Introduction

Social Morality as a Grammar of Relationships
         Problems
         The Self and Society

Freeing Social Morality from Politics
         Re-Narrating the Parentocentric Self
         Re-Narrating the Parentocentric Universal
         The Value of Difference and Sameness
         Equality (Fairness)

Speaking a Renovated Social Morality
         Justifying a Right to Integrity
         Spelling out the Boundaries
         Holding Integrity in trust

Making Good Laws (speaking community to those who do not care)
         Punishment (de-profitabilising violence)
         Realising Closure
 

An immediate and serious problem, facing any real self, is that of instituting a morality of relationships that will enable her or him to be real in a society of violent phonies. Because relationships between human persons are always political, and politics is the source of our alienation from each other, our alienation cannot be healed merely by socialising - and there's the rub. A moral [apolitical] sociability could give us a healing [non-violent] bridge between selves. But, because humans are compulsively political down to the details, becoming apolitical would alienate you from others even more than will being moral or rational. For this reason, unless there is a quantum shift in human sociability, the real self will always be a social outsider to some extent.¹ Having said that, however, our selfhood is embedded in human society - we owe our existence, language, survival and selfhood, to other selves within community. This integrity of interdependence and mutual obligation needs to be respected if we are going to be realistic about being a self in the world. Such respect is a function of morality.

Morality is an ethic; that is, a narrative which embodies, realises [make real] and expresses a value-set and rule-set which structures [gives form to] a larger integrity. Moralities, like all ethics, apply only to evaluators [persons]. For my present purposes, I want to limit my attention to the society of human persons. So, in this chapter, the larger integrity in question will be limited to the relationships in which a human self engages with other humans. In its simplest form, I will asume a 'society' relating only two human persons, but it will not matter to the morality whether the society involves two persons or millions.

Moralities, again like all ethics, narrate a value-set of good and bad [value and disvalue] from which emerges a rule-set of right and wrong (doing good and doing bad). On the basis that integrity is the foundation and vehicle of reality, reason and morality, I hold that the value of integrity is the most reasonable value-set for a morality.² Respect for integrity emerges from this as the rule-set which conserves the input value of the ethic. I will input (and justify) this ethic in all that follows because an integrity-respecting morality is the only one I can think of which enables the would-be real self to live in a society largely made up of violent phonies.

For personal morality, my integrity-respecting narrative integrates the value-set and rule-set in a language of virtue (the integrity of being and doing, deed and doer, rather than either doing/deeds or states of being, see personal morality).
        Virtue ethics are agent-centred.³ Social morality emerges from the same value-set as personal morality but seems better spoken in an act-centred language. This is because social morality is primarily concerned with how acts [uses and non-uses of power] affect, and are affected by, others.
 

There is nothing inconsistent about speaking personal resepct for integrity in an agent-centred language, and social respect for integrity in an act-centred language, just so long as the change does not dis-integrate the value-set of social morality from that of personal morality. The change in language is called for by a change in what social morality is intended to do with the value - personal morality uses value to realise a meaningful life, social morality uses value to facilitate our sharing a limited natural and cultural world. I use the same value (that of integrity) for both tasks; only the moral language is different. This change is further called for as an antidote to our addiction to moral violence. I can, for example, justify evaluating how well I live my own life as a self in the world, and virtue morality (an agent-centred language) is appropriate for this. But, because I do not know what it is to be anyone but myself, or live any life but my own, I cannot justify a like ability or authority to evaluate how well or badly another agent is living her life as a self. This is especially so following the recognition of just how much contingency contributes to, or detracts from, the realisation of valuable character.4 Agent-centred languages, however, tempt me to make these kinds of judgement. This matters further given that we are all mythos-conditioned to avoid responsibility for our own character by acting as if the motives of others were open to us (which, in fact, they are not) and within our sphere of justified parental interference. The political habit of attributing motives to others, and then condemning them for the motives attributed to them rather than the actions they have performed, is a common vehicle of institutionalised violence.5 Replacing this habit with a less violent one is necessary if we are to recover from the violence it institutionalises. Moral languages which focus on public acts, rather than the inner workings of agents, should facilitate this. Evaluating who others are requires evidence that is closed to us, easy to misrepresent and hard to verify. But the acts of others (what they do with their power) are both open to us and of concern to us. They are open to us because, unlike the feelings and motives which drive them, acts are their own evidence. That acts happen in the way they do is all the evidence we need to evaluate them as acts. We can use this to justify an ability to judge the acts of others. And what others do with their power concerns us because, given the integrity of the world, the acts of persons, which realise values in society, impinge on our values, interests and welfare - what some put in, others take out, and we are among those others. By this we can justify a right [a morally justified claim] to judge the acts of others. And, in both cases, it is only the acts of others for which we can justify a right and ability to judge. Thus an agent-centred language is appropriate for personal morality but, for social moralities, act-centred languages are better.

For a reasonable species, a valuable social morality could emerge from an integrity-respecting personal morality as just two universal rules for living in any kind of relationship or community with each other. Because integrity is respected and freedom is the default standard, these rules would be along the general lines of:

• do what you like just so long as no one else has to listen to it, look at it, feel it, smell it, taste it or pay for it unless they freely consent to do so, and
• beyond this, negotiate your interests as if you and all other persons were equally valuable.⁶

If I meet another person then, just to have any kind of meaning-possible engagement, the two of us must share certain forms [structures] of relationship. Because persons are evaluating integrities of nature and culture, these forms will need to be both natural and cultural; we must, at least, share a space-time environment and some form of language.
        The location and relation of ourselves and various facts, in space and time, provides a physical structure within which any relationship will be realised. Language provides the cultural structure.
        The forms, given and enabled by language, play a significant role in personal relationship. Rule-governed conventions of greeting, communication, self-expression, sign, insult, response, promise and information exchange, all affect a relationship for better or worse depending on both the form of the language (the vehicle) and such narrative/informative content (meaning) as with which each person may fill the form. If we enjoy a rich, complex and subtle language then we can realise rich, complex and subtle relationships. If we endure a language that is crude or impoverished then so too will be the relationships. If the language we share distorts or otherwise frustrates relationship then our chances of realising any constructive and meaningful content are that much less.

Language is any rule-governed system of creatively using signs as vehicles to convey evaluation or meaning. Meaning emerges from language as a function of value applied to facts [differences] and conserved by rules. Those rules are a grammar, and it is grammar which makes linguistic facts (marks, sounds, movement) into vehicles of meaning.
        The grammar of a language is the rule-set which gives it integrity [structure, form] and so makes it a language [a vehicle of meaning] rather than just a noise, marks or movement. The grammar of a social relationship is the rule-set [morality or politics] which gives it integrity and so makes it a vehicle of value [an engagement or meaningful exchange]. In both cases, indifference to or contempt for grammar is both cause and symptom of social dis-integration.

If I meet another, and gesture towards her with an object, that gesture could be intended as a gift or as a threat. If I intend a gift then that intention is my value-set. If she reads the gesture as offering a gift then we share a grammar [rule-set] just because we share the same rules for encoding and decoding the gesture as a sign [a act which 'points to' a meaning]. The rules preserve and transmit the value [meaning] across a change of persons. But if I subsequently repeat the same gesture, hoping or believing that she will read it as offering a gift but really intended something else, then I am enacting a narrative which violates the integrity of rules and values established for our shared language (I am telling a lie). The symbolic nature of these acts embody a grammar of behaviour that is part of the ethical language that we need to share an interpersonal relationship. It is this 'grammar of behaviour' in face of the reality of others, with which I am concerned under the head of 'social morality'.

Like language, social morality must relate [integrate] different integrities (in this case, citizens) within a wider sameness (a larger integrity - in this case, a society) just to be what it is. What we say with a piece of language use may begin privately within us - as thoughts - and then reach out to others. But language itself does not and cannot. Rather, language is a public integrity into which we first enter as a result of relating with others, and into which we subsequently re-enter as a means of relating with others. The language and its values are prior; our fellowship with other persons, and with all that is not us, are built on, and follow the inherited logic of, the language.
        The vocabulary of a language may change quite rapidly at times, but the rule-set [grammar] needs to be far more enduring if the language is to conserve value [preserve and transmit meaning] across changes of place, time and person (which is what language does). Similarly, the membership and fashions of a society may change quite rapidly at times but the public grammar [morality] of that society must endure across time and between persons if that society is to be preserved as a society.

What a language-user thinks in a language might be private to that user, but the grammar which makes the thought and/or its expression possible will and must be public (in the language) and fundamentally the same for all users of the language.
            Social morality is likewise public, in the structure of relationships, and it too must be mutual to those in relationship. There are no private social moralities any more than there are or can be single-citizen societies or genuinely private, one-person, languages.

Grammars, and the values they conserve, are and must be institutionalised prior to our engagement with them. This is not just because we are, in fact, all born into already-existing grammars, and learn our language, reasoning, moral narratives and emotional repertoire as we enter into the larger integrity which is our inheritance as persons. It is also because we share a world in which all of us cannot have all we want without denying others at least some of what they want. Social moralities provide the languages by which we negotiate our sharing of our world with each other. And there cannot be any negotiation until and unless the would-be negotiators share at least some already common grounds of negotiation with one another. Grounds of negotiation are linguistic (cultural), they precede negotiation, and are thereby already laden with values prior to relationship. And these values will affect the subsequent relationship.

The vocabulary of a language obviously affects what can be said in that language. If, for example, we choose to negotiate interests in terms of rights, we may not be thereby claiming that rights and duties are the only valid language of measure or that the differences narrated by rights talk are the only differences to be described. But the choice of language means that we will select the differences described by rights to be weighted for importance in our narrative, and our choice of the language will limit our narrative to those differences.
        Language, however, is more than vocabulary, language is vocabulary and grammar. And the grammar of a language also affects what can be said in the language.
        Meaning, in any sense, can emerge only from shared integrity, and it is the integrity of content and form [vocabulary and grammar] which carries meaning across differences of time, place and persons. Language narrates differences as meaningful by integrating a content [signs] into a form according to a rule-set which encoder [speaker, writer] and decoder [listener, reader] share. That sounds, marks and/or actions have meaning at all, and that the meanings are different, is a product of the rules which integrate the content of language as a form. If the rules are ignored or violated then the meaning becomes obscure or lost. If we endure contrary grammars - such as are generated by politics - then our very attempts to communicate will, in itself, become a source of alienation between us. The same considerations apply to any social engagement. Some kind of social 'grammar' informs or deforms all human relationships, and the logical forms of that grammar have an effect on what values the subsequent relationship will realise. A dichotomous grammar whereby anyone who is not P is automatically an anti-P, for instance, deforms our ability to negotiate a dialogue between those who define themselves as P and those who do not.

This matters because our relationships with other people make such a difference to us, as they also make a difference to others. We define ourselves in the face of others, and we learn about our selves from others - indeed, we often learn more about ourselves from others than from ourselves. How many, and what kind of, differences we find congenial is not only a matter of personal preference but also of safety. We can safely allow the wealth of difference, embodied in other folk, full play in the world only if we can trust them not to violate us. This is something which we cannot do within the addictive mythos because trust is dependent on the grammars which structure the play of differences between people. If others are predisposed to think of and treat us as a thing then that immediately devalues us. But if they are further conditioned to secure themselves, by trying to overcome ourselves, then we must either resist (which means joining in the violence of overcoming) or surrender our integrity.

The logical structure of sharing works in two ways; being a bridge for relationships within the shared grammar and a barrier against relationships outside of it. If we share a grammar of engagement that allows difference full play within the larger integrity of our interdependence, but curbs it emphatically once it reaches the edge where it begins to violate the integrity of others, then and only then we can trust each other. It is in this trust that the power, which we both gain from dialogue, can flourish.
        Again this works both ways. Grammars and narratives of behaviour can both expand and contract the scope of difference with which and by which reality is created - and it can do so with equal facility. If a group of people want to alienate or exclude others from their fellowship then their shared grammar will sustain that alienation or exclusion. This is one reason why conflict situations are always marked by distinct (political) grammars of uniform, jargon, procedure and in-group narratives. The grammar restricts the scope of relationship by diminishing the range of differences within the group (fostering 'group think') and thereby augmenting the differences between it and other groups. It pushes, and is pushed by, the hierarchical dichotomisation of difference between 'us' and 'them'.

