CONCEPT
Integrity (Williams)
Not honesty or consistency but Williams's structural concept — the relationship between an agent and the commitments that constitute her as a person with a life distinctively her own, whose violation is not moral failure but identity dissolution.
Williams's concept of integrity is not the colloquial virtue of honesty and consistency — though it includes those — but a structural feature of personhood. Integrity consists in the relationship between an agent and her ground projects: the commitments without which she would not recognize her life as her own. Williams's celebrated attack on utilitarianism turned on this concept. The utilitarian demands that the agent be willing, in principle, to sacrifice any commitment to the aggregate calculation. Williams argued this demand was not merely burdensome but unintelligible — it required the agent to adopt a standpoint so abstract it no longer contained the specific person whose deliberation the system was supposed to guide. The AI transition threatens integrity by reorganizing the practices around which identities were formed, faster than new ground projects can be established.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The integrity objection to utilitarianism is Williams's most famous philosophical argument. In a 1973