The difference between integrity and dissonance reduction

I do not suppose that I am reporting anything novel or recondite. All of these experiments are widely known, and the Milgram and Stanford experiments are famous, almost legendary.

To all this there is a simple reply: You are not talking about genuine integrity. Integrity does not consist of molding and adapting one’s principles to whatever behaviors we and those around us find convenient. Integrity consists of taking the high road, the road of conforming our behavior to our principles. I mentioned earlier that the word ‘integrity’, like ‘integer’, ‘integral’, and ‘integrate’, comes from the Latin integrate, to make whole. That word, in turn, derives from in-, “not”, plus tangere, “touch.” An entity is whole if it is untouched, unsullied; the Latin integer vitae meant innocent, pure, blameless in life. And thus the person of integrity is not merely the person whose principles and behavior harmonize, regardless of how that harmony gets achieved, but rather the person who has kept her principles intact (“intact” is another word whose Latin root means “untouched”). We think of the person of integrity in the terms C. S. Lewis uses in Perelandra to describe Ransom, his protagonist: “even if the whole universe were crazy and hostile, Ransom was sane and wholesome and honest.”^[540] His moral compass never turns from north, no matter how many other compasses point else­where.

Of course, as an analysis of the concept of integrity this must be right. When we are done in by situational forces that distort our moral judgment, we are hardly “untouched.” Just the opposite: we are all too touched. The low road to integrity is simply not the same as the high road, and bending your principles to rationalize your actions is not the same as bringing your actions into conformity with your principles.

The problem, however, lies in telling them apart from the inside. As I noted above, merely asserting categorical principles and refusing to deviate from them regardless of the situation we find ourselves in may be Ransom­like integrity, but it may also be an inability to learn from experience, a kind of fatal priggishness and narrow-minded inflexibility. Every normal life contains episodes of learning from experience, during which principles are reinterpreted, contexts are distinguished, and precommitments modified, along with episodes of sticking to your guns, drawing lines in the sand that you will not cross, and keeping faith with your ideals. This implies that a life of integrity - the high-road, genuine kind of integrity, not the low-road, ersatz kind - will normally contain episodes in which preexisting moral judgments get discarded in the face of experience. Ransom may always have been sane and wholesome and honest, but his judgment of what particular behaviors are sane, wholesome, and honest may well have changed between the ages of fifteen and fifty. One supposes and hopes that they did. His fifteen-year-old self might view some of the fifty-year-old’s beliefs as sold-out ideals, where the fifty-year-old Ransom sees a story of growing wiser (and maybe sadder). From the agent’s point of view - from the inside - how do you tell which is which?

One plausible answer is that genuine integrity consists not simply of adherence to principles, but adherence to the right principles, or at any rate to reasonable principles. As Deborah Rhode puts it:

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At a minimum, persons of integrity are individuals whose practices are consistent with their principles, even in the face of strong countervailing pressures.

That may be true in a formal sense, but from the agent’s point of view the formula won’t help. For one thing, many of the psychological forces dis­cussed here leave our principles untouched, instead affecting our judgment of whether or not a case falls under a principle. It seems likely, for example, that Milgram’s compliant subjects believed before, during, and after the experi­ment that it is wrong to inflict undeserved suffering on the innocent. What changed was their perception of whether the 330-volt shock they were administering was an instance of inflicting undeserved suffering on the innocent. Even when cognitive dissonance reduction causes a change in values, it will not help the agent to be told that integrity consists in adherence to values that are right and reasonable, because the agent knows only what is right and reasonable to her, and what seems right and reasonable to her may have been corrupted by the psychological forces we have been examining.

But perhaps matters are not as hopeless as they appear. Many of the phenomena revealed by experimentalists are short-lived aberrations, recog­nized as such even by the subjects once the spell wears off. As Doris puts it, the motives induced by the experiments “are not readily enmeshed in... biographies; they look like psychological tics or glitches.”^[542] Asch’s subjects did not continue to perceive shorter lines as longer after they left the experiment. Nor did most of Milgram’s compliant subjects continue to believe that compliance was the right thing to do once the experiment ended and they talked it over with the experimenter and the man they had suppo­sedly been shocking.

Perhaps the most dramatic evidence that dissonance-induced belief­change is an ephemeral thing comes from Zimbardo’s personal recollections of the SPE. At one point, Prisoner #819 became ill and broke down emo­tionally. Zimbardo found him “sobbing uncontrollably while in the back­ground his fellow prisoners were yelling that he was a bad prisoner” because the guards had ordered them to do so. Remarkably, when Zimbardo tried to lead him away he refused, because he had to show his fellow-inmates that he was not a bad prisoner.

Zimbardo said to him, “Listen, you are not #819. You are [his name], and my name is Dr. Zimbardo. I am a psychologist, not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison. This is just an experiment, and those are students, not prisoners, just like you. Let’s go.” He stopped crying suddenly, looked up at me like a small child awakened from a nightmare, and replied, “Okay, let’s go.”^[543]

The suggestion, then, is that dissonance-induced belief-change does not resemble genuine integrity, even from within, because outside the experi­mental situation it fades and vanishes, unlike our genuine long-term moral and personal commitments.

Unfortunately, there is one crucial state of affairs in which this will not be true: the state of affairs in which the agent returns again and again to the situation that caused the belief-change.

action → rationalization → commitment → further action

has a recursive character. Put the same subject in the belief-altering situation day after day - better yet, have the subject put herself in the situation day after day - and it seems overwhelmingly likely that the transitory will become permanent.

