I offer no apology for presenting a simple paper about what is essentially a simple subject: the objectivity of moral judgments. Most of the complications are introduced by those who do not grasp the distinctions I shall be making. I am afraid that they include the majority of moral philosophers at the present time. These complications can be unravelled; but not in a short paper. I have tried to do it in my other writings (see esp. Hare 1981: chs 1, 12 and refs).

The title of this paper proclaims its central interest—the relationship which holds between the concept of integrity and the concept of the identity of the self, or, for short, self-identity. Unreflective speech often suggests a close relationship between the two, but in the latter half of this century, notwithstanding one or two notable exceptions, they have been discussed with minimum cross-reference as if they belonged to two rather different philosophical menus which tended not to be available at the same restaurant on the same night. My intention is to argue that our account of the one carried implications for the other and that this relationship is reflexive. My argument will proceed by stating and criticizing a common account of the relationship between each of these concepts which tends to offer mutual support for the implied account of each. Thereafter an alternative account will be outlined.

According to Aristotle, the goal of anyone who is not simply stupid or slavish is to live a worthwhile life. There are, no doubt, people who have no goal at all beyond the moment's pleasure or release from pain. There may be people incapable of reaching any reasoned decision about what to do, and acting on it. But anyone who asks how she should live implicitly agrees that her goal is to live well, to live a life that she can think worth living. That goal, eudaimonia, is something that is sought for its own sake, and for nothing else. Anyone who asks herself how she should live can answer that she should live well. The answer, admittedly, needs further comment. Aristotle went on to suggest that ‘living well’ amounted to living in accordance with virtue, or if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. Eudaimonia, happiness, is virtuous activity over a whole life. To live a worthwhile life we must acquire and practice habits of doing the right thing, for the right reason. Equivalently, we must do what a virtuous person would, and in the way she would, for the sake of to kalon, or beauty.

As there is a condition of mind which is characterized by invincible ignorance, so there is another which may be said to be possessed of invincible knowledge; and it would be paradoxical in me to deny to such a mental state the highest quality of religious faith,—I mean certitude. (J. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 138–139)

‘She's an artist. She keeps saying the same thing without repeating herself. (Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice, 66)

In being initiated into our life as human beings we are subject to causal influences; guiding, teaching, restraint, compulsion, incentives, rewards, warnings, penalties. Until such influences have achieved their most important work we do not share the human understanding within which there can be ratiocination, evidence, argument. So there is and must be a causal story of how we come to acquire a human understanding; a causal story for the species as a whole and a causal story for each of us; and there is not and could not be any acceptable account, either for the species or for the individual, of how we reasoned or argued our way into our initial and fundamental understanding. I say the same thing without repeating myself if I call such knowledge and understanding invincible. It is not possible to Overthrow it by reasoning any more than it is possible to establish it by reasoning.

Although some people argue Emmanuel Levinas is a Jewish thinker because he introduces in his philosophical work ideas which come from the Jewish tradition, I want to present him as a philosopher. A philosopher who tries to widen the philosophical horizon which is traditionally a Greek one but, at the same time, a philosopher who does not want to abandon it. In one of his main books Totality and Infinity (1969), he describes western civilization as an hypocritical one because it is attached both to the True and to the Good, but he adds:

It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets, (p. 24)

When reading Levinas we may realize that such an ‘hypocrisy’ might well be a blessing from a philosophical point of view. One of Levinas's philosophical aims is to refer to the Greek language of philosophy—a language he asserts to be of universal significance—in order to elucidate ideas that come from the Hebrew world view, from the prophets and from the sages. He wants to give a new insight into Greek categories and concepts but he refuses to abnegate the philosophical requirements for accuracy. That is why when he refers to biblical verses or to Talmudic apologues, he does not want to prove anything. His philosophical writings are indeed philosophical because he does not yield to the temptation of substituting the authority of a certain verse or of a certain name to the philosophical requirement of argumentation.

At a conference I attended not so long ago I suggested to someone who had just read a paper that beneath his apparent commitment to a kind of ethical relativism he was in fact an ethical absolutist. The person I was addressing seemed quite upset by my suggestion and proceeded to argue that my understanding of his paper was somewhat awry. This experience was not new to me. Having taught ethics and philosophy of education courses for many years, courses which have been taken by undergraduates and by members of the teaching profession, I know that if I ever say to those I teach that they are adopting or favouring an absolutist position, then, more than likely, they will regard my remark as something to be opposed and they will often suggest that there must be some misunderstanding on my part. Judging by my experiences, ‘absolutist’ is a label most undergraduates and teachers wish to disown, particularly at the outset of ethics and philosophy courses, even though many of these disowners seem to subscribe to absolutist positions on such issues as racism, rape and child abuse. In his book Ethics; Discovering Right and Wrong Louis P. Pojman, talking about his own findings in this area, makes it clear that my teaching experiences are not unique. Over a period of several years and in several universities Pojman found that most of the students who took his ethics or philosophy courses explicitly rejected absolutism and affirmed support for some kind of relativism even though several of these aspiring relativists subscribed to absolutist positions on various ethical matters (Pojman, 1990, 19).

