consensus. To explain the former qualification

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first: Regardless of who precisely one considers one’s co-deliberators to be, one cannot consider

one’s co-deliberators to include all of one’s community. Given the reality of hegemonic

discourse, one must assume that the vast majority of one’s community subscribes to unjust

norms that are to some extent argument-resistant. Depending on which specific norm one wishes

to avoid in one’s deliberations, one may have to exclude from discussion a certain segment of the

community that is understood to uphold that norm. If, for example, white people are trained in

an “epistemology of ignorance” that obliges them to think that race is real and carries moral

significance (Mills 1997, 18-19), deliberations aiming to find an appropriate response to racism

should include at least some discursive space that excludes white people and the associated

epistemology. The purpose of doing so, moreover, is not to find a judgment endorsable by all; to

the contrary, it is to arrive at judgments that, were white frameworks included, would have been

ignored or rejected. The aim is to find a judgment that some people, insofar as they are defined

in part by an epistemology that upholds oppressive social relations and insofar as that

epistemology is invulnerable to argument, cannot endorse.

To explain the second qualification: Not only should one’s aim not be construed as

rendering a judgment that is universally endorsable; it should also not be understood as arriving

at a judgment one whole-heartedly considers good. To return to one of Davion’s main points,

individuals, as intersectional selves, belong to multiple communities. And these communities

are not necessarily aligned with one another; worthwhile values of one community might conflict

with worthwhile values of another. As a result, an individual may come to find herself

committed to an action that she believes genuinely is best, but that she also cannot fully endorse.

Take, for example, the issue of same-sex marriage as it evolved in recent decades in the US. The

movement for same-sex marriage provided a crucial way of resisting heterosexist social

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structures aiming to relegate lesbian and gay sexualities to the margins of social life. As a

participant in the LGBT community, an individual would likely support same-sex marriage

campaigns; opposing or working to undermine them in some way would likely feel like a

betrayal of her core values. However, the success of same-sex marriage campaigns relied on

framing the issue in neoliberal terminology. The scripts provided to volunteers working at phone

banks and canvassing neighborhoods, for example, drew from such assumptions as the primacy

of negative freedom, state non-interference within the private realm, individual (rather than state)

responsibility for meeting basic needs, and so on. In this context, the same individual, insofar as

she also identifies herself as a member of the left-wing, may well have felt that support for same-

sex marriage meant “selling out.” Given a plurality of communities standing in different

relations to dominant social-structural norms, and absent a vanguard group, an individual who

belongs to more than one community will find it difficult to fully include all of her values in her

response to the “what is resistance” question. Whatever answer she considers “best” will also

not likely be an answer she considers fully endorsable – at least, not when viewed from a holistic

perspective taking into account all of the plural values that constitute her moral self.

If one practices first-level integrity by aiming to achieve consensus over values one

believes should be endorsed by all, as Calhoun suggests, then first-level integrity is thoroughly

challenged in the context of structural injustice. Calhoun’s description of “standing for

something,” however, may be appropriately re-integrated specifically on the meta-level of

integrity. Here, the judgment that one ought to be willing to stand by is not one’s direct answer

to the “what is resistance” question, but rather, the standards by which one arrives at one’s

answer. Meta-level integrity may require one to exclude some members of one’s community

from one’s deliberations, or to misrepresent one’s views – but it also requires that one be able

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and willing to explain who one excludes, what one misrepresents, and why. One might explain,

for example, that deliberations excluding white people are necessary in order to weaken the

influence of white supremacist hegemonic assumptions. Or, for example, one might explain that

arguments in favor of same-sex marriage coming from more left-leaning perspectives are

currently political untenable; given the importance of same-sex marriage campaigns,

misrepresentation of one’s reasons for supporting same-sex marriage is necessary. As in the

first-level application of Calhoun’s approach, one ought to maintain a balance between

confidence in one’s judgments and open-mindedness to alternatives. If, for example, someone

offers a way of navigating the same-sex marriage/neoliberalism conflict in a way one considers

better, one should change one’s mind accordingly. But until then, one ought to stand by one’s

judgment.

By offering up one’s explanation for one’s violations of ideal deliberative ethics, one

maintains for others the same kind of balance one maintains for oneself regarding internal and

external relations to structures. When one excludes or misrepresents one’s views, it is because

one understands others as internal to structures – one believes that argument is of little use and

people will simply continue to do what they do in conformity with unjust practices. White

people will by and large keep employing racist assumptions in their everyday attitudes and

behaviors; members of social justice groups – LGBT organizations, left-wing organizations,

etc.– will generally continue to define group interests around the interests of the most privileged

group members (i.e., “transparent” interests, see Lugones 1995). When one presents one’s

explanations for one’s violations of deliberative ethics, one demonstrates one’s belief that while

individuals in general will act in certain predictable and problematic patterns, any given

individual is able to externalize herself from these patterns sufficiently to critically reflect on

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them. When one offers one’s explanation, then, one re-initiates a collective deliberation

regarding important moral questions. The scope of one’s co-deliberators will be smaller in scope

than one’s moral community writ large, and the questions will not involve such grandiose topics

as goodness and justice, but rather, more narrow questions regarding appropriate compromise in

absence of full goodness and justice. The deliberation, nonetheless, will occur, and occur

between individuals who respect one another as deliberative equals aiming to articulate their

authentic judgments about what is best.

The practice of meta-level integrity allows for a kind of reliability, though again, not of

the kind first-level integrity aims at. Integrity at the meta-level abandons the goal of universal

consensus over values one considers fully endorsable. In a sense, it allows individuals to be

unreliable participants in moral deliberations, and it abandons the aim of society-wide reliable

adherence to morally defensible values. However, the practice of meta-level integrity promotes

reliability in other ways. Individuals cannot be counted on to reject all violations of deliberative

ethics, but they can be counted on to provide acceptable reasons for their violations and,

confronted with compelling criticisms or better alternatives, to modify their tactics accordingly.

While these efforts cannot eliminate structural injustice, they can at least maintain a space for

dialogue, and so too a space for social justice-oriented community-building. If we cannot in our

current conditions participate in an authentic moral deliberation within a fully inclusive moral

community, we may at least be able to build the conditions wherein this deliberation may

become possible.

References

Calhoun, Cheshire. 1995. Standing for something. Journal of Philosophy 92 (5): 235-260.

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Card, Claudia. 1996. The unnatural lottery: Character and moral luck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. Mapping the margins. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241-1299.

Davion, Victoria. 1991. Integrity and radical change. In Feminist ethics, ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

Frankfurt, Harry. 1987. Identification and wholeheartedness. In Responsibility, character, and the emotions: New essays in moral psychology, ed. F. Schoeman. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lugones, Maria. 1994. Purity, impurity, and separation. Signs 19 (2): 458-479.

McFall, Lynn. 1987. Integrity. Ethics 98 (1): 5-20.

Mills, Charles. 1997. The racial contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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