Problems. A general problem, facing any moral or political narrative, is that all persons do and must live by values but that no human person actually knows what, if any, values really are valuable. This matters especially for social morality because

• persons can neither enjoy nor endure any kind of social integrity, co-operation or connectedness (any society, fellowship, communication or relationship) without some kind of shared morality.
• Any shared morality, like any language or other ethic, simply will and must impose values on those who might not otherwise freely adopt them. We mightn't like the rules of language, for example, but we cannot profit from language without allowing it to impose its rules on us (after all, if we don't follow the rules then we won't be understood when we speak) - the same goes for mathematics, politics, self-realisation, or any other ethic.
• None of us have a morally justified authority to impose our values on others if we cannot justify that our values are those that others ought to follow. And none of us have a right to impose our values on others if we cannot justify imposing on others the costs involved in either accepting or dissenting from those values.

This problem is aggravated by the fact that (a) human persons are chronically irresponsible about our imposition of values, to the extent that some of us even deny that we do impose our values on others, (b) imposing values violates the evaluating integrity of those on whom the values are imposed, and the imposition of values is god-playing [parentocentric], but (c) the only forms of social morality we know are parento-like defences against disvalue that assume a god-like superiority on our part.
        Contrary to parentocentric mythology, our social, moral, political and aesthetic 'parents' are not better informed about values than are those they treat as moral children. And that so many of us think that we know what is right is evidence only that we haven't thought about it carefully enough to be aware that we don't know what is not knowable. Moral uncertainty logically justifies no more than a degree of humility (especially on the part of government). But, to the extent that we are morally insecure, we are generally fearful enough of our own uncertainty only to violate others in an effort to secure our own need for significance. The cost of this kind of logic is evident in the history of Communism, Islamic fundamentalism or 20th Century Germany. In each case, assumptions of moral superiority have given rise to an appalling history of vast and costly violence.
        The dilemma, of having to do right by doing what we cannot know is right, cannot be escaped because, the attractions of pseudo-innocence notwithstanding, we simply cannot avoid imposing some values on others, and/or avoid responsibility for imposing our values on society, just because we have no moral authority to do so. To live is to impose one value on society, to not live is to impose another. To join in imposes our presence, to opt out imposes our absence. To vote or not vote, to speak or not speak, to mind our own business or interfere, are all values-imposing. Our choice is not to impose no values but only, and always, to choose which values we will impose, how and why.

Being responsible about the values we input into the world is, however, a behaviour which humans are generally scrupulous to avoid. We normally translate any responsibility that we have for others as according us the privilege of parent-like power over them. We protest that no one has a right to impose her or his values on us while, of necessity and in fact, vigorously imposing our values on others with a viciousness made worse [more violent] by:

• our refusal to recognise and take responsibility for what we are doing - we deceive ourselves that it is not us who impose moral violence on others, we are just the agents of deities or forces of one kind or another, society/women/the workers, convention/tradition, fate, karma or 'historical necessity', justice and so on and on and on. And
• our confusion of moral values with political [preference] values - we impose our preferences on others under (a) a compulsive need to confirm that we matter and (b) the assumption that our tastes and preferences are morally good because, if they are not, then there are doubts about our value as persons.

We cannot make these problems go away, but neither can we elect to have no social morality; even the denial of morality inputs a morality, and those who follow what others call 'evil' do so only because they believe it to be valuable [good]. We each and all have the power of persons, whether we want it or not, and we all use our personhood power whether we want to or not. Any use or non-use of personhood power necessarily inputs values to the world and, thereby, onto others in the world. So the only possibility, for using our power in any way that is valuable, is to follow the rules (the 'oughts') of a genuinely valuable morality.
        We cannot know that any moral values are genuinely valuable but, as with all beliefs, we can know which moral beliefs are more or less justified. So what we can do (and the best that we can do) is 'shorten the odds' - we can strive for those values which are best justified by the evidence and reasoning that is available to us.

Integrity-respecting values are necessary for any relationship or society. To not impose such values on each other is to impose the values of social dis-integration. We do and must, in fact, impose integrity-respecting moral values on each other. And, if any kind of relationship is valuable then we are justified in imposing such values just as the price of our connectedness with others and theirs with us. This does not prove that an integrity-respecting morality is 'right', but it gives us better reasons for acting as if it was right than we have for acting as if integrity-violating values were justified. And, this being the case, we are better justified in imposing these values on each other, than we are in imposing other values, just as we are better justified in personally living by a respect for integrity (including an integrity of personal and social morality).

We are not similarly justified in imposing preference values on each other because preferences are pegged to subjects, and that any person or persons prefers something tells us nothing at all about whether or not it should or can be valued by any other person or persons. I can, for instance, compel others to hear the sounds I like, or to say what I want them to say, but I cannot make them like the sounds or believe the saying.⁷

Some social rules are a necessity of relationship, just as linguistic rules [grammar] are a necessity of communication. And, given that some rules are inevitable, moral rules (which impartially empower everyone, and without which a society could not function) are much easier to justify than are political rules (which empower some at the expense of others and/or compel us all to realise only the values that some parentocentric elite prefers).
        Like the rules governing the uses of power in a language (the making of sounds or marks to communicate), the grammar of morality must attach value to actions (the uses and non-uses of personhood power); there must be rules for there to be a language, the rules must be in the language - just to communicate any content, or mediate any relationship, at all - and the rules in a language are there for all users of that language. That 'must' however, does not apply to preference values because preferences are just incidental facts about the persons who value them rather than any kind of necessity for relationship. That someone prefers vegetables to meat, or cruelty to kindness, for example, tells us only that vegetables and cruelty are valued by that person - not that they ought tobe valued by other persons, that those who like them are justified in imposing their preferences on others, or that such values are necessary for social integrity. A person is morally justified in imposing preferences on another only if that other ought to value those preferences. And that the would-be imposer happens to value them is not enough to justify that 'ought'.

The Self and Society: Being a human self is a bit like having accidentally overheard a conversation (i.e., language) which, just because we have overheard it, commits us irrevocably to a game of fabulously high stakes which we may as easily lose as win. Being pitched into this game (i.e., personhood) is a non-negotiable event which binds us to an almost god-like power that we did not earn and a god-like responsibility for which we did not ask. Our addiction to violence, irresponsibility and parentocentric politics, makes us ill-equipped for either of these.

Objectively, the rules of the personhood game are a kind of narrative fiction; like mathematics, they give us a power in the world without themselves being a natural part of that world. When any of us uses our power as a person, we take it from the human community, modify [make a difference to] it, and then input it back to the community [the larger integrity from which it emerged] along with its modifications. This process - which is very like that by which a cell takes and gives back to the organism of which it is part - is what keeps the species-wide, organic integrity of human personhood culture alive and evolving.

In this transaction between ourselves and our personhood culture, we are free in some regards and bound in others. In particular, we are free to use, modify or violate, human ethics as we please, but we are bound to take this freedom from, and impose it's consequences on, the larger integrity which is the human community.⁸ This seemingly odd mix of contingency, freedom, necessity, fiction and truth, reflects the normal integrity of self and society which is necessary to human personhood. We are, for example, dependent on the community of persons for the selfhood which makes dissent from the community possible; we are free to choose without being free not to choose; we are free to choose what we want - and the values driving our choices have no other validity than our choices give them - but we are not free to choose without taking our choice-enabling inheritance from others, editing it, and passing it back to them in edited form.
        By this unasked-for inheritance, all of us are and must be making the world after an image. We variously understand and misunderstand the world by that image, and we impose that image on others. For example, just to live and/or die as a self in a world is to input values which make a difference to that world and to the meaning [output values] that it has. And, because the world of persons is a natural-cultural integrity, to input any values necessarily makes a difference which, sooner or later and one way or another, affects everyone and everything else in that integrity. Thus, to initiate contact with another is to impose the value or disvalue of that contact on that other, to not initiate contact is to impose the value or disvalue of non-contact. So your choice is never to impose or not impose but only ever to choose what will be imposed on whom and why - and every choice not only helps define you, and others with whom you choose to make or not make direct contact, but also the world and the community of human selves in the world.

The mix of freedom and necessity, which is the context of human choices, is reflected in the moral logic of those choices thus:

• Every voluntary use or non-use of power by a person flows from and inputs a value;
• Every value necessarily entails a rule;
• Rules are action-guiding (they cause action if we choose to obey them). And when we evaluate our options, we apply action-guiding concepts [rules] to situations in which a person is confronted with a choice (to choose an option because it is easy, for example, is to apply the rule derived from the value of easiness to a practical situation);
• Rules point us at features of circumstances that count as reasons for or against acting a certain way in those circumstances (only if we value rules against killing persons, for example, does it become relevant whether or not a human foetus is a person when considering an abortion);
• Judgements about the value of an option cannot function as guides to conduct unless we not only choose to follow the rules but choose what rules to follow (as persons, we cannot choose to follow no rules.⁹ Only when we choose which rules to place ourselves under can those rules point us at features of a circumstance that count as reasons for or against acting a certain way in that circumstance);
• In choosing to follow a rule in a circumstance, we thereby logically make the relevant reasons-for-action in that circumstance equally relevant for all circumstances of the same kind (if, for instance, a rule against killing persons makes the personhood status of a human foetus relevant in one abortion then it makes it relevant for all abortions. If we do not accept this then we are not doing morality at all; we are, instead, violating the integrity of reason in pursuit of a political advantage).

When we apply a rule, we are not following a path laid down by God, nature or some kind of moral law built in to the universe. We are simply choosing to enter into and profit from a human cultural tradition, the integrity of which will be variously nourished or violated by our engagements with it. But this freedom from extra-human restraint does not mean that any rules will do. To realise the value of doing maths, for example, we must respect the integrity of maths. So, doing mathematics is not a matter of 'alternative validities' or 'it's true if it's true to you'. But nor is it a matter of maths being empirically true (nothing in nature will prove that 2+2=4). When you choose to follow a mathematical rule you are, in effect, asserting that your personal [subjective] choice is universally [objectively] valid to the extent that such assertion is compatible with the corresponding claims of everyone else involved in mathematical evaluations in any time or place whatsoever. You could express this relationship in two equally true ways.

1. You could say that, although, like the grammar of a language, the rules you follow must fit into the larger integrity of a shared culture, they have no force independently of your choice. Or
2. you could say that, although the rules you choose have no force independently of your choice, they must, like the grammar of a language, fit into the larger integrity of a shared culture.

The politicising of social morality is a potent source and symptom of institutionalised violence.¹⁴ Detoxifying ourselves from the politicising of morality is a largely matter of re-narrating the most corrupted players in the game: ourselves, our prejudices, our understanding of dissent and our understanding of equality.

