The idea that an individual is responsible for his or her actions is something that we accept every

day without questioning. Indeed, the notion of individual responsibility is what underpins our legal and

law enforcement systems, what drives our notions of fairness and what justifies our criticisms of

individuals who we believe have failed. However, if we instead believe that, as humans, we have little to

no individual control over the actions we “choose” to make, then the basis of our belief in individual

responsibility becomes null. I intend to make an argument against human free will and explain the

pursuing ramifications for our notion of morality and progress.

Our capacity for impersonal reflection, for looking at our own perspective from without, as part

of a world that exists independently of us, is our most distinctive trait as human beings. It finds its most

striking expression in our moral thinking. For we are moral beings insofar as we stand back from our

individual concerns and see in the good of others, in and of itself, a reason for action on our part. It is

not, to be sure, in morality alone that we exercise this power of impersonal reflection. We do so too,

whenever we set about weighing the evidence for some belief without regard for what we would like to

be true or for what common opinion would say. Yet nowhere does this self-transcendence show forth

more vividly than when we turn our attention from our own happiness to that of another, taking the

same immediate interest in that person's good—just because it is his or hers—as we naturally harbor for

our own. In this essay, I explore the way that the moral point of view is shaped by the nature of

impersonal reflection and thus constitutes a signal expression of our humanity.

Integrity has always been an ambiguous or vague concept. Integrity as a general concept seems

to be too problematic in philosophical or scientific language. This paper will aim to improve and

preserve the specific notion of integrity—the concept of moral integrity as a virtue and as a moral

purpose, and its opposite—the concept of counterfeit moral integrity or false moral integrity. It stresses

a strong relationship between the concepts of morality and the concept of moral integrity: if moralities

are diverse, moral integrity has many forms too.

Submitted:

Florencio C. Montenegro

EdD Student

Checked:

Dr. Cherrielyn L. Casco

Professor