Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

Stuart Rosenbaum’s book Recovering Integrity: Moral Thought in American Pragmatism is a creative and daring exploration of a pragmatist account of integrity as a central moral value. Rosenbaum offers an expansive treatment of integrity connecting it to wide-ranging topics: racism, religious intolerance, suicide, environmental values, the problem of induction, and contemporary quantum mechanics. Given this diversity, I confine my remarks to what I regard as central insights of the book as well as a few disagreements that I have with Rosenbaum. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that there are many creative insights in this book. If they do not get mention, it is not due to lack of merit but to the limitations of a review.

Rosenbaum boldly challenges traditional moral philosophy’s preoccupation with “justification.” He claims that this challenge enables a recovery of integrity as the central foci of moral philosophy as oriented towards “the battery of projects involved in understanding who we are so that we might fully realize ideals that move us personally and communally towards better futures” (p. 11). Chapter 2 identifies three parts of integrity: autonomy, community, and motivating ideals. Rosenbaum is eager to point out that this depiction of integrity “does not invite essences into thought about morality; integrity can mark any character in any biological or cultural environment precisely because it has no moral content of its own, no essence or ontology of its own, apart from the cultures, societies, and psyches that may realize it” (p. 20).

Rosenbaum plausibly argues that these three features describe generic features of integrity across cultures. I think the generic description can be called a formal account of integrity. As a formal model, it remains neutral about integrity’s content. Quakers, samurai, Buddhists, [End Page 469] Jihadists, corporate executives, elementary school teachers, and psychotherapists will all have quite distinct conceptions of integrity according to the three generic features.

A utilitarian like Peter Singer might complain that Rosenbaum is unfair in suggesting that integrity, in deontological or utilitarian ethics, does not “play any distinctive role” (p. 22). Singer could reply that it plays the role it would play in any moral theory—a second-order virtue whose content is specified by the theory. Utilitarian integrity manifests in a life devoted to consistent pursuit of the greater good. Singer expresses utilitarian integrity in tithing at least ten percent of his income to organizations with proven records in an area such as famine relief. To this, Rosenbaum can successfully reply that the problem with the traditional moral theories, such as Singer’s, is their focus on certifying a single fixed principle. On such accounts, integrity is marginalized to a mere under-laborer status. Such accounts assume that philosophers can identify the nature of moral principles through purely conceptual analysis prior to the actual problem-solving activities of particular communities with particular histories. Rosenbaum rejects this view of moral theory: “in pragmatism practice precedes theory” (p. 59).

Rosenbaum’s take on traditional moral theory and integrity is one of the book’s great strengths. Nevertheless, I wonder why Rosenbaum seems to think that he is not giving something like an “essence” of pragmatist integrity, which comes with a pragmatist ontology and axiology. Consider the following claims pragmatists endorse, according to Rosenbaum:

1. 1. “‘The self’ is not a substance, but it is rather an active organism behaving out of ... habits and dispositions” (p. 37).

2. 2. “... the Darwinian idea that humanity is continuous with the biological world from which it emerges ... humanity is not ontologically different from other parts of the biological world, but is continuous with that world” (p. 19).

3. 3. “... humans are integral parts of their natural world and that thinking adequately about value depends on embracing that idea” (p. 34).

4. 4. “Our concepts of reality are our contributions to the constitution of our world, and those concepts change historically with the change in our accounts of that world” (p. 146).

The fact that pragmatists reject Platonist accounts of essences does not entail that they must reject such...