Social discourse about morality often features appeals to fundamental personal commitments. Individuals who wish to justify their conduct to others frequently portray certain actions they pursue as stemming from commitments that are central to their self-conception, and actions they reject as incompatible with their self-conception. 

However, while appeals to fundamental commitments are pervasive in everyday moral discourse, the same is not true in professional moral philosophy. Moral philosophers have certainly given attention to agents’ fundamental commitments, often discussing these commitments under the language of “integrity.” Yet integrity arguments nonetheless occupy a much less prominent place in contemporary moral philosophy than they do in everyday life.

My aim here is to narrow this gap. More specifically, I seek to advance the normative analysis of integrity in three ways. First, I wish to better structure this analysis, by offering new distinctions among different types of fundamental commitments that might underlie an agent’s integrity, and by outlining different kinds of normative functions that integrity might have in different contexts. Second, I wish to show that the idea of integrity is distinctive in capturing elusive intuitions as to how an agent’s particular history might bear on its normative situation. Third, I argue that a properly structured analysis of integrity that is sensitive to agents’ particular history allows us to undermine some influential forms of skepticism about integrity’s normative significance.