What do these two stories have to tell us about the moral value of an integrated self? The cases of Sassal and Lydgate are interesting for our purposes as both begin as people with a degree of inner conflict. For Sassal his aspiration to be a strong, courageous and unsympathetic hero in the mould of Conrad’s master mariners was in conflict with his aim to help his patients. Lydgate’s conflict comes from the combination of his aspirations to be a successful practicing doctor and to push forward medical science together with his expectations for his place in society.
After these initial starting points, however, the stories of Sassal and Lydgate take quite different paths. Sassal, through his period of self-examination, was able to forge a new ideal of the universal man. Aspiring to live up to this ideal allowed him to better fulfil his aim of helping his patients. Sassall achieved this by finding a way to reshape his goals, ambitions and desires so that they formed a coherent whole. The resolution of this conflict not only enabled him to become a better doctor but also to lead a more satisfying life. By resolving this conflict, then, Sassall acquired a more integrated self.
Lydgate’s tale, on the other hand, is not a happy one. His aspirations to be both a successful practicing doctor and a medical pioneer would not have been problematic by themselves. If Lydgate had been willing to accept that fulfilling these aspirations would mean having to lower his expectations for his social status, then these aspirations need not have led to conflict. Combined as they were though with Lydgate’s expectations of his place in society and his inability to subject this part of himself to critical scrutiny they led to his betrayal of his medical values and to a life that he viewed as a failure. The source of Lydgate’s failure was his inability to appreciate that in the circumstances he was facing, these aspirations were in conflict with each other. Had he, like Sassal, engaged in a process of critical self-examination, then he may have realized the need to refashion his aspirations into a coherent whole.
These contrasting stories tell us something important about integrity. By managing to form an integrated self Sassal put himself in a situation where by working towards his ideal of the universal man he was also furthering his goal to assist his patients. If instead Sassall’s revelation about the appropriate attitude for a doctor in his position was not accompanied by a shift in the ideals he based his life upon then we can see why problems would quickly start to emerge. If this had been the case then Sassall would have been incapable of a wholehearted commitment to the pursuit of the betterment of his patients, as this goal would have been in frequent conflict with his aspiration to the Conradian ideal. In this situation working towards one of these goals would have undermined his pursuit of the other. From a self-interested point of view then forming an integrated self was beneficial to Sassal, as it enabled him to wholeheartedly pursue his self-interested goals without thereby thwarting his other goals. This integration would also lessen the damaging conflicts that seems likely to arise in someone who knows that by pursuing one of her goals she will be undermining another.
We can see this point more clearly by contrasting Sassal with Lydgate. Unlike Sassal, Lydgate was unable to integrate his various goals, ambitions, values and desires into a coherent whole. This, combined with an unfortunate set of circumstances, led to conflict. His expectation of his place in society undermined his ambitions to be a successful doctor and medical innovator. His ambition to be a medical innovator led him to give up much of his time to work unpaid at his hospital. This meant that he did not have the financial resources to fund the lifestyle he expected for himself. This in turn led him into a situation in which he felt pressured to act in a way that violated his medical principles. His public failure as a doctor, destroyed (at least temporarily) both his ambition to be a medical innovator and his expectation to occupy an elevated place in society. By pursuing these three incompatible goals then, Lydgate failed to achieve any of them.
The value of an integrated self from a self-interested point of view then is that when our various projects, goals and desires fit together in some way then the pursuit of one will not undermine (and often will promote) the interests of the others. However, those who question the value of integrity are unlikely to be fully satisfied with this response. After all, integrity is generally thought to be a morally valuable character trait. An adequate account of the value of integrity then will explain why integrity is morally valuable.
I believe that comparing the cases of Sassal and Lydgate allows us to see the moral value of integrity. The starting point of this explanation is to note that it is a common feature of the lives of many people that their view of what they morally ought to do conflicts with their view of what would be best from a self-interested point of view. As H. A. Prichard puts the point:
Any one who, stimulated by education, has come to feel the force of the various obligations in life, at some time or other comes to feel the irksomeness of carrying them out, and to recognise the sacrifice of interest involved.Footnote 36
Prichard’s claim is likely to ring true for many people. It is a familiar part of moral experience that sometimes we feel our moral views pulling us to perform an act that will require some form of sacrifice on our part. For most people then, their moral goals are, to some extent, in conflict with their self-interested goals.
This conflict between self-interested and moral goals is one we can find in the lives of both Sassal and Lydgate. For Sassal this occurred in the realization that his aspiration to live up to the ideal of Conrad’s master mariners was in conflict with his moral aim to help his patients. For Lydgate this occurs when his moral aims to be a good doctor and to push forward medical science conflict with his self-interested desire to occupy an elevated place in society. Their subsequent responses to this conflict tells us a great deal about the moral value of integrity.
By integrating the conflicting aspects of his self, Sassall was able to reduce the gap between his moral and non-moral goals. This made him someone more likely to act in line with his moral judgements. The reason for this is that compared to most people who face a conflict between pursuing their moral goals and pursuing their self-interested goals, the difference between Sassal’s moral goals and self-interested goals is harder to distinguish. It is for this reason that Berger says of Sassall that, “being ‘a good doctor’ answers some of his own needs.”Footnote 37 While a typical doctor might want to find out about his patients or about the latest developments in medical research her self-interested desires may well lead her to spend her time in other ways. For Sassal, both his self-interested goals and his moral goals will be pushing him to act in this way. With Sassall, then, there is no need to worry about how the internal conflict between moral and non-moral goals will be resolved. The lack of such a conflict makes such concern unnecessary. For Lydgate, on the other hand, his failure to reconcile his various ambitions, desires and values mean that this conflict does not disappear. In fact, Lydgate’s failure to reconcile the various aspects of himself leads to an ever widening divide between his moral and non-moral goals; the pursuit of one having ever worsening implications for the pursuit of the other.