1. Re-narrating the Parentocentric Self. The self-centred politics of parentocentricity, although understandable given our history, is flawed in trying to form relationships on the relationship-violating foundation of the self-contained [I=I] subject.¹⁵ This disowns the fact that the personal 'I' [the human subject] cannot be self-existent or self-defined in fact because every self owes its existence, definition, realisation and value, to engagements with others who are not the self.¹⁶

Under dichotomy, the only and exclusive alternative to a self-centred ('parent') relationship is an other-centred ('child') one. But this merely changes who is politically on 'top' in the top-down flow of violence. The counterfeit equality of mutual indifference does not escape this because indifference is just another form of addiction to self-centredness. An integrity-respecting narrative, however, would recognise that the most valuable morality is neither self-centred [subject-centred and self-righteous] nor other-centred [object-centred and self-abnegating] but integrity-centred and value-oriented - not just self or other, but self and other and both for good.
        This accords with the realisation of selfhood. Others, just by making our personhood and selfhood possible, obligate us to realise our own value in the face of our mutual need. The well-being of relationships is our well-being as well as that of others. If integrity is the logical object of respect then we cannot discharge our responsibility, even to our own personhood, while, at the same time, violating the persons whose integrities nourish ours. To violate another self simply is to undermine all selfhood, including our own, by inputting violence to the world of relationships which is the nourishment of all selves. So if, for example, you wonder why you should keep a promise when there is no longer any external profit in it for you, one answer is that breaking any promise violates, and thereby harms, (a) your own integrity, (b) that of the person or persons to whom you made the promise, (c) the relationship between you and they, and (d) the whole person-nourishing and society-enabling world of narratives and relationships which make promise-making and promise-keeping possible. If we, others, society and the keeping of agreements are valuable then we should make only promises we can keep,¹⁷ and should keep all the promises we make, because keeping promises is right [respects integrity] even if it is inconvenient, and breaking promises is wrong [inputs violence] even if it is convenient. And we can tell if keeping agreements is valuable by whether or not we are annoyed, offended or harmed when others break their agreements with us.¹⁸

2. Re-narrating the Parentocentric Universal. Types and stereotypes are useful, as are universals, universal types and personhood roles. We do need to discriminate, and we will discriminate using abstract universals. The only real problem is that our normal [parentocentric] abstraction prejudices the moral universal with political types and/or stereotypes derived from preference values.¹⁹ This loses the real in abstraction, confuses politics [preference] with morality, and does both unfairly. All three of these 'toxins' need to be recovered from if our skills of abstract universalisation are to be detoxified from our normal bigotry.

Recovering from the habit of confusing political preferences with moral values is a relatively simple matter of learning to discriminate between different kinds of value.²⁰ Although preference and moral goodness are both values, they are different. This is clearly shown in that moral claims (such as "I deserve to be first") require different justifications to claims of preference ("I want to be first") or taste ("I like being first").
        To treat taste or preference as a moral issue, or morality as a matter of preference, treats differences as a sameness. To treat the differences as different is enough to both remove a confusion and detoxify ourselves from the prejudice. This is just a matter of discriminating between (a) what we like or dislike about a situation, (b) what we would [politically] prefer or not, and (c) what is right [integrity-respecting] or wrong [integrity-violating]. All that makes this difficult is that we are conditioned by our addiction to confuse preference and moral values, mindlessly and out of habit rather than conviction. Recovering from a habit is never easy.

The skill of treating differences as different extends to skills of discrimination. Bigotry, for example, is a function of preference values. There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong with individuals preferring any person or group of persons to another. The violence of bigotry lies in the unfairness of institutionalising a politics of preference. So the answer to bigotry is not to 'treat everyone the same' (to not treat differences as different) but to discriminate fairly. This may sound obvious, but fairness in discrimination is exceedingly difficult to achieve for a species addicted to the compulsive jockeying for rank in parentocentric hierarchies. And the only complete antidote to this toxin is probably to recover from our addiction to parentocentricity generally. Addictions allow no compromise and we cannot expect any less drastic means to work if the compulsions which drive our flair for bigotry remain active.

Recovering from addictive bigotry - the habit - lies not so much in narrating that others are as valuable as we are (our 'equals') but in admitting that others are as real as we are - we meet the abstraction of bigotry not just with another abstraction (equality) but with the reality of actual physically embodied persons. Doing this is possible only by paying attention and practising the imaginative skills of empathy on real people.
        We all condition ourselves and each other not to really perceive other folk as who they are. Unlearning this behaviour is as hard as unlearning dependence on any addictive drug or process - and our own capacity for self-deception is our greatest obstacle (see self-deception ). We are not justified in pretending to know or address who another 'really' [essentially] is behind her or his badges and masks. And believing that we 'see others for what they really are' is a dangerous self-deception. When we meet others we will, despite our own best efforts, perceive them as less real than they are - as tokens of a psychological or other type, representatives of a social or other class, or a 'typical' something. This habit must be admitted if it is to be countered. So, when we meet others, we need to practice the skill of noticing that the persons we meet are real, uniquely embodied selves in their own right, just as we are. We must school ourselves to notice the 'otherness' of others.
        We do not notice others by ignoring the 'masks' that they wear, the stereotypes they employ or the games that they play. And we have neither right nor need to insist that no one wears a mask or plays a role. All that is required of us is the recognition that the masks are there in fact - sometimes a straightjacket, sometimes armour, and sometimes both - but that the persons wearing those masks are more real, more complex, more vulnerable and more valuable, than the masks they wear. So when we meet others, the demand of integrity (theirs and ours) is that, despite all the conditioning and all the theories, we pay attention to them; to who they are - masks and all. We have to listen to them as we would, in principle, want them to listen to us. In this way we respect each self's integrity as valuable property, which is vulnerable to harm, in accordance with the General Value by which real selves live a good life.

Socially, it would be valuable for legislators in a society to institute only fair laws and to treat all citizens as equally subject to those laws. But universal equality is a misleading concept outside of moral, legal and/or legal-political narratives because persons are so obviously not equal in any factual sense. To type persons as coined from a mould, no matter how sublime a mould, is a half-truth that violates the integrity of the self in question and the narrative that purports to describe her or him. To then treat that self as coin from a mould realises that violation (the generalisation overcomes the person's unique reality) and so harms the person, the bigot and the society they share. We cannot respect integrity by respecting a bigot's beliefs in any way that implies that the beliefs are valid. But to pretend that we can all 'just be persons', as if our entire history was not marred by addictive patterns of ideological narrative, is to disown the reality of our situation. That too treats selves as less real than they are. This means that if we are to meet others as 'equals' then we need always to keep reminding ourselves first of a triple-sided fact which both we and others are equally conditioned to overlook: (a) that we are not tokens of any class but (b) we are all treated as if we were and (c) we are all conditioned to act as if we were. So we do not disown our share of the bigotry game by pretending that it is not being played ("Why does it matter that she's disadvantaged and I'm privileged? Can't we forget the past and just be persons?", "I worked for where I am, the poor could do the same if they tried" and so on). We disown the game by owning [admitting and taking responsibility for] our share of it.
        When we meet someone who is not-P to our P, or vice versa,we are conditioned to dominate or defer accordingly; we are conditioned to react to others as a token of the class whose badges they wear rather than bother trying to find out who they are in fact. We do not deal with this by pretending that it isn't so, and we do not deal with it by pretending that none of the class categories apply or that none of the badges 'fit'. The proper alternative to "All not-Ps are bad" is not "No not-Ps are bad" or "All not-Ps are good (or 'spiritual' or whatever)" but that "Some not-Ps are good (and some are bad) just as with all human persons". So we deal with our addiction by admitting our own bigotry as a fact, and then compensating for our prejudice as a fact which we own is real but not valuable.

We are all multi-bigoted. Parentocentricity conditions us to object only to the bigotry of others. But we are not responsible for the narratives and attitudes of others. We are responsible for our own. And we do not recover from our own bigotries by pretending that we are not bigoted. We each deal with our bigotries by admitting each of them as a fact and then deliberately compensating for each of them as a fact that is not valuable. And we need to do this every time we meet, hear, read or think about, any person of any race, class, gender other than ours. The skills of compensation are learned only by practise and by being willing to make a fool of ourselves (as we do every time we get it wrong). Practising those skills informs social morality with personal virtue morality.

It is entirely probable that, whenever we meet another, both parties will each be so misused by addictive mythology that we will identify who we are primarily with being a man or woman, or by being working class, adolescent, 'Black' or 'White' or Semitic or whatever. Indeed, the odds are that each of us will be variously bigoted to the point where we sincerely believe that our membership of some race, gender, culture, religion, psychological category or other ideological class, is what makes us special and makes us who we are. It is not, but it is valuable to be aware that we are each conditioned to believe that it is. And it is valuable also to be aware that we are not equals in fact and that we are all conditioned to judge everyone a priori as P and/or not-P according to various political hierarchies that poison our thinking. Only this kind of honesty heals the integrity of the narratives by which we evaluate the character of ourselves and others.

3. Preserving the Value of Difference and Sameness. The theme of treating difference as different (above) extends also to our treatment of persons who are different not only from ourselves but from whatever norms are implicated in our society. Samenesses give us a sense of belonging and, within the larger integrity of sameness, differences give us the sense of our uniqueness. But the anxieties built into parentocentricity condition us to fear any differences which are not parento sanctioned because such differences are out of our control. Parentocentric ethics also condition us to vest our significance in overcoming. So we are always trying to overcome difference with some kind of uniformity, just to secure our own values. We compulsively treat others as moral children where possible or, if we have not the power to achieve that, we let ourselves be overcome by others as moral parents. This cheats us of both difference and sameness as freely chosen vehicles of significance.

There is, however, a less violent and more convincing narrative of significance which can be abstracted from the fact of human freedom. Human persons enjoy a degree of freedom to choose among options, which are genuinely open to them, according to a range of values. Because we live in a causally determined world (one in which actions have real and predictable consequences), our choices make a real difference and we can know what that difference is. This means that what we choose matters (is significant). Indeed, only free beings, located in a world that conserves inputs, can be really significant. Genuine freedom of choice entails being able to mess up if we so choose. Only persons [language-users] can be free because only the language-enabled creativity of our personhood culture gives us the power to input values into the causally determined necessities of nature. We have the power to realise real value and real disvalue. What we do matters; it matters only because it genuinely makes a difference and the difference 'sticks'. So, in conformity with the Laws of Conservation and because the world is an integrity, both we and everything else in the world have to live with the consequences of our choices. The integrity of human reality makes it impossible for any of us to use our freedom and power in a way that does not impact on the freedom, interests and values of others.
        Thus, if we choose to respect integrity then we are free to act on that choice, pay for it and live with the consequences. If we choose to violate each other, trash our planet and so on, then we have the freedom to choose that, pay for it and live with it. There is no magic karma trick, reincarnated second-chances or cosmic grandparent to come along and kiss it all better. If we make a mess, as we are free to do, then we both live with the mess we make and compel others to do the same. That is what makes us significant.

The point here is that, want it or not (and the self-defeating arguments of determinism notwithstanding), we do have some real, if limited, choices and that does make us significant. One of the reasons that persons are more significant than microbes is precisely because bugs have no choice about what values they will input to the world. We do have that choice; we have little choice about what kinds of human we will be - that is too much a function of contingency - but we can and do choose what kind of self we will cultivate within the contingent constraints of human personhood.

This is a quite different narrative of significance from that embedded in parentocentric thought. Our significance as persons does not derive from, and is not measured by, our power to violate. Falling rocks have that power. But the significance of persons derives from, and may therefore be measured by, our power and freedom to choose and be responsible for the values we input and realise. It is that we have the skills of personhood, and not any human fact about us, that makes human persons significant. The significance of our freedom, as persons, is a function of the values we input and realise by our uses of power. And, by the conservation of value, our output significance [meaning] as selves is a function of input values [morality] - just as is any meaning.²¹

It follows from this that we respect ourselves and others as significant when we use our powers persons to enact the recognition that we are all owed the loving freedom to be who we are rather than who others believe that we ought to be.

I introduce the word 'loving' here because indifference also allows others freedom - to 'go to Hell' if they want to. But indifference does not treat others as significant; indifference does not care; indifference treats others as insignificant. This is why motive matters and why any act-governing moral narrative, such as rights talk or ends-aimed ethics, is best integrated with an agent-centred personal morality. A reasonable ends-aimed ethic can remind us of good reasons for acting, and reasonable rights talk can remind us of valuable boundaries to our actions, but agent-centred morality stresses the importance of acting from a valuable motive (respect for integrity), and of practising the skills we need to act wisely in enacting our respect for integrity. Knowing that we should respect integrity is only the start of living well. Knowing how to respect freedom out of a respect for integrity, in the complex and ever-changing world, is a skill to be learned by honest doing rather than by merely acquiring information.
        This being the case, an integrity-cherishing and violence-recovered relatedness will respect both difference and conformity, just so long as both are themselves integrity-respecting (i.e., not coerced), and impose no preference or political values on another self.

