While it isn't clear that we are right to value integrity — or so I shall argue — most of us do. Persons of integrity merit respect. Compromising one's integrity — or failing completely to exhibit it — seems a serious flaw. Two influential accounts suggest why. For Bernard Williams, integrity is ‘a person's sticking by what [she] regards as ethically necessary or worthwhile.’ To this Cheshire Calhoun adds a helpful negative gloss:

One of the central objectives Shapiro and Sober pursue in (2007) is to show that what they call the master argument for epiphenomenalism, which is a type of causal exclusion argument, fails. Epiphe nomenalism, according to the terminology adopted in (Shapiro and Sober 2007), designates the thesis that supervening macro properties (or variables or factors) have no causal influence on micro proper ties that are caused by the micro supervenience bases of those macro properties. Well-known classical exclusion arguments are designed to yield such macro-tomicro epiphenomenalism along the lines of the following reasoning: subject to the widely accepted principle of the causal closure of the physical, there exists a causally sufficient micro cause for every micro effect; if it is additionally assumed that macro properties supervene on micro properties without being identical (or reducible) to the latter and if — in light of the rareness of cases of causal overdetermination — micro effects are assumed not to be systematically overdetermined, it follows that macro properties are causally inert with respect to effects of their micro supervenience bases.

Take determinism to be the thesis that for any instant, there is exactly one physically possible future (van Inwagen 1983, 3), and understand incompatibilism regarding responsibility to be the view that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility. Of the many different arguments that have been advanced for this view, the crux of a relatively traditional one is this: If determinism is true, then we lack alternatives. If we lack alternatives, then we can't be morally responsible for any of our behavior. Therefore, if determinism is true, then we can't be morally responsible for any of our behavior. The second premise is a version of the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP): persons are morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise. This principle, in conjunction with the assumptions that responsibility requires control, and that this control consists in the freedom to do otherwise, provides the vital bridge from the initial premise to the skeptical conclusion. Some incompatibilists, joining ranks with various compatibilists, have sought to reject this principle by invoking so-called ‘Frankfurt examples.’

Traditionally, incompatibilism has rested on two theses. First, the familiar Principle of Alternative Possibilities says that we cannot be morally responsible for what we do unless we could have done otherwise. Accepting this principle, incompatibilists have then argued that there is no room for such alternative possibilities in a deterministic world. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have argued that incompatibilism about moral responsibility can be defended independently of these traditional theses (Ginet 2005: 604-8; McKenna 2001; Stump 1999: 322-4, 2000 and 2002; van Inwagen 1983: 182-8; and Zagzebski 2000). Incompatibilists of this stripe are generally motivated by the concern that, if determinism is true, we are not genuine or ultimate sources of our actions and, hence, we are not responsible for what we do. Following Michael McKenna (2001), I shall call this view source incompatibilism. While the source incompatibilist's concern is rather vague as stated, it has given rise to a powerful argument against any attempt to reconcile moral responsibility and determinism. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998) have labeled this the Direct Argument, as it avoids the detour of alternative possibilities.

In this essay, I examine two claims Hobbes makes about obligation in Leviathan:

My thesis is that Hobbes seeks to reconcile these apparently conflicting claims by arguing that obligation and advantage are empirically identical. He does so, I hold (in contrast to many of his interpreters), without ‘reducing’ obligation to advantage. That is, he does not hold that people should only keep covenants if doing so is in their self-interest.

In section I, I analyse the temporal structure of covenants and distinguish the decision to enter (or not to enter) a covenant from the decision to break or keep a covenant one has already entered. In section II, I examine Hobbes’ fool. Hobbes tries to refute the fool by putting him right about that which conduces to his ‘conservation, and contentment.’

‘Where am I?’ This is something we might expect to hear from hapless explorers or academics with no sense of direction. If we can, we'll explain to our inquirer that he is east of East St. Louis and hope he can find his way from there. If he persists, insisting that he is not really lost, but only cannot find himself no matter how hard he looks, we might reasonably suspect that we are dealing with that peculiarly incorrigible academic explorer, the philosopher. When we hesitantly point to his body, we hear him explain, exasperated, ‘No, don't you get it? That's my body, but I’m looking for my self! And I cannot find it!’ At this point it is tempting to slip away, convinced that our philosophical friend is throttling himself with the noose of his own cleverness and is at risk of intellectual suicide by denying that he in fact has a self. Nevertheless, we shouldn't turn away so quickly: some pretty ingenious people from radically diverse schools of thought have endorsed the claim that the self ineluctably evades detection.