This is why an integrated self is morally valuable. Those who manage to reconcile the various aspects of their self will have reduced the risk of the all too common conflict between doing what is morally best and doing what is best from the point of view of self-interest.Footnote 38 For those who, like Sassal, manage to achieve an integrated self there is likely to be little or no conflict between promoting their moral goals and promoting their self-interested goals. Such people will not feel the temptation to pursue their self-interested goals at the expense of their moral goals because there will be no conflict between the two. Those with an integrated self, then, will be more strongly disposed to perform the right act, as the pursuit of one will not undermine the pursuit of the other. Of course, the fact that someone is tempted to act against her moral judgement does not guarantee that she will do so. A strong-willed person may be able to resist such temptation. Nevertheless it seems reasonable to think that the presence of such temptation and a desire to act against her moral judgement increases the likelihood that the agent will act contrary to her moral judgement.
Up to now we have been talking in idealized terms. It seems fair to say that a complete reconciliation of one’s moral goals and one’s self-interested goals is unlikely. The point though can be made just as well in terms of degrees. Someone who has a more integrated self, whose various aims, goals and desires fit together more coherently, will experience less conflict between their moral and self-interested goals than someone with a less integrated self. As a result, they will be less likely to be tempted to pursue their self-interested goals at the expense of their moral goals. They will then be more likely to perform actions that are in line with their moral views.
At this point we might reasonably think that too much is being rested on the two literary examples we started with. Perhaps in these particular cases a more integrated self led to moral improvement, but why think that this would apply generally? The answer is that this claim is backed up by recent psychological research on moral exemplars. In a study of moral exemplars, twenty-five recipients of national awards for volunteerism, Frimer et al. found that exemplars were significantly more likely than the comparison group to have integrated their personal ambitions with their moral convictions. After ruling out various alternative explanations, the researchers concluded that, “These results are consistent with the claim that moral exemplars have achieved enlightened self-interest, whereby they best advance their own interests by advancing the interests of others.”Footnote 39 Similarly, Anne Colby and William Damon conducted a study of moral exemplars selected by a nomination process involving “twenty-two moral philosophers, theologians, ethicists, historians and social scientists.”Footnote 40 Their study led to the following conclusion:
All these men and women have vigorously pursued their individual and moral goals simultaneously, viewing them in fact as one and the same.
The exemplars have done so without devaluing their own personal goals. Nor do they disregard their own fulfilment or self-development – nor, broadly construed, their own self-interests. They do not seek martyrdom. Rather than denying the self, they define it with a moral center. They seamlessly integrate their commitments with their personal concern, so that the fulfilment of the one implies the fulfilment of the other.Footnote 41
Again the message is clear, a core part of what enables moral exemplars to dedicate their lives to moral causes is that they have integrated their moral and non-moral goals so that they are no longer in conflict.
Further support for my account of the value of integrity can be found by looking at the other end of the moral spectrum, to the morally vicious. In his psychological study of the Nazi doctors who killed and tortured prisoners of concentration camps, Robert Lifton claims the following:
The key to understanding how Nazi doctors came to do the work of Auschwitz is the psychological principle I call “doubling”: the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self. An Auschwitz doctor could through doubling not only kill and contribute to killing but organize silently, on behalf of that evil project, an entire self-structure (or self process) encompassing virtually all aspects of his behavior.Footnote 42
Lifton goes on to explain how this process works:
The way in which doubling allowed Nazi doctors to avoid guilt was not by the elimination of conscience but by what can be called the transfer of conscience. The requirements of conscience were transferred to the Auschwitz self, which placed it within its own criteria for good (duty, loyalty to group, “improving” Auschwitz conditions, etc.), thereby freeing the original self from responsibility for actions there.Footnote 43
Similarly, Abram De Swaan, describes claims that the perpetrators of genocide, “compartmentalized their murderous self from their civil self.”Footnote 44 What this tells us is that a process of disintegration, where different parts of the self are radically divided, appears to have played an important role in enabling these doctors to perform these horrendous acts. The moral views of the Nazi doctors were so radically at odds with what they viewed as being in their self-interest that only by radically detaching their ordinary moral selves could they manage to carry out their work. This gives us further reason to accept the claim that an integrated self is morally valuable. Not only do moral exemplars tend to possess an integrated self, where their moral and non-moral goals, aims and desires fit together into a coherent whole, but a disintegration of the self appears to be one way in which morally vicious people become capable of performing evil acts. Moreover the lack of integration appears to be playing a crucial role in enabling some morally vicious people to perform morally abhorrent acts. The division of the murderous self from the civil self prevents the murderous self from facing the usual self-sanctioning moral reactions such as guilt and self-blame. This makes it easier to continue to engage in such appalling behavior.
In this section I have argued that the stories of Sassal and Lydgate have an important lesson to teach us about the value of integrity. I have argued that possessing an integrated self not only promotes an agent’s self-interest but is also morally valuable, as it makes the agent more reliable at acting in line with her moral judgements.