Differences make us who we are, so a self-respecting morality will value the differences by which selves are defined as unique.

Sameness is valued for the sense of belonging that it gives a self, so a self-respecting morality will respect the conformities by which selves define themselves as belonging.

This means that respect for integrity is a way of being a person that reaches out to relate [integrate] difference in shared variety [a larger integrity] rather than coercive unity. A real relationship would, like language, connect [integrate] without overcoming. This does not require that we don't evaluate or discriminate. It does require that we practice evaluating and discriminating honestly, carefully and with some humility.
 

This narrative recognises that freedom includes both the freedom to dissent and the freedom to conform - and this, I think, deserves emphasis. Because we are all addicted to the same parentocentricity, all those 'under-parentos', who try to engineer their significance by dissenting from a dominant narrative, ineviatably input their own coercive insistence that the moiety with which they identify should conform with their values. Those who proclaim 'liberty' for women, the workers, a race or whoever, always have another cage into which they insist the 'liberated' shall enter immediately on escaping the cage which the 'liberators' don't like. This 'changing cages', often temporarily, is all that parentocentric dissent can achieve by all its violence. Freedom, however, if it means anything at all, must at least mean the freedom to choose our cage; to choose to dissent or conform as we please rather than as any parento inputs that we should.

4. Equality (Fairness). Any parentocentric ethic of social relationships can be expected to institutionalise a political hierarchy just by being what it is. These hierarchies are systems of inequality in which differences of value are prejudicially attached to differences of fact independently of whether the facts themselves logically cohere with the differences of value - such as, for example, when certain valuable opportunities are open to a P moiety, regardless of merit or talent, and closed to not-P moieties. By this device the pre-personhood 'Top Dog versus Underdog' division, of the pack animal, is enshrined as systematic unfairness in the social moralities of persons.
        The object of parentocentric rules is not to help everyone 'play the game' but to inhibit pre-defined moieties from winning. The object of fair rules is not to help or inhibit anyone's winning but to help everyone to play. So unfairness is a political virtue (it favours a P moiety at the expense of not-P) but a moral vice (for the same reason).
        Fairness [justice] is a measure of the value achieved by respecting the conservation of values in the distribution of inputs [costs] and outputs [benefits]. And we behave fairly when we act in accord with the distribution what is deserved - good or bad - according to deservingness [actual input] rather than prejudice or privilege. We do not, of course, have to limit distribution to fairness (both generosity and mercy are virtues so long as they are not unjust).²² But human societies are normally unfair, unmerciful and unkind just because, in them, opportunities and rewards are distributed among members of one moiety, whether they have earned them or not, while costs and penalties are borne by members of another moiety whether they deserve them or not. An integrity-respecting self will not play this game.

Political inequality between sexes, races and classes, is not an issue of differences but of fairness. Differences of race, sex, social class and so on are just the vehicle, the form which unfairness takes; it is the unfairness which is the content [meaning] and unfairness which violates the conservation of value. So any moral objections to the violence of social inequality are not logically addressed by suppressing differences of fact but only by reducing the unfairness (the pre-emptive inequities of value).

Obviously we are all born, both individually and as members of various classes, with different characteristics of race, sex, physical build and so on. And we are all born more or less intelligent than each other, more or less healthy, rich, whole, strong, lucky and so on. These are just contingent facts of our birth. In a more serious sense, persons are unequal because both the process and product of realising selfhood is so uniquely different for each of us. The realisation of value, although principally a fruit of self-endeavour, is nevertheless somewhat like the fruit of a tree. A good tree will grow better than a sickly one, even if neglected, living in poor soil and/or subject to bad weather. But fruit trees cannot reliably produce excellent fruits unless they are (a) of good stock, (b) planted in appropriate soil, (c) treated kindly by the weather and circumstances (a matter of happenstance) and (d) well cared for - it is good trees in good orchards that flourish best and produce the finest fruits. Institutionalised fairness is a necessary condition for a society being a 'good orchard', and being treated fairly is a necessary condition for all the 'trees' being treated well in any orchard.
 

Our individuality is due to more than our circumstances, it depends at least as much on what we do with, and within, our circumstances (see about being real). But that, in turn, depends to a great extent on how much we are allowed the freedom to define the kind of self we are within the larger integrities of our humanity, personhood and community. Selfhood is a fruit of personhood which, by realising a moral character, makes a significant difference to what would otherwise be our natural conduct . It seems clear that all human selves enter into an addiction to parentocentricity as we enter into our personhood, and many of us are further damaged by violent interference with the growth and ripening of our selfhood. This does not absolve us from any wilful refusal to realise a relatively valuable self because it merely explains our difficulty, and explanations do not excuse (even the most disadvantaged of us don't have to become violent). There is still a sense, however, in which our selfhood is fully and most valuably realisable only when it is allowed to emerge univiolated, and it is allowed to emerge unviolated only when we begin to be in charge of, and responsible for, our own uses of whatever power we have and/or can attain. It is precisely this freedom that is denied to slaves, the victims of parentocentric government, and other oppressed folk, by political inequality.

This matters further because a good orchard [society], in turn, needs good trees [citizens] doing what good trees do. The success of social morality is finally contingent upon the personal morality of citizens realised in and as a selfhood which, although vulnerable to both nature and culture, luck and design, is still the responsibility of each self. We may not be able to do much about the contingent facts and accidents of our existence, but we each do make a difference to the 'horticulture' which we practice on each other. We realise ourselves in the company of other persons to whom our selfhood is vulnerable. If we are going to be the best we could be then it helps to cultivate in a 'orchard' [society] and 'climate' [culture] which allows all of us both the freedom and the security to grow as selves within the larger integrities of family, community and human society.
 

A Note on Euality as Sameness.  Inequalities of ability, income and opportunity are banal unless they result from, or are used as vehicles for, systems of unfairness. Women and men, for example, are different kinds of human being in ways that are interesting, valuable and irrepressible in fact. Sexism [the politics of gender] unfairly, and illogically, turns these differences into a P/not-P system of value. Equality-as-sameness ideology [androgynarchy] tries to suppress difference by main force. But contingencies of fact are not the problem; the problem is with the system of differences in value riding as political parasites on the back of contingency. The bigotries which drive social inequality all treat contingencies of fact as systems of value. That is why bigotry is illogical (contingencies are not systems, and facts are not values). What makes them unfair is that the systems of value are always parentologically stacked 'P over not-P'. Equality-as-sameness 'attacks' bigotry by violating the difference [the natural host] in a vain and violent effort to free it from its political parasite. But neither women nor men, for example, can be free unless each citizen is allowed to be responsible for her or his own individual contingencies without having to endure the violence of systematic distortion of those contingencies for any political purposes - no matter how well intended those purposes are supposed to be. Women and men will not and cannot be social equals just so long as any moieties of sexual characteristics (feminine, masculine or androgynous) are treated as more or less valuable than any other moieties. Only when gender carries no partisan value into any processes of reasonable [integrity-respecting] discrimination will the sexes be equal in any moral sense. There is nothing objectionable with discrimination as such. Indeed, not to discriminate between honest and dishonest or trustworthy and untrustworthy folk, for example, would be as foolish as not discriminating between safe and unsafe foods or housing. And we sometimes achieve value only by discrimination; as when we discriminate between those physically competent to be firefighters, or intellectually competent to continue a university course, and those who are not; or when we pay a police force to discriminate between safe and unsafe behaviours among those using our roads. Discrimination is a disvalue only when we discriminate unfairly in some way. Attaching general merit or demerit to membership of a preferentially and/or politically defined moiety violates integrity because the values (the meaning, or informative content read into the facts) do not logically cohere with the facts which are supposedly their vehicle (being born rich or poor, male or female, or whatever, does not tells us whether a person is more or less valuable). This violates the conservation of value, and would be unfair in any case, but what is wrong with racism or sexism, for example, is not that different races or sexes are treated differently but that the differences are used to institutionalise a system of injustice. It is the injustice [the content] that is wrong; not the vehicle. That is why changing the form (re-defining the Top Dogs, homogenising moieties, privileging a previously oppressed moiety, picking on a different class of citizens to be not-P, and so on) does not stop the violence.         Addressing inequalities of wealth or opportunity by trying to institutionalise an equality in fact (equality-as-sameness) penalises both those who have more because they are lucky and those who deserve more because they have earned it. This is unfair. And if fairness is valuable then suppressing differences of fact, in pursuit of some equality-as-sameness ideal, is not valuable. Equality-as-sameness commits the very same sin to which its proponents object: systematically distorting contingencies of fact into political moieties. It is true, for example, that one of the ways in which any man is different from any woman is a set of features by which all women and men are different. This is the true 'half' of the half-truth. But, while part of gender differences is biological fact, the larger part is ideological value. You and I do not deal with moieties; we deal with persons. And the reality of persons is always violated by being be subsumed into a dichotomy of P/not-P. This violence is not addressed by forcing both women and men into any kind of androgyny. The violence of dichotomy comes from forcing women into W or not-W and men into M or not-M. Forcing both women and men into any A or not-A does not change this violence at all. Suppressing differences of fact is also less than valuable to the extent that differences themselves are valuable. Differences, being the basis of reality, are valuable in any case. It is differences in energy states such as hot and cold that allow machines and other energy systems to work, and it is entropy (the decrease in differences) that leads to the loss of structure [integrity]. Our differences from each other, and all that is not us, are also especially valuable because they are what makes each self unique. And personal differences, being the basis of our self-identity, are both valuable to and valued by realised [unviolated] selves in fact.

My own thinking about social morality follows after the four-step method already used for personal morality.²⁵ This means that, for me, the moral issues have been settled by the recognition that objectively, all integrity is valuable to whatever depends on it and, subjectively, if any language can signify any meaning at all then the first and final meaning it signifies is that integrity is valuable. This gives persons [the users of language] a value-set that reads integrity as valuable and a general rule that we would all do well to respect and cherish all integrity as valuable. So, as far as I am concerned, all that remains for a social morality are factual questions concerning what integrities are at stake in different uses of power and how best to respect their value.
        These are questions which continue to raise the issue of detoxification. We cannot avoid violating integrity altogether. But we can avoid the compulsive and excessive violation of integrity that flows from our fear-driven addiction to assuming that strength, safety and significance is found, and found only, in violating every integrity we can.²⁶ For this reason my social morality will be concerned only with (and integrate) thoughts about how to both maximise respect for integrity and minimise the violation of integrity in actual practise.

Justifying a Right to Integrity. The persons with whom we share a world all avow and embody different values and interests, some of which violate the integrity of other folk and their interests. If we are to negotiate a respect for ourselves, others (violators and victims), and our shared society, all within a general value of respecting all integrity, then the act-centred language and logic of rights seems most appropriate. This is because rights talk specifically defines boundaries around the ownership of moral properties, such as personhood, and, more particularly, give us a clear language for calculating the balance of rights and duties called for by a general respect for integrity.

Rights work by assigning value to certain facts that are held to be pertinent to the well-being of an integrity (usually, but not necessarily, a person or group of persons) and then prescribing that the integrities, to which the valued facts are pertinent, should be treated as the owners of those facts. So all rights are ownership claims and, because the logic of ownership confers a particular authority to owners, a right normally takes precedent over the various non-owner interests that might otherwise prevail. Thus to say that someone has a right to vote, for example, is a way of claiming that he should be treated as owning a particular cultural power. This power is his property and, because he owns it, taking it off him would be theft. The claims of owners, of any moral property, are held to 'outweigh' otherwise comparative claims by non-owners. So if someone has a right to vote then whether or not it is convenient to let him vote, whether or not he will use his vote wisely and so on, is irrelevant; he owns his vote and has an owner's authority to use or not use his own property as he sees fit provided only that his use does not violate the like right of others.
        That 'provided only' makes rights talk a useful language for striking integrity-respecting balances in social relationships. If I and another have a like right to speak, for example, then my right extends to the point where it begins to violate her right; her right likewise extends to the point where it begins to violate mine. On that principle, both she and I can balance our otherwise conflicting interests as we go along. And this balance extends to all others with an interest in speech or listening. So say, for instance, that I and another want to chat while attending a lecture. In this case our conversation is going to violate the rights of others, to hear the teaching that they have paid for, so rights talk prescribes that we have a duty not to chat and that, conversely, others have a right to stop us chatting.
 