For example, suppose that the belief-altering situation is your job, and that each day you voluntarily go to the office and put yourself back in the situation - for, let us say, 2,400 billable hours a year, year in and year out. And each night you take yourself out of the situation. By day, with a wig on your head and a band round your neck, you occasionally have to do things for a guinea that at night you would think it wicked and infamous to do for an empire. It seems very likely that before too long you will find yourself believing that a special professional morality, distinct from the morality of your extra-professional life, justifies what you do - and this belief will be no transitory thing, but rather a fixed part of your moral personality. Nor will this dualistic view of morality bother you. You will effortlessly negotiate the transition from one form of life to the other, with no sense of tension or contradiction.

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Let me give two literary examples. One comes from Lawyerland, Lawrence Joseph’s fictionalized account of a dozen or so southern Manhattan lawyers. In a chapter entitled “Something Split,” a corporate dealmaker named Wylie relates a story about his partner, Jack, who is in psychoanalysis.

So what does the mind doctor say? He tells Jack that, as a lawyer, he has to be capable of deep moral compromise... Well, you can’t argue with that. We all know there are times when you’re working on some deal that, if you were to think it through, you’d realize that it was going to ruin the lives of thousands of people and their families. We all do it in one size, shape, form, or other.^[544]

But Wylie and Jack think the psychoanalyst is a sanctimonious fool - and Wylie finds Jack’s reply to the soul doctor hilarious: “Well, yes, doctor, that is what I do...

My guess is that most lawyers would respond to the psychoanalyst the same way, and I must admit that it is hard not to sympathize with Jack. But Wylie agrees with the substance of the shrink’s accusation (“We all do it,” that is, “ruin the lives of thousands”), and the point of the story seems to be that lawyers like Wylie and Jack have no difficulty living with that diagnosis. Where one would expect to find “something split,” eerily enough the pro­tagonists experience no split at all.

The second example comes from a very different quarter, Montaigne’s essay “Of Husbanding Your Will.”^[546] The essay praises those who remain aloof and emotionally detached from causes and enterprises, and in part it is a reflection on Montaigne’s own tenure as mayor of Bordeaux. At one point he writes:

The mayor and Montaigne have always been two, with a very clear separation. For all of being a lawyer or a financier, we must not ignore the knavery there is in such callings. An honest man is not accountable for the vice or stupidity of his trade, and should not therefore refuse to practice it: it is the custom of his country, and there is profit in it.^[547]

A few paragraphs earlier, Montaigne wrote, “I have been able to take part in public office without departing one nail’s breadth from myself, and to give myself to others without taking myself from myself.”^[548]

These boasts bear the telltale signs of dissonance reduction at work, especially striking in a self-observer and psychologist as acute as Montaigne. As Gerald Postema points out, Montaigne seemed to be making two different claims: first, that “the mayor and Montaigne have always been two people, clearly separated,” suggesting that the professional self and the personal self are two distinct selves; and second, perhaps inconsistently, that because Montaigne served as mayor “without moving the length of my nail from myself,” there is only one true self, and Montaigne (but not the mayor) is the true self.^[549] In Postema’s terminology, the first claim is a “schizophrenic” strategy for proving that an honest man “is not accountable for the vices or stupidity of his calling”; the second is a “restricted identification” strategy.^[550] Both strategies seem like self-deception, convenient ruses for denying that a person should be held responsible for the “knavery” of his calling. On the schizophrenic strategy, Montaigne is not responsible because the other fellow - “the mayor” - should bear the blame. On the restricted identification strategy, no one bears the blame, because Montaigne’s true self is not invested in the mayoralty. Apparently, the mayoralty itself bears the blame - a rhetorical strategy similar to lawyers’ frequent recourse to the excuse that “the adversary system did it.”^[551] Both arguments neglect the fact that Mon­taigne is the mayor, and regardless of whether Montaigne is invested in the mayoralty, it is he who performs the mayor’s duties.

Strikingly, Montaigne resorts to these psychological fictions of schizo­phrenia and restricted identification in order to argue that one need not abandon professions that are customary and profitable, regardless of their knavery. If I am right that schizophrenia and restricted identification are fictions, and that Montaigne’s arguments for nonaccountability fail, we are left with the situation of someone whose practice of a customary, profitable profession drives him to stable, self-justifying belief-changes whose only drawback is that they happen to be lies. Montaigne claims that he has kept his integrity - he has not departed one nail’s breadth from himself. But he has kept it, it appears, by fooling himself. This is a significant point for legal ethics, because one of the first modern articles on the subject quotes these sentences from Montaigne and takes them as a model of Stoic morality to justify the ethics of advocacy.^[552] As Trollope, another shrewd literary psy­chologist, observed, “Men will not be talked out of the convictions of their lives. No living orator would convince a grocer that coffee should be sold without chicory; and no amount of eloquence will make an English lawyer think that loyalty to truth should come before loyalty to his client.”^[553]

The problem, in the end, comes to this: the ethical value of integrity is experienced from the inside as a kind of harmony or equilibrium between values and actions, whereby one does what one does without departing a nail’s breadth from oneself. But the experiments show that integrity has a kind of evil twin, induced by our need to see ourselves as ethically righteous people regardless of the knavery of our calling. From the inside, the quest for integrity and the process of rationalizing our actions prove nearly impossible to distinguish. We would like our moral compass to point north, but our only instrument for detecting north is our moral compass. And so, even though integrity and its evil twin may differ, the quest for integrity can drive us to the high road or the low road, without any landmarks to alert us about which path we have taken.