Writing, to me, is both a means and an end.

I enjoy the act of writing itself. The art of writing feels no less beautiful to me than painting or composing music. The question is rarely “what should I write about?”, it’s simply to write, and to enjoy the process. There’s something deeply satisfying about using language to articulate ideas, about taking what’s vague or scattered in the mind and giving it form and logic. It’s like clearing away fog and letting thoughts land in their most honest and organised shape. That process brings me an aesthetic joy.

At the same time, writing is a means, an act of meaning-making. While I love writing for its own sake, I also want it to matter. If something fascinates me or moves me to join the conversation, then I feel compelled to write about it. If I care about patriotism, or identity politics, or justice, and I sense there are things that haven’t been said clearly or truthfully, then maybe I’m meant to be the one to write them. Writing, in that way, is participating and sharing, and that’s what gives it meaning.

Writing draws on many things I already carry: emotional sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, reflection, and lived experience. And writing aligns deeply with my values. It gives me a way to explore and express those principles with honesty and intention. This feels like a natural extension of who I’ve always been, now expressed in a more creative form. It’s the kind of work I don’t need to force, as it matches my inner tempo, my love of solitude, and my need for depth.

I feel fortunate that I’m not tied to a single topic or niche in my writing. This flexibility allows me to explore different subjects and earn income from a variety of sources, without feeling like I’m compromising my dream. In this way, writing has become a livelihood, something I genuinely enjoy and that helps me sustain myself.

Some days, the work feels light. Other days, heavy. But it always feels like home. I trust that. And when it feels foggy, I remind myself: I’m still on the path.

 

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LIVING WITH INTEGRITY

Last spring, I reconnected with an old friend of mine in Europe after years apart. She spoke at length about God. I don’t recall much of it, but one line stayed with me: “If we are not living with integrity, how can we ask it of others?”

At first, I was offended. But why? Not because I felt judged, more because I didn’t know how to respond. Her words were like a mirror, and mirrors can scare us when we already suspect what they will show. Am I living with integrity? I can’t say yes. Am I asking it of others? Constantly.

Integrity is often considered as something about consistency between what we believe and what we do. Thus, to urge others toward integrity while failing to live it myself feels like a contradiction that undermines the very principle I’m appealing to. If I fall short of a value, does that make it hypocritical to expect it from others?

Immanuel Kant might argue that moral principles aren’t invalidated by our personal failures. What matters is whether the principle could hold universally, whether it can be rationally willed by anyone. In this sense, even a flawed person can rightfully expect integrity from others without being a hypocrite! But Kant also emphasises good will – a willingness to act from duty to what reason demands, even when it is difficult. Failure does not disqualify us, but indifference might.

Where Kant builds morality from what reason demands of all, Søren Kierkegaard helps illuminate the inward side of ethical existence. Though Kierkegaard’s philosophy is deeply rooted in religious thought, there’s a broader insight we can draw from him: that the ethical life isn’t about external conformity, but about going inward – a continual becoming of the self in relation to its highest demands. If I speak from within the struggle, to name the dissonance and stay engaged with it, then I may still speak truthfully about integrity as someone, as Kierkegaard would say, engaged in the difficult work of becoming.

So the question becomes: What does it mean to live with integrity as an ongoing effort? This essay, then, is about seeking integrity and exploring how we might align what we believe with how we live. And to begin, I have to start with my own story.

A freedom seeker

In my early years of activism, I was driven by a deep conviction of freedom. I believed so strongly that I couldn’t stay silent. It was sincerity and a sense of moral clarity that burned like fire. I remember that fire, and I still cherish it.

Back then, I couldn’t bear sitting in a human rights conference in Hanoi, listening to people speak of rights as if they were just international legal frameworks, not the violated realities surrounding us. I was frustrated by how many scholars spoke of freedom as something too premature for my country, as if Vietnamese people needed to be “educated” before they could be entrusted with it. More difficult was seeing how even those who believed in freedom had to self-censor. They narrowed their speech, softened their positions, or turned their attention elsewhere just to carry on.

I couldn’t stand it, so I left Vietnam. That was eight years ago.

I told myself I was seeking freedom, that beyond the borders that once contained me, I would find space to speak more freely and live more fully. I entered what I now understand as in-exile activism. Truthfully, I never set out to become an activist; the role emerged less from choice than from consequence. The injustice and the silence left little room for neutrality.