One way of describing this logic of balancing is to picture rights is as a kind of boundary fence which both defines and defends a moral property. This property will be serving the value of some integrity in some way. And the 'boundary' around it will, like all fences, have two sides: approached from one side it is a right, from the other it is a duty. So to say that someone has a right to speak, for example, is just one way of saying that others have a duty to let her speak if she wants to. She does not have to speak, speech is her moral property to use or not as she pleases, but if the owner of any moral property wants to use that property then others have a duty not to inhibit or prevent that use. The right and the duty are in balance by being same boundary - all that changes is the 'side' from which it is approached.

A right to speech is a negative right - a strong moral claim against destructive interference with a moral property. But the same logic that translates rights into duties equally translates duties into rights; if I have a duty to help another then that other thereby has a right to be helped. This is a positive right - a strong moral claim for constructive interference in a moral property. If someone claims only a negative right to life for example, and his claim is morally justified, then the rest of us have a duty only to refrain from killing him or depriving him of whatever means to life that he has. But if he claims a positive right, and his claim is morally justified, then we have both the duty not to harm and a larger duty to actively provide him with any means of life which he lacks. So a positive right is about what we should do, a negative right is about what we should not do.

If I narrate a social morality of respect for the evaluating integrity of person, in this language, then I prescribe that all persons [all evaluating integrities] have rights [emphatic and strongly justified moral claims of ownership] to their evaluating integrity. These include ownership rights to their natural [bodily], cultural [moral, emotional, intellectual], and natural-cultural [personhood] integrity. All persons, in other words, have a strong moral claims to ownership of their own bodies, selves and personhood, limited only and as always by the like rights of all other persons and the proportionally equivalent rights of all integrity.²⁷

Moral rights are not facts. And to avow that all persons 'have' rights to their evaluating integrity does not point to any fact or characteristic of persons; it is just a way of avowing that personhood and selfhood deserve to [should] be treated as the valuable and vulnerable property of those who embody them.
        Such rights unambiguously include all human beings because all humans are members of a person-species. But to the extent that any animal, plant, machine or whatever is person-like, that animal, plant, machine or whatever logically has a like right in proportion to its own person-likeness.

A right to evaluating integrity forms the basis of a social morality that logically emerges from a general value of respect for the value of all integrity. The right, just to be what it is, includes a negative right not to be violated, and a positive right to be both what we are [a right to personhood] and who we are [a right to selfhood], limited only and as always by the like right in all other persons and the proportionally equivalent right of all integrity.
 

The right not to be violated is what is normally understood as a 'right to life'. I express it as a negative 'right not to...', rather than the positive 'right to...', because recognising the value of integrity obliges us only to maximise respect for integrity; it does not oblige us to maximise the amount of integrity that there is. If every integrity had a right to life then we would seem to be committed to nourishing every egg and every seed. But it does not follow from the value of integrity that what could exist and/or has a potential to live has some kind of right to be brought into existence. If a tree exists then the value of integrity obliges us to count the value of its existing integrity in our moral evaluations. If someone is hurt, and we can help to heal their wound without trespass, then our obligation to their integrity obliges us to care. But nothing in the morality obliges us to cultivate every wild seed, or conceive as many children as we can, just because the seeds would be trees if we nourished them and more persons would exist if we conceived more.

A tree has a right to be valued as what it is, I have a right to be valued as who I am, you have a like right to be who you are. If this is the case then all persons have a duty to respect and a right to be respected. The claim to respect (which all integrity makes on persons) becomes, in persons, a strong moral claim, on ourselves and others, to care about and nourish both what we are and who we are. And that gives us a corresponding (and correspondingly strong) duty to respect both ourselves and others.
        This does not entail that we have to like other persons and/or enjoy their company. Liking is a preference value and no morality can logically legislate our preferences. Whether or not we like other persons is a contingency of taste, and we cannot, by an act of will, choose to feel genuine liking for anyone we otherwise dislike. We can, however, choose to respect all persons because respect is an activity, a use of power. A particular respect for persons is just the respect for their integrity that derives from a general respect for all integrity rather than any particular approbation on our part. Others do not have to earn our respect for their integrity because it is already owed to them; likes and dislikes don't come into it. The only reason for respecting persons as persons is because it is valuable for us to respect integrity and human persons have a physical integrity as humans, a cultural integrity as selves, and a natural/cultural integrity as persons. Others may reject our affection, friendship, trust and approbation, they may oblige us to respect them by treating them as responsible for what they do, but it is still valuable for us, as persons, to respect the integrity of all even if they do not.

In the context of a human social morality, the general value that counts integrity as valuable translates into the claim that all evaluating integrity counts as valuable; yours and mine as much as anyone else's. Relationship is the form, vehicle and content of integrity, and so the integrity of relationship also counts. If we are in any kind of relationship with other persons, as we always are in a shared world, if we are going to be fully real selves, and if we are to treat the other persons as real, then we need to take responsibility for the relationship. Relationships, not being thingish, are easy to violate. Persons will lie to, deceive or cheat on a friend or partner, for example, and pretend that it does not matter just so long as the other person does not find out ("What he doesn't know can't hurt him"). This is untrue. Relationships are not things but they are real integrities. A lie or other betrayal of trust, however small, violates the integrity of the relationship and thereby harms all persons in the relationship. This violates the evaluating integrity of real persons in a very real way. And this is wrong if, as I have argued, all members of a person-species have a right to all their various natural, cultural and natural-cultural integrities as integrated into one self-realising person.

Because all integrity is valuable, there is no dichotomy of 'self versus society' in a Right to Evaluating Integrity morality. Just by being integrity-respecting, such a morality will logically favour integrating the value of individuals and the community and the relationships between them rather than choosing between promoting individualism at the expense of community or communalism at the expense of individual freedom and self-expression. If balances have to be struck then the 'three questions and two measures' ethic can be invoked just so long as no one's individual right to evaluating integrity is violated.²⁸
        Because it is valuable to respect persons as having a right to their evaluating integrity, it remains valuable to take personal freedom [liberty] as part of the social default standard. We cannot treat persons as owners of their own personhood without accorded them the liberty to develop their own personhood in ways that seem most valuable to them. Thus it is not what others do with their freedom that requires justification; it is the rules or other uses of power, limiting that freedom, that need adequate justification. Of course, because no person can be reasonably and valuably accorded a 'right' to violate integrity (including the evaluating integrity of their fellow citizens), adequate justification can readily be given for curbing the freedom and power of persons to be thieves, rapists, killers, bullies and so on. This is not a matter of us imposing our moral values on others in society but of stopping others from imposing their political/preference values on us and/or others in society.²⁹ I will say more on this below.

Spelling out the Boundaries. Respect for evaluating integrity, like respect for any integrity, is always qualified by respect for all integrity. We cannot, for example, respect a violator's expression of his self, as violent, without thereby failing to respect the integrity of his victims. A right to integrity cannot logically entail a right to violate integrity (our own or others'), so deserving a right to integrity does not entail that anyone deserves a right to express herself or himself through physical, verbal or other violence. Spelling out this boundary is an important function of rights talk.

The logic of rights is such that the limit to the free exercise of any claim is where that exercise begins to infringe on the comparable claims of others. If, for example, A and B both have rights to the same food source, and each can harvest all he or she needs without the other going hungry, then each can enjoy free exercise of his or her claim. But if A starts harvesting so much that B is going to go short then A has reached a point where his taking is beginning to violate B's right to take. At that point their mutual right - which defines a kind of moral equality - dictates that A should curb his exercise of the right. Similarly, if you and I have like rights to our personhood then my right extends to the point where it begins to violate your right, and your right extends to the point where it begins to violate mine. This logic gives us both a mutually accessible boundary, to morally legitimate uses of power, within which we can strive for and realise whatever states of affairs we value. On that principle we can recognise the boundaries to our own rights on an ongoing case-by-case basis.

All boundaries have two sides. If A and B are separated by a boundary between them, for instance, then A cannot open access to B without thereby opening B's access to him; any gap that lets B's sheep into A's pasture also lets his goats into hers. In the case of common rights such as our common right to evaluating integrity, what is a right, from one side of a boundary, is a duty from the other side of the same boundary. So if A has a right to privacy, for example, then B thereby has a duty to respect his privacy, as he has to respect hers. If B has a right to argue her opinions then A thereby has a duty to listen respectfully to her argument, as she has to listen respectfully to his. Thus, if persons have a right to their integrity then every person has a right to be respected and an equal duty to respect the facts of personal integrity by treating all persons as valuable. This duty is as wide as the facts it protects, the fact of integrity is universal to persons, so the duty is universal and includes an obligation on every self to respect his or her own integrity as well as that of all other selves.

This is where the notion of equality-as-sameness makes no sense. We could recognise, for example, that everyone in an area had equal rights to ownership of their own bit of land even though the properties in question were very different in size, fertility, workability, water supplies and so on - it is the rights to ownership that are the same, not the size or value of the bits of land. The same goes for our rights to act as owners of our own bits of evaluating integrity. The rights of ownership attach to the fact of the integrity itself, not proportionally to its size and/or richness (proportional rights are political rather than moral). Recognising the value of integrity, in a language of rights, justifies that members of a person-species have no more or less right than each other to their ownership of their share of the evaluating integrity of that species. And that just is to say that all persons have the same, or equal, rights to personhood - it is the rights that are equal, not the properties of persons.

Because a right to integrity defines only the boundaries of justified power use, it allows the maximum freedom for each person to be the kind of self she or he wants to be. Defining valuable uses of power in terms of a right to integrity does not demand any particular 'flavour' to how others live. A right to integrity limits uses of power only in defining abuse on one hand (as the violation of negative rights), neglect on the other (as the violation of positive rights), and ruling that the treatment of integrity should be kept within the bounds of abuse and neglect. This culturally-relative freedom is valuable, and the right is further valuable for the freedom it accords. But one reason that we fear social freedom arises from our uncertainty about how far others will take it. We are not sure what others will do with their freedom, and we have little grounds for confidence that they will not use their freedom to our disadvantage. If others get too different then their differences become a threat. A right to evaluating integrity narrative, just by balancing rights and duties at a definable boundary, can reduce those fears. We and others are free to be ourselves, to own our own values in trust to integrity, just so long as our uses of power do not trespass on the like rights in other persons.

Holding Integrity in Trust. Because our responsibility is to integrity, rather than to persons, a right to evaluating integrity describes a qualified ownership. And to recognise that persons have rights to their evaluating integrity is to recognise that the facts of their biological, intellectual, moral, cultural and other integrity should be respected as valuable property, vulnerable to harm and held in trust by the selves they protect and nourish.
        To hold property in trust is to accept an obligation to take care of the property on behalf of (as trustee to) the final owner and/or beneficiary of the property. So a trustee acts as if she or he was owner of the property but discharges that power as one who has an obligation to care for, protect and enhance the value of the property on behalf of another. That is what the case must be, regarding any ownership of our own integrities, given that (a) it is the integrity which is valuable, and not just our ownership of it, and (b) all of us owe our personhood to the personhood culture of our species. Integrity is the final 'owner' and beneficiary of our trust, and our primary obligation is to the value of integrity rather than to our parentocentric egos.