My title, as it stands, is not very informative. The two terms that occur in it are so commonly conjoined, in the philosophical world, at any rate, that it can be no surprise to find them together. My aim, however, is to go some way, at least, towards disconnecting them. My thesis is, to put it briefly, that it is a mistake to see political philosophy as a subordinate part of moral philosophy and thus to suppose that the characteristic problems of the former are of the same kind as those of the latter. More concretely, the problems of politics itself are not generally or primarily, let alone exclusively, moral in nature. We all know that political problems are not, to any great extent, approached by those involved with them, from a moral point of view. I shall argue that it is not reasonable that they should be. But the philosophical habit of running the two things together encourages a kind of moral absolutism in political thinking, and from time to time in political practice, which has bad results, not necessarily morally bad, just bad.

Duty and virtue are no longer the common coin of daily conversation. Both terms strike many of us as old-fashioned and heavy handed. Yet we incessantly talk about what ought and ought not to be done, and about the sorts of persons we admire or despise. As soon as we talk in these ways we discuss topics traditionally dealt with under the headings of duty and of virtue. If we no longer use these terms, it may be because we associate them with heavily moralistic approaches to life, with obsolete codes and ideals, with ‘Victorian’ values and attitudes, rather than because the concerns our predecessors discussed in these terms have vanished from our lives.

We use such terms as good, bad, right, wrong, should, ought, in many ways other than moral: good evidence and bad argument, right answers and wrong notes, novels which should be read and policies which ought not to be adopted. The moral is a sphere of the practical and the practical itself only a sphere or the normative. Norms guide us in all we believe, feel and do. Do these normative words then have a specifically moral sense? If so can it be defined?

In this paper I want to discuss an issue (usually perceived as an ethical one) which has generated a great deal of feminist discussion and some profound disagreement. The issue arises as follows. One of the most important targets of feminist action and critique has been male sexual violence and control of women, as expressed in rape and other forms of violent or aggressive sexual acts, and as represented in much pornography. Pornography itself has been the subject of major and sometimes bitter disagreements among feminists, especially around the issue of censorship. But it is not that with which I am concerned here. The issue which I want to discuss involves the question of sexual desire and fantasy, and their apparent potential incompatibility with political and ethical principles. This is by no means, of course, an issue of exclusively feminist concern; but I shall focus on some recent feminist argument, since it is that with which I am most familiar.

By far the most common form of argument in ethics nowadays is what can be called piecemeal appeal to intuition. Any reader of philosophy will know the kind of thing I mean. ‘On your principle, it would be all right to do such-and-such. But that's counter-intuitive. So your principle is wrong.’ The word ‘intuition’ here is not used, as it was in earlier times, to refer to a special way of knowing; instead it is used to mean merely a moral sentiment or belief that persons have independently of the moral theory or philosophy or stance that they might adopt.

What fundamental aim should be seen as animating egalitarian views of distributive justice? I want to challenge a certain answer to this question: namely, that the basic aim of egalitarianism is to neutralize the effects of luck on the distribution of goods in society. I shall also sketch part of a different answer, which I think does a better job of supporting egalitarianism.

My arguments here are not presented in a way that is intended to win over those who have no sympathy with egalitarianism to begin with; they move within the compass of egalitarian concern. Moreover, it is difficult, for familiar reasons, to separate the question of what the basic aim of egalitarianism is from the question of what it should be. If one aim does a better job of supporting egalitarian results than another, then, even if few egalitarians recognize this, it may be regarded as a stronger candidate for what the basic aim of egalitarianism is. As with other essentially contested concepts, a new conception does not change the subject.

An old question, still much discussed in moral philosophy, is whether there is any ethical knowledge. It is closely related, by simple etymology, to the question of cognitivism in ethics. Despite the fact that the terms ‘cognitivism’ and ‘objectivism’ seem sometimes to be used interchangeably, I take it that the question whether there can be ethical knowledge is not the same as the question whether ethical outlooks can be objective. A sufficient reason for this is that an ethical outlook might be taken to consist of rules or principles, which do not admit of truth or falsehood and so cannot be objects of knowledge, but which can be seen as having an objective basis.

My title may generate some perplexity. It is certainly not a familiar one. So I should make it plain at the outset that I shall not be talking about the ethics of organizations or associations or groups. I want to direct attention to the ethical and valuational questions associated with social institutions, and I distinguish institutions from associations and organizations. One question I am aiming at is whether the principles and standards applicable to moral judgments of actions (either tokens or types) and of persons—call them individual principles—are also applicable, or applicable with only minor changes, to the judgment and critique and evaluation of institutions and practices. This is not the sole question of institutional ethics, but it is a main one.