Thus utilitarianism does not demand that one live without identity-conferring commitments at all, but that one live with utilitarian identity-conferring commitments.
(On the other hand, this view of integrity as maintenance of identify-conferring commitments recognizes the relevance of self-knowledge to acting with integrity.
Williams holds this view because he sees integrity as steadfast maintenance of identity-conferring commitments, a view we discussed in section 2. Nonetheless, Williams sets out a clear challenge for those who hold integrity to be a virtue.
In general, Williams concludes, identity-conferring commitments cannot play the kind of role in act-utilitarian moral deliberation that is required for an agent to act with integrity, that is, for an agent to act with genuine conviction in matters of grave, identity-determining importance to them.
George has a strong commitment to pacifism, a conviction amounting to an identity-conferring commitment.
One apparent consequence of defining integrity as maintenance of identity-conferring commitments is that integrity cannot really be a virtue.
Utilitarianism demands that agents adopt utilitarian ideals; that agents give utilitarian ideals the kind of priority that would have them function as the central identity-conferring commitments of their life.
(Williams 1981a, 49) A further consequence of this view of integrity as maintenance of identity-conferring commitments is that there appears to be no normative constraints either on what such commitments may be, or on what the person of integrity can do in the pursuit of these commitments.
The idea is that for people to abandon an identity-conferring commitment is for them to lose grip on what gives their life its identity, or individual character.
It demands that he act without integrity, abandoning or ignoring a longstanding, identity-conferring commitment to pacifism simply because maximum general well-being is to be found elsewhere.
An identity-conferring commitment, according to Williams, is 'the condition of my existence, in the sense that unless I am propelled forward by the conatus of desire, project and interest, it is unclear why I should go on at all.' (Williams 1981b, 12).