Our obligation to the general value of integrity makes all of us trustees to all integrity. But when it comes to the evaluating integrity of a self, no one has a better claim to trusteeship of a life than the only self who can live it in fact. Parents have the best justification for holding our well-being in trust while we are children because, just by bringing us into the world, they created responsibilities which we, as children, could not meet for ourselves. But the same consideration applies to parents as to ourselves; they held our integrity in trust, for our good, only until we could assume that trusteeship and its obligations to the same integrity. Having the power of a parent does not justify violating children. And, while being the only persons who do and can live our own lives might not automatically make us the best qualified person to run our own lives, it does make us the best positioned. I am the only person who lives my life; you are the only person who lives yours. So, like drivers of vehicles within which we are locked, we are each better placed to negotiate our own vehicle through the world than is any supposed expert locked into a different vehicle.
        The fact that we enjoy owner-like rights to our own selfhood, however, cannot give us a right to abuse, neglect or destroy our own integrity without violating the general value of integrity from which our right to selfhood derives. It gives us only the right to do our best to each realise, enhance and take care of our own lives and selfhood, as trustees of our own unique share of integrity, and as we each honestly evaluate is best from within the life that only we can live. This is because a 'right to evaluating integrity' morality can reasonably justify that we each have a right to be the persons we are, limited always and only by the like right in others. It cannot reasonably justify a right to abuse, neglect or otherwise violate our own evaluating integrity without offering a parentocentric assumption against the value of integrity. If evaluating integrity is valuable in itself then the 'right to be' can only be narrated as ownership in trust by the person (the trustee) to the value (the integrity). We have a right and an opportunity, under this morality, to realise integrity to our best ability, but no authority to devalue any integrity just because it is ours.³⁰

A particularly difficult question for any social morality concerns what to do with those who do not respect their fellow citizens and the shared rules which make a society possible. In a small number of cases, violence flows from a dis-integration of personality and/or brain function that deserves therapeutic treatment. And there are a few persons who, for whatever reason, are so dangerous that legitimate social self-defence requires them to be, in effect, kept in quarantine. But these are a tiny minority of the population. Most serious violence flows from nothing more than self-righteousness conditioned by our addiction to the parentocentric belief that violence makes us significant and that our significance justifies the use of violence to further our interests. Responding to this violence is a moral issue (an issue of valuable uses of personhood power), rather than a therapeutic one, because such violence is driven by beliefs about values rather than any sickness or injury.

To do nothing, in the face of violence, is to validate it, reward the violent, and to further avow the lies which help to drive violence. We do not treat integrity as valuable by reinforcing a conditioning to violate integrity by rewards such as allowing the dishonourable to profit from breaking their agreements. Nor do we respect integrity by ignoring its violation or joining in 'tit-for-tat' violence. So none of these options will be seriously considered in this section.

Punishment (de-profitabilising violence). The most satisfactory response to violence, which I have been able to derive from the recognition that integrity is valuable, first notes that the violation of integrity endures, in greater part, because of the material and/or emotional profits that violence delivers, or is believed to deliver, to the violent. It then reasons that the value of integrity obliges integrity-respecting people to at least try to 'de-profitabilise' violence by offsetting any profits that accrue to the violent from their violence. Even those for whom violence is distasteful may fight an invader, fine or imprison citizens who violate the persons and/or property of their neighbours, fail those who cheat at exams or decline to lend another book to someone who has mistreated an earlier loan. All of these kinds of actions offset the real and perceived benefits of violence by making the violation of integrity unprofitable to the violators. And it is the moral logic of de-profitabilising violence that I want to consider.
        The de-profitabilising of violence is what I understand as punishment. If evil is understood as a disvalue wrongfully inflicted by a person then punishment is a disvalue incurred by someone as a result of, or in response to, an evil that they have or are supposed to have performed. Punishment is an act that would be an evil if it was not imposed in response to wrongdoing but which is morally justified by the wrongdoing to which it is a response. Failing someone who has won a race or passed an exam, for example, would be wrong had they won or passed fairly but is held to be justified if they have been caught cheating. Fair punishment, in this case, does more than take from the cheat what would otherwise be an unfair benefit of her or his cheating; fair punishment deliberately replaces an unfairly gained value with a disvalue held to be equivalent of the output actually earned [deserved] by the cheating.
 

What makes a fair punishment 'fair' is respect for the conservation of value. For physical systems, of course, it is impossible not to respect the conservation of matter and energy narrated by the Laws of Conservation; we simply cannot, for example, get more bread out of an oven than goes in. The natural 'cannot' becomes 'should not' when the Law of Conservation is applied to cultural systems. We can physically disrespect the conservation of value if we want to (we can cheat at exams or take money that we haven't earned), but we should not because violating the conservation of values generates outcomes that are unreliable, mistaken, wrong, and/or incoherent. So the conservation of value doesn't make unfairness impossible, but it does make fairness valuable and unfairness wrong.         The violent try to cheat the conservation of value by appropriating outputs that are more valuable than those generated or otherwise justified by their inputs. Fair punishment tries to heal this violation (restore integrity) by pointing outputs, equivalent to those generated by the wrongdoer's actions, at the wrongdoer whose inputs justify them.         The equivalence of values, such as is aimed for when, for example, we gaol someone who has assaulted another even though imprisonment and assault are different disvalues, respects the conservation of value in a way analogous with that by which generating light and heat from electricity conserves input even though light and electricity are different kinds of energy. The conservation of value provides a measure of fairness by which we can try to evaluate punishment so that a wrongdoer gets all of and only what she or he deserves. And how well values-equivalence is conserved, by adjusting outputs through reward or punishment, is the measure of fairness. Fair punishment respects the integrity of our relationships with each other in and as a society, such as is narrated by the Law of Conservation, by conserving, for a wrongdoer, values equivalent to those input by the wrongdoer - just as a reward tries to conserve [preserve and transmit], to those who do well, the values equivalent to those input by their well-doing. For real selves, skills to be learned lie in doing this without succumbing to the blame game and/or the moral violence of punishing those whose only 'crime' is a disinclination to bow before our parentocentric idols of politics or fashion.

Someone committed to respect for the value of integrity is thereby logically committed to respecting the right of each person to realise her or his own evaluating integrity in her or his own way. Liberty would be the default standard for such a person, and it would not be the freedom to be different which was held to require justification (as is presently the case). It would, rather, be limitations of freedom - such as censorship, laws against violence, and so on - which required justification.
        It might be thought, in this case, that debate about punishment should revolve around the question of whether or not those who respect integrity have any right to impose their rules and values on those who do not care. But that is not the issue, and we are conditioned to think it is only because we are habituated to taking violence as the default standard and morality as being about overcoming the freedom of the violent. The fact, however, is that negotiated, agreed and/or freely adopted restraints on freedom are justified by the freedom and negotiation by which they are arrived at. It is only the restraints on freedom imposed by the violent which are unjustified; they are unjustified by the very nature of violence, and it is only they that give rise to the need for a coercive response. So the logic of punishment does not revolve around the imposition of integrity-respecting values by those who do care but only around defending all persons (both the caring and the uncaring) against the imposition of integrity-violating values by those who don't care. I would not, for instance, ask another to reduce a noise he was making unless it was loud enough to be disturbing me. And, in asking him to reduce a noise that is disturbing me, I am not imposing my preferences on him but asking only that he stop imposing his preferences on me. There is no issue until he violates the integrity of my world, and then the issue is only an end to imposition; not a trespass on his freedom but only an end to his trespass on my freedom.

A important point here is that those who respect integrity can live their lives without imposing their preference values on others, those who do not cannot, and it is putting an end to imposition that fair punishment is all about. A person who does not take, violate or trespass on, what isn't his, imposes neither preferences nor violence on any other. By the very nature of violence, however, we cannot live violent lives without imposing on [violating the integrity of] others. A thief, for example, simply cannot be a thief without violating the property-relations of at least one other person; a politician cannot oppress without passing at least one freedom-denying law. There would be no moral issue, beyond languages of negotiation, if folk were not imposing their preferences or the consequences of their preferences on others. And, if the careless, the irresponsible, the governors, the violent and the self-indulgent did not impose their mess, their noise and the cost of their stupidity and self-indulgence on others, then there would be no problem. But the violent do impose their values on others, only the violent impose their values on others, and they do so just by being violent. It is only because the violent do this that the question of imposition arises. And then the only question that arises concerns the right and means of all folk (and not just the integrity-respecting) to stop the violent from imposing their integrity-violating values on others. And the only questions for social morality concern what de-profitabilisation fits which crimes. I may, for example, merely express my annoyance verbally to a neighbour who steals apples from my tree, but I actively support laws that will fine and/or curtail the freedom of those who commit more serious thefts.
        When I accord with laws that punish theft, I am not imposing my values on anyone; if my values prevailed then the issue of punishing theft would not even arise because my values entail respect for the persons and property of others. Thieves, however, do impose their values on others and, unlike those of us who respect the property of others, thieves cannot live the life of a thief without imposing their values on others. I would not interfere with a thief's life if she was not doing that, any more than I would ask another to turn down a noise that I cannot hear. But, just by stealing another's property, a thief is imposing her values on others, she has started the imposition game and obliged others to play by her rules. Having done that, the issue is not then one of citizens imposing any values on her but only of our agreeing that no one (including the thief herself) has a right to impose her values on others. It is the end of imposition that is the aim of fair punishment.
 

What I note here is that there is no disagreement over the rules of imposition in any case.  If a thief does not avow that we should impose our values on others, or avows that we should not impose our values on others, then I agree and, by stopping him from imposing his values on others, I merely accord with his own narrative and play his game by his rules.  If a thief avows that we do have a right to impose our values on others (as she does just by enacting a values-imposing narrative) then, again, I can agree (albeit reluctantly) and, out of respect for that avowal, play her game by her rules and so impose my values on him.  Either way, I respect not only the Law of Conservation but also the thief's right to be taken seriously and to be valued as responsible adult, only if I accord to him, in full, the punitive wage he has earned and deserves by his efforts.

It is sometimes objected that, especially in cases of violence against persons, punishing the wrongdoers does little or nothing to right the wrong (restore the facts of integrity to what they were). Punishing a killer, for example will not bring his victim back to life. That is true. But it is also true that nothing will bring a murderer's victim back to life once he or she is dead. Even in the case of crimes against property, where the property itself can be restored, nothing will restore the many intangible losses incurred by having been violated. If we are going to object to punishment on those grounds then the same objection stands against therapy, restorative justice, doing anything and doing nothing. But de-profitabilising violence is not about restorations of fact; it is about restorations of value (restoring moral integrity) by offsetting any unfair advantage that would otherwise accrue to the violent.

In terms of the 'three questions' evaluation of violence.³¹ Punishing someone is undoubtedly a violation of their integrity (Q1), and it can be very significant (Q2), so it is important to settle whether a punishment is justified in the circumstances (Q3). Some folk argue that no response to violence is justified if it itself violates integrity. But, unless criminals volunteer to de-profitabilise the violence they have already done, and to desist from further violence, this rules out any coercive response to violence - including therapeutic, restorative or self-defensive uses of power. This is not justified, under a morality which recognises and respects the General Value of integrity, because there are times when the only way to defend a vulnerable integrity from violence is by violating what would otherwise be the rights and freedoms of that integrity's attacker.
 