Activism is often portrayed as a public act of courage, and it is. But rarely do we speak of its inner cost. To be a responsible activist is to live in a state of vigilance: to weigh every word, measure every risk, anticipate every consequence. The more I committed to the work, the more I found myself constrained by it. I became guarded, strategic, distanced. I moved through conversations cautiously, watching not just what I said, but how it might be used. What once felt like a cloak of freedom grew heavy like confinement.

I caught myself wondering, what am I doing? I speak about freedom, yet I choose not to live freely. Am I compromising? Have I betrayed the very value I hold most dear? Or something closer to self-deception? Leaving Vietnam was a crossing of borders; but exile isn’t always geographic. At some point, I found myself in exile from my own belief. I do not question freedom; it remains a value I admire and treasure. What I question is my own coherence, whether my life reflects the very convictions I continue to defend. And it is precisely there that the question of living with integrity begins.

Integrity begins with self-honesty

Integrity, rooted in the Latin integer, means wholeness. In data science, integrity refers to the accuracy and consistency of data, that it remains intact, unaltered, and internally coherent. Many people speak of personal integrity in a similar way: as the alignment of behaviour with a unified set of personal values. This view treats integrity as a kind of internal coherence, where one’s actions are guided by a harmonious value system. But this ideal assumes that our values are consistent and form a seamless whole. In reality, they often conflict. We might value honesty and compassion, justice and loyalty, yet circumstances force us to prioritise ones over the others. The aspiration of living in full alignment with all the values we claim to hold sounds like a philosophical ideal.

The story above is one among many moments in my life that revealed how easily conviction can give way to compromise. Moral life rarely offers clear choices, and the conflicts between competing values often leave us uncertain. In such moments, I believe that if one virtue must serve as the foundation for all others, it is honesty with oneself. For without that inward clarity, the pursuit of an ethical life can become more of a performance or conformity than of anything truly rooted. The attempt to appear virtuous, when not grounded in self-honesty, may satisfy the gaze of others but leave us estranged from ourselves.

But what does it mean to be honest with oneself?

Although I disagree with Bernard Williams on several things, such as his view on moral luck, I find his account of integrity compelling. For Williams, integrity is about remaining true to the commitments that define one’s identity, or what he called one’s “ground projects.” The notion of “ground projects” refers to those commitments that are so central to one’s identity that their abandonment would leave one alienated from oneself. In this sense, integrity requires acting from a place where the motives and commitments are truly our own. As Bernard Williams put it in A Critique of Utilitarianism:

“nor is it just a question of the rightness or obviousness of these answers. It is also a question of what sort of considerations come into finding the answer. […] a consideration … that each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do. This is an idea closely connected with the value of integrity.” [1]

While Bernard Williams does not present self-honesty as a moral duty, it is nonetheless essential to his account of integrity. One must possess a certain clarity about what truly matters to them and recognise when their actions align with or depart from those commitments. This demands a form of self-honesty. It’s not a matter of factual honesty, nor is it reducible to self-disclosure. If anything, it’s about the willingness to see oneself clearly.

Consider the example of someone, let’s call him Dorian, who publicly calls for a boycott of McDonald’s on political grounds. His reasoning is strategic; he believes that collective economic pressure is an effective way to push for environmental accountability. Privately, however, Dorian does not see eating at McDonald’s as intrinsically wrong, and continues to eat there on occasion. He sees no personal contradiction because he frames the boycott as a tactic rather than a personal imperative. His behaviour may appear hypocritical – publicly advocating one thing while privately doing another – but he sees it as a practical work in the pursuit of a larger goal. Some might argue that this undermines his integrity.

Williams’s approach offers another view. He resists turning integrity into a rigid moral system, instead emphasising that integrity involves being honest to oneself, and being not alienated from one’s ground project. In Dorian’s case, the crucial test is not whether his behaviour is externally consistent, but whether it feels to him like a betrayal of what matters most to himself. If his core commitment is to environmental justice, and he sees the boycott as one of many imperfect tools toward that end, then his integrity might remain intact, so long as he does not experience his own conduct as estranged from his larger identity.

This approach is psychologically insightful, it captures how individuals maintain a sense of coherence by acting in line with their deepest commitments. Yet I find this account ultimately unsatisfying, as it risks lowering the bar too far. Calling Dorian a person of integrity feels too generous. What is missing, I think, is a sense of ethics, a demand that integrity involve not only coherence with one’s motivations or beliefs, but critical reflection on the beliefs themselves and the ethical weight of acting upon them. In activist spaces, I’ve seen many Dorians, and, at times, been one myself. These patterns of rationalised contradiction expose a deeper problem: when strategic justification replaces self-examination, something essential is lost.

