Integrity and Conscience: Nomos XL

NOMOS Series #40

by Ian Shapiro (Editor), Robert Merrihew Adams (Editor), Henry Tam (Editor)

Can individuals believe that they are acting with integrity, yet in disobedience to the dictates of their conscience? Can they retain fidelity to their conscience while ignoring a sense of what integrity requires? Integrity and conscience are often thought to be closely related, perhaps even different aspects of a single impulse. This timely book supports a different and more complicated view. Acting with integrity and obeying one's conscience might be mutually reinforcing in some settings, but in others they can live in varying degrees of mutual tension. Bringing together prominent scholars of legal theory and political philosophy, the volume addresses both classic ruminations on integrity and conscience by Plato, Hume, and Kant as well as more contemporary examinations of professional ethics and the complex relations among politics, law and personal morality.

351 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research. In democratic theory, he has argued that democracy's value comes primarily from its potential to limit domination rather than, as is conventionally assumed, from its operation as a system of participation, representation, or preference aggregation. In debates about social scientific methods, he is chiefly known for rejecting prevalent theory-driven and method-driven approaches in favor of starting with a problem and then devising suitable methods to study it.