Perhaps I should reiterate here that respect for the value of integrity, and not just an antipathy for violence, is the value that drives my moral reasoning. Violence is a disvalue only to the extent that integrity is valuable and violence violates integrity. So, while resisting our habitual violation of integrity is the main point of renovating morality, it is not the main point of a renovated morality. Living a respect for the value of integrity in order to be real selves is the main point; resisting our addiction to violence is mainly a means of achieving that. Thus the obligation laid on persons, by a renovated morality, is to realise the values which only persons can realise, and to do as little harm as is compatible with that. There is a significant difference between being pro-integrity and being anti-violence even though being pro-integrity entails opposing unjustified violence. For example, say that a valued integrity is being attacked - a person or work of art, a valuable ideal or process such as democracy, due process or whatever - and the only practical way of preventing her, his or its violation is to attack and/or forcibly restrain the attacker or attackers. If we are merely anti-violence then we would not attack an attacker in defence of any integrity because that would be for us to input violence. But to not violate the integrity of the attacker puts the value of the attacker's integrity above that of the victim integrity, ourselves, and the relationship between the victim and ourselves. So if we oppose only unjustified violence, and then only out of respect for the value of integrity (which entails caring about the integrity of the intended victim), it seems clear that we should employ as much violence (and only as much violence) as is necessary to defend the threatened value. To not do so is both unloving and disrespectful of the integrity. In cases where violence is mounted against an integrity there are times when defensive and/or retaliatory [punitive] violence may be the only way to meet our obligations and so pay the debt of respect that we owe to integrity. We justifiably quarantine dangerously ill people, forcibly and without their consent if necessary (and even if they are not responsible for their illness or the danger it represents) in accordance with this principle. If this is justified for those who are not intentionally dangerous then how much more for those who endanger integrity by choice?          If we refuse to lay coercive hands on thieves, if we decline to forcibly restrain rapists and penalise [de-profitabilise] their violence, then it is hard to understand what we could mean by any claim to be living a respect for the many integrities that such folk violate. We may 'turn the other cheek' if we are the one paying the price of that. But if we are not prepared to defend our children against violence, or fight in defence of rights and liberties if that is made necessary by the violence of others, then it is hard to understand what we could mean by any claim to be living a life of respect for children, society, justice, freedom, goodness and so on; a man who would not defend his children, by violence if necessary, may be a good pacifist, but he is also a bad parent.          A blanket prohibition on violence may sound nice, but the value of integrity demands better than that. And respect for integrity points us towards the [admittedly difficult] skills of trying to get the justice right rather than the pseudo-innocence of implicitly or explicitly acting as if de-profitabilising the injustice performed by others is not my responsibility.

Rights talk can provide a useful 'shorthand' for articulating fair responses to violence because the logic of rights talk holds rights and responsibilities in balance. Rights are like a fence that is right or duty depending only on from which 'side' you look at it. You cannot tear down a fence or boundary marker that keeps you from trespassing on a neighbour's property without, at the same time and by the same action, tearing down the boundary that keeps him from trespassing on your property. Analogously, if any person violates the rights of another then that person thereby logically surrenders her or his own like rights. And, by this reasoning, the victim of violence, or any agent acting on her behalf, may then fairly de-profitabilise the violence without violating any rights of the criminal, just so long as any punitive action does not go beyond any rights which the criminal has not surrendered. This is the logic of self defence - to which a respect for integrity adds only the rider that any punitive action should aim for the least violation of integrity compatible with realising the value of de-profitabilising violence.

We can respect the value of integrity, while instituting valuable responses to violence, by using the violator's own rule-set to restore the equilibrium of value at his or her expense. Societies are cultural integrities which, like languages or games, run on, and are only made possible by, shared rules. Criminals input that persons ought not be treated as holding various rights to their own integrity in trust for good. If others take that testimony seriously, if they pay the criminal the respect of conserving his input values and playing by his rule-set, then his narrative obliges them to assume that he has disowned the same or equivalent rights to live his own life free from coercive interference and as the [violent] person he is. After all, the criminal is someone who has input and enacted the rule that persons do not have some or any of their rights to inviolate integrity such as a right to life, bodily integrity, property and so on. As the set 'persons' includes the criminal, he is himself logically included in that rule. The criminal therefore avows that he, as a person, does not enjoy those same rights to inviolate integrity. This surrender of rights, by persons who violate the like rights of others, gives other members of the society (other players in the game) a defined ground on which they may act fairly out of respect for integrity. The Law of Conservation of Value gives us the measure of fairness. We cannot violate any rights that the criminal does not have. And if a criminal has surrendered her right to freely live her own life in her own way, by violating that same right in another, then no right is violated by acting according to her rules (i.e., acting as if she does not have a right to live her own life in her own way). This is precisely what citizens do when we appoint agents of society to apprehend criminals on our behalf and then hold the criminals responsible for their actions by curtailing and controlling their freedoms in various ways.³²
        I stress 'out of respect for integrity' because, to a people conditioned by parentocentricity, the logical surrender of rights effortlessly slides into a licence to violate. It is hard to imagine, for example, that the terrorist violence of the politically self-righteous could be seen as respecting integrity. Nevertheless it is easy to imagine bigots gleefully exploiting the above reasoning as an excuse for behaving as badly as the people they don't like. Winnie Mandela, for instance, is on record as claiming that the African National Congress 'had' to embrace violence in order to 'speak to the Boer's in the language they use and the only language they understand'. A criminal (often defined as anyone a society's parentos do not like) too easily becomes a rightless being who may be held without trial, convicted without fair process, humiliated, tortured, mutilated, brutalised and/or put to death. But this is where the integrity of a renovated morality rescues rights talk from abuse. Taking care of our health, for example, is more important when we have been injured; not less. Likewise, if we are to take the moral 'health' of integrity seriously then the fact that others injure it invites us to take it more seriously, not less. So the violence of others is an invitation to repair and/or compensate for the damage they have done, not an excuse for merely inflicting further damage of our own. So, if a citizen surrenders the rights and privileges of citizenship by violating those same rights in another or others, what stops that surrender from becoming an excuse for behaving as badly as she has done is that we and our agents (the makers, processors and enforcers of law) still retain a general obligation to integrity. The criminal has abdicated his or her responsibility, but we have not; and that the criminal has abdicated is no justification for us following suit. We and our agents still have an obligation to all integrity: our own, the criminal's and the criminal's victims, as well as that of justice and the society in which we, the criminal and the victims of crime all live. So we and the agents of a society are justified in acting coercively in defence of integrity, and on surrendered ground, but only in whatever way and to whatever extent will serve to restore, preserve and enhance the integrity of the victim, the criminal and the society in which criminals, victims and punishing agents live.

Realising Closure. Atonement by the guilty party (making right a wrong by compensating the victim of the wrong in some way) can input closure to a cycle of violence by harmonising outputs, for persons in the cycle, with their inputs to the cycle. Fair punishment does the same for persons who are not willing to voluntarily atone for their violence. This respects the conservation of value and is why fair punishment is more just than supposedly therapeutic regimes aimed at modifying the behaviour of wrongdoers.³³ Forgiveness by the victim can also input closure by discharging the actual or metaphorical debt (or its residue after an inadequate punishment has been pronounced), without demanding that it be paid.

To illustrate this, consider a case in which you witness a culprit (C) mistreating a victim (V). To absolve C from responsibility for violating V (e.g., by making excuses or blaming society and so on) patronises him as being less than a free, powerful and responsible person. If C deserves a rights to evaluating integrity (a right to personal freedom, power and responsibility) then he has earned the right to be held responsible just by exercising a freedom and power of personhood. So to hold C to account for his violence is less violent, in terms of respecting his integrity as a person, than it is to violate that integrity by treating him as less than a person by holding him as less than responsible.³⁴

The skill here is to do this without yourself being violent and/or being sucked into the parentocentric game which makes such violence normal. I suspect that there is no sure immunity for humans to either self-righteousness or the blame game, and that the best antidote we can hope for is to detoxify ourselves from parentocentricity generally. But respecting the conservation of value (making sure that the punishment 'fits' the crime and no more than the crime) should help. In the language of rights, the rights violated by an action define a conceptual boundary beyond which any punitive conservation of equivalent value should not go if it is to be fair. Members of a fair society are not obliged to 'go to the limit' every time; rather, we are obliged to err on the side of caution rather than risk going beyond boundaries defined by any violated rights.³⁵ By this calculus, punishing C for what he has done is justified. Making amends to V, at C's expense, is also justified. But 'making an example' of C, for instance, by over-punishing him to deter others and/or express our abhorrence of his crime, is not justified.

One way of keeping de-profitabilising responses to violence consistent, with the violations to which they are a response, is to take respect for integrity seriously. This is fully contiguous with the whole notion of coercive law in the first place. It makes no sense to defend an integrity unless that integrity is valuable in some way. And the mere existence of laws against violence, and mechanisms to enforce them, implies a belief that integrity is worth defending. If a system of enforceable laws makes sense only on these terms, and if citizens are going to take the point of having laws seriously, then it is reasonable to include full respect for the evaluating integrity of criminals into the general respect for integrity which motivates the response to crime. A legal system which respects the value of integrity will respond to crime by conserving, for the criminal, the same or equivalent values as were input by the criminal's actions. If that legal system respects the criminal, and respects her rules, then it can conserve value [be fair], without violating her evaluating integrity, by playing her according to her own rules. By violating V, C has 'played the game' as if he believed it right and proper [justified] to violate personal integrity to the degree that he did. Taking C's 'rules of play' seriously allows that it is fair for other players to violate his personal integrity to at least the same degree. Doing this, to conserve for C a values output that is equivalent that generated by his values input, would not be imposing any external moral standard on him. His rules justify the kind of imposition involved in punishment - we respect him by playing by his rules (often the nastiest thing you can do to anyone). And, in punishing him fairly, we and/or our agents [the legal system] would simply be delivering the input values he has earned, to him, using the same moral standard which he himself has avowed and embodied. C, of course, would experience having to live by his own rules as a punishment. But to not respect him in this way violates his evaluating integrity as well as failing to maintain the integrity of the society of which he and we are part.

What stops this logic from justifying a 'lowest common denominator' morality, under which we are each justified in behaving as badly as the most violent among us, is our primary obligation is not to the violator, the victim or even to society, but to the value of integrity. As C holds his own integrity in trust to the value of integrity, so those to whom he surrenders it, when he acts in violation of integrity, adopt that trust. He has violated his responsibilities to integrity, but that does not absolve the rest of us from our responsibility.

Forgiveness: Punishment points at the same end as atonement through the satisfaction of a debt by payment. So punishing C by making him pay for the maintenance and rehabilitation of his victim would go part way to satisfying the debt that he owes her. But such payments could only ever go part way, no matter how fulsome, because no response by C can fully restore the integrity violated by him. Forgiveness by V would still be necessary therefore, to close her processes of healing, even after any apology, monetary and/or other compensation, discharges C's debt to V and the rest of society.

To forgive, in the sense needed to free us from thrall to a cycle of violence, is to (a) acknowledge that some kind of debt is or has been owed but then (b) to write-off that debt as fully and finally discharged. Sometimes, of course, the debt will have been paid in reparation or punishment; sometimes an apology is enough on its own; and sometimes, because the debt is owed to us, we can exercise our right to write-off an unpaid or unpayable debt as no longer owed. But only when the debt is both acknowledged and discharged can we be said to have fully respected the conservation of value. So if you truly forgive another, and are subsequently called upon to testify against him or her, then you must testify that her or his debt to you was incurred but has been paid in full.

To not admit that a debt has been incurred is to make excuses rather than to forgive, and this endangers both violator and victim.
        Excuses threaten violators with freedom from responsibility [freedom from the conservation of their input values] - a privilege that addicts find almost impossible to resist. But to excuse someone who has violently mistreated a fellow citizen not only patronising, and cheats her of dignity, it also denies her an opportunity, that she has earned, to realise her personhood by paying for what she has broken.
        For victims of violence, the temptation of excuses is that of denial. Violence invalidates us so much that we are often tempted to banish it from memory or, at least, from being spoken (folk in my society sometimes literally describe a violence as 'unspeakable'). This denial inhibits full healing, and the 'ghosts' of violence come back to haunt the violated in much the same way that injuries we fail to deal with properly in our youth result in pain and/or disability in later life.

For both societies and individual persons, remembering and telling the truth of a violence is a prerequisite not only to revisiting it (keeping hate alive) but also to healing from it. Forgiveness lets remembered hate die. Excusing violence is counterfeit forgiveness; it denies us the opportunity to name a debt, express our hurt and then, if and when we choose, input our power to end the cycle. Continuing to act as if a paid debt was not paid (for example, by playing the blame game and/or otherwise revisiting it) is to continue the violence cycle. To forgive conditionally may also be to continue the cycle rather than end it (there is a lot of seductive 'power over' in conditional forgiveness), but is more often a clumsy way of restructuring the debt or insisting that it be 'paid in other coin'. The value of integrity demands that we name the debt and deal with it, one way or another; only this takes the conservation of values seriously. Anger and revenge do this at the expense of continuing the cycle of violence. Atonement and forgiveness, however, input values that end the cycle - and, of these, only forgiveness is a power of the victim. Moreover, and whether those who violate us are punished or not, forgiveness is a values-inputting act with profound moral and emotional consequences. As violators, we do not begin to recover from a violence until we atone for our wrong. As victims, we do not finally recover from a violence until we forgive.

To atone is a way of dealing with guilt for the harms we have done. To forgive is a way of dealing with the consequences of harms done to us (anger, resentment, self-abnegation, and so on). And I have observed that, as persons become more real as selves, they not only become more forgiving (and a lot less violent) but also tend to like who they are more. I suspect that these changes are closely tied together.

Forgiveness is a value that can be input only by those to whom a debt is owed. A debt may be paid by someone other than the person who incurs it but, regardless of who pays, a debt is not satisfied unless it is paid to or forgiven by the person to whom it is owed. So no third party has any authority to forgive a wrongdoer on the victim's behalf. If it is meaningful to avow that we owe respect to integrity then violence owes a debt to the violated and, as with other debts, only the victims of a violence can write-off the debt (forgive the violator).
        Reconsider, for example, the case in which you witness C mistreating V. Either you take responsibility for what the evidence justifies your believing (that an unjustified violence has occurred) or you input and legislate that it is valuable for citizens to violate fellow members of their society. It is not, however, your place to forgive C the wrong he has done V, even if you are a priest or properly appointed law-enforcement official and C asks you for forgiveness. Only V can forgive C. It is, after all, her right to trusteeship of her own life which C has stolen and from which he has profited at her expense. So it is to V that he owes the largest debt incurred by his violence. You can forgive C any wrong that he has done you as a 'fellow player' in the society. And it would be valuable both for him to ask for your forgiveness for that, without making excuses, and for you to freely give it without making conditions (anything other than this is not forgiveness but politics). But neither you nor I nor any agent of society can forgive the wrong done to V because that debt is not owed to us. Neither do you or I or any agents of society have a right to pressure victims of violence by making punitive responses sensitive to forgiveness. If, for example, C could get a reduced legal penalty if forgiven by V then unfair pressure comes on her to forgive. The pressure is unfair because V is, after all, a victim precisely by having the trusteeship of her own life violated. It is up to the rest of us, therefore, to be especially sensitive to her injured rights just as we should be to a physical injury (we take better care of an injured body, not less). V's ownership of the power to forgive is not respected if she is pressured to use it as others want her to.
        Forgiveness therefore, although valuable, may be asked (but not demanded) only of the victim and only by the victim's violator. And it may be freely offered to or withheld only from the violator and, again, only by the violator's victim.

Because forgiveness avows an end of violence-begun processes, including processes of healing from the violence, a person who forgives prematurely can find himself in the position of someone who returns to work too soon after an injury or illness - a behaviour valuable to, and lauded by, those who profit from it but not one conducive to maximising the restoration of injured integrity. A victim who forgives while still harbouring unresolved anger, for example, will likely end up feeling not only anger but also guilt for feeling anger. For this kind of reason, forgiveness, like all effective uses of power, needs to be used skilfully.
        Skilful uses of forgiveness can be guided by the value-set from which forgiveness itself emerges as a valuable rule. Forgiveness, as an antidote to violence, is premised on the notion that respect for integrity is more valuable than is it's violation. The purpose of forgiveness is to complete the healing of violated integrity. If integrity is valuable then we have an obligation not to facilitate violations of integrity even in the cause of restoration. To meet this obligation requires two conditions: first, that a debt is owed (to forgive someone who owns that they have done no wrong is to attribute to them a debt which may not have been incurred), and second, that the violated integrity is healed to the point that it would be beneficial to the victim to close the process and put the violence behind her. This may be almost immediately in the case of minor violences and/or robust victims, but it can also take some time. Processes of healing have their own logic and timetables. To impose premature closure on the process does not respect that any more than does dragging the process out for some political advantage (to feel special, get attention, etc. - all anathema to the real self). Forgiveness is an act of generosity, and of significant value if input out of generosity. But to avow forgiveness, while continuing to harbour anger or resentment, or while trying to wring some return from the act, is an investment in hypocrisy (which may be valuable socially but is of no personal value to the real self). Likewise, to avow forgiveness out of cowardice, self-abnegation or as an excuse for avoiding emotional responsibility for anger, would not be a valuable use of power because it does not respect integrity.

Where forgiving is a skill, being forgiven is a responsibility. The violent all too often misread or covet forgiveness as a licence to trespass without cost or consequence of responsibility for their uses of power. So if someone borrows a book, for example, and fails to return it or returns it in a damaged state, then that violation of property may be forgiven. But, unless there is a moral improvement in the borrower's ethics, it would not be valuable to go on lending her more books.
        One test a wrongdoer's ethics is their willingness to take practical responsibility for any harm done. If, for example, C feels sufficient remorse for his violence to confess his debt, admit his responsibility, apologise and to make such reparations as he can in restoration of violated value, then it would be a virtue for both you and V to forgive him. If this is not the case, it would be most integrity-respecting for you and V to both testify against C in a court of law and, assuming that he is fairly judged and punished by the appropriate authorities, forgive C his wrong preparatory to putting the affair behind you.
 

Steven Foulds. Last modified 15 June 2006

Feedback is welcome

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1. See about being real for the defintion of a 'real self'. Note also that the notion of self-government has often been criticised as going too far in this regard; the accent on the self is said to damage community-mindedness to the detriment of both society and the individual citizen. This criticism is partially valid but, given the chronic way in which humans, as addicts, give away our value, self-definition and personal responsibility to community, stressing the 'self' in self-government is proper for those selves who want to be real (see self-government).

2. Out of the Caves 11.4-11.5

3. Ibid., 11.3

4. Ibid., 9.11-9.12.

5. Ibid., 6.3ff.

6. I stress 'persons' because this does not imply that everyone's interests or projects are equally valuable.

7. Ironically, our fear-driven compulsion to secure the moral space for ourselves means that it is very much our personal preferences and politics which we try to and do impose on others. This imposition of preferences is a violation of evaluating integrity, and to impose even an overwhelming majority's preferences on even a tiny minority of others violates the evaluating integrity of the others' preferences (Note that this has serious moral implications for those who insist on pushing music at people - in shopping malls, streets, waiting rooms, etc. - without getting the prior consent of all those who must hear it). But, because humans are conditioned to assume that not acting as Top Dog automatically dooms us to Underdog status, we experience any check to our 'right' to impose our preferences as a direct challenge to our dignity and worth.

8. This is the fact recognised in the Organic Paradigm of violence (Out of the Caves 3.2f).

9. Choosing not to follow any rules merely institutes a de facto rule against rule-following which cannot itself be followed without violating itself (i.e., if we are not to follow rules then we should not follow the rule against rule-following.

10. And note that the moral cohesion of any society is very much a function of the self-government of its citizens (see the self-government page).

11. I say 'just as it always has' because many humans continue to but into the false romantic myth of pre-urban societies living in happy harmony with themselves and nature. Although we do not know a lot about many pre-urban societies, we do know that the romantic myths are wholly unrealistic fabrications (i.e., 'bullshit'), and all the actual evidence we have indicates that all human societies have endured violence, oppression, superstition, cruelty and injustice.

12. Out of the Caves 9.13.

13. Ibid., 5.104

14. Ibid., 6.31.

15. Ibid., 6.12.

16. One reason why so many folk feel that their lives are meaningless may be because the ethics of parentocentricity have seduced us away from nourishing that otherness of others which alone summons us from an empty I=I subjecthood.

17. This is, I believe, an important point. Human make too many promises, too casually, precisely because we don't value the integrity of keeping our agreements. If we respect the value of integrity, enough to rigorously keep our agreements, then are going to be far more cautious about what promises we make.

18. An integrity-centred social morality also helps us to personally experience life meaningfully by helping to harmonise the actor/spectator tension of our experience. As actors in the world, we each feel like a centre of experience around which the whole world revolves. But, evaluating the world from a spectator point of view, it seems obvious that we matter little to others and not at all to the vast and impersonal indifference of the cosmos. Integrity-centred morality, by focussing our attention on a requirement to take both ourselves and others seriously, helps us to keep our moral balance and so achieve a 'significant something' between the actor's 'all' and the spectator's 'nothing'.

19. Out of the Caves 6.32.

20. Ibid., 8.121.

21. Ibid., 8.3-8.31.

22. We act mercifully when we distribute more goodness [more value] than is deserved.

25. See About Personal Morality or Out of the Caves 11.12

26. Out of the Caves 11.43

27. See Out of the Caves 11.42 for an analysis of proportional equivalence.

28. Ibid., 3.23 and 11.42. See also Evaluating Violence in the 'About Violence' Page.

29. A criminal's values, for example, are always and necessarily political because they involve a double-standard: one standard undervalues the interests of the victims (who are made not-P by the violence), the other overvalues those of the criminal (who, just by violating another, assumes parento status). The right to evaluating integrity, on the other hand, is a moral right because, by avowing respect for a common property of all persons, it impartially applies one standard of value to all persons.

30. This reiterates the logic of the Golden Rule - that we live well by loving our neighbours as ourselves - as interpreted by Christ's insistence that we count all folk as neighbours (see the Christian New Testament, Matthew 7:12 cf: Luke 6.31). The Golden Rule is expressly reasonable given that its contrary always and necessarily begs the question as to why others should accept one person's measure of their worth as the measure both use to evaluate their worth. But a problem seems to arise if you address the Rule to someone who does not love himself - and there are many such folk in this world. Should a self-abnegating masochist, or someone with abysmally low self-esteem, neglect or mistreat his neighbours just because he neglects or mistreats himself? I think not. In those cases it seems right to say to such folk that they should love themselves; that they should take care of themselves, have a bit more self-respect and so on. This is how the Golden Rule works. What we are saying, when we encourage someone with low self-esteem to care more about himself and his own welfare, is that he ought to recognise his evaluating integrity as being worth more than his treatment of it would indicate. And what the Golden Rule says is not that we should embrace a kind of 'lowest common denominator' ethic, treating no one better than we would at our most self-abnegating, but that we should treat both ourselves and all our neighbours [all our fellow persons] as valuable in principle. That is justified only to the extent that both we and our neighbours are valuable and have an obligation to that value. Believing that both we and our neighbours are valuable, and that we all have an obligation to that value, is justified by a recognition of the necessary correlation between integrity and value.

31 See About Violence or Out of the Caves 2.23.

32. And those agents - the police, judiciary, prison services and so on - should never be allowed to forget that they are agents of their fellow citizens; there to serve their interests. It is to the folk in community, and especially the vulnerable folk, that laws owe their legitimacy and allegiance. And laws are only fully legitimate to the extent that they allow more freedom than they restrain. So not only should the agents of the citizens never forget where their legitimate loyalties lie. Citizens, in their turn, should never forget that they have a responsibility to support the institution of good laws and support the laws of their society and the agents who enforce them. The relationship should be mutually supportive.

33. If a violence is held to define a debt owed, so that a wrongdoer pays only what she deserves to pay by a conservation of equivalent value, then a cycle of violence can be closed upon payment of that debt. But if a wrongdoer can be 'treated' until some parent-figure or figures is/are satisfied that she shows proper deference to their values, then we licence those parent figures to 'play God' without limit at the expense of the wrongdoer's evaluating integrity and dignity as a person.

34. Because being real commits us to honesty, we cannot pretend to care about the injustice being done to V while giving our responsibility for justice away to some supposed transcendent mechanism such as God or karma*. Either we take responsibility for what the evidence justifies our believing (that an unjustified violence has occurred) or we input and legislate that it is valuable for citizens to violate fellow members of their society.
        * Karma and/or reincarnation give only an illusion of justice in any case, and if a God or gods exists then
        obviously He, She, It or They has left worldly justice in our hands. But, if we are true to the evidence as we
        know it, then there is no transcendent world underwriting our values, no divine trick or magic formula for
        cleaning up the mess, compensating V, punishing C and otherwise making it all better.

35. There is room for mercy in justice because mercy is a form of generosity and generosity inputs value.