Integrity, to be meaningful, must operate on more than one level. It is not enough for our actions to align with our commitments; we must also interrogate the nature of those commitments and the kind of self we are becoming through them. That, to me, is the difference between what I’ll call minimal integrity – coherence with one’s values, and ethical integrity – a more demanding form rooted in Kierkegaard’s vision of the self as a task.

Ethical dimension of integrity

Williams explicitly argues that integrity is not a virtue in the traditional sense, not because it lacks ethical significance, but because it does not function like other virtues that generate or shape motivation. What matters, for him, is not moral faultlessness, but whether a person can act without becoming alienated from their own actions. This view sets a low ethical threshold. I do not mean to suggest that Williams’s account is ethically deficient, but rather that it provides a necessary foundation, a minimal starting point, for a broader ethical account.

Some may argue that Williams’s account needs to be supplemented with another moral theory of integrity. I suggest another approach. Rather than relying on an external framework to correct or complete Williams’s view, I believe that the ethical depth we seek must arise from within the self itself. This is why I turn to Søren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard draws a distinction between two modes of life: the aesthetic and the ethical. The aesthetic life seeks pleasure, novelty, or detachment. The ethical life begins when the individual turns inward and takes responsibility for becoming a self. Through the figure of Judge Wilhelm in Either/Or, Kierkegaard shows that duty, if truly ethical, must be internal – integrated into the individual’s way of being. Ethical seriousness is not about external conformity, but about living from an inner grounding that no longer requires constant justification, reassurance, or approval:

“The person who lives aesthetically expects everything from outside, hence the sickly anxiety with which many speak of the dreadful circumstance of not having found one’s place in the world. […]

When he has thus found his bearings within himself, he is steeped in the ethical and will have no need to urge himself breathlessly on into fulfilling his duties. The truly ethical individual has, therefore, an inner calm and assurance because he does not have duty outside him but inside him. The more deeply a person imparts an ethical structure to his life, the less he will feel the need to talk every instant of duty, to be anxious every instant that he is fulfilling it, to confer every instant with others about what his duty is.” [2]

While Kierkegaard does not use the term “integrity,” his account of the ethical life offers a deeper vision of what Williams’s concept of integrity demands. For Kierkegaard, true ethical life begins when one turns inward and takes full responsibility not only for what one does, but for who one is becoming. This requires choosing oneself as a task – not inventing the self, but realising it from within through free and responsible choice. It is not a single moment of decision, but an ongoing effort, a life lived in continuity. Kierkegaard describes this ethical demand as a serious and inward undertaking, one that calls for self-knowledge, self-possession, and responsibility. As he writes:

“Only when one has taken possession of oneself in the choice, has attired oneself in one’s self, has penetrated oneself so totally that every movement is attended by the consciousness of a responsibility for oneself, only then has one chosen oneself ethically, only then has one repented oneself, only then is one concrete, only then is one, in one’s total isolation, in absolute continuity with the reality one belongs to.” [3]

Dorian’s situation becomes more ethically demanding when viewed through Kierkegaard’s lens. Kierkegaard would not accuse him of hypocrisy in a conventional sense, but would question whether Dorian has truly taken responsibility for the self he is becoming. By showing no concern for the gap between his public stance and private behaviour, Dorian appears to avoid the inward task that Kierkegaard sees as central to ethical life. Even Dorian’s self-honesty about his motives would not exempt him from this demand. Dorian risks remaining ethically abstract, someone whose actions are not anchored in the deeper task of becoming a self in truth.

This two-level account of integrity avoids two common pitfalls: the relativism of authenticity detached from ethical reflection, and the legalism of morality divorced from inward selfhood. What emerges here is a deeper, Kierkegaardian reinterpretation of integrity as the ongoing, inward task of reconciling oneself with the demand of the ethical – “the ethical is that whereby a person becomes what he becomes.” This preserves the core insights of modern accounts of personal integrity while grounding them in a deeper vision of ethical life.

Dorothea case

While Dorian’s case raised questions about personal contradiction and public positioning, it assumed that the individual still has a meaningful degree of control over their ethical alignment. But in many real-world contexts, the difficulty is not hypocrisy, it is complicity. Even those who act with sincerity often find themselves entangled in systems that compromise their commitments. Here, the problem is not misalignment between belief and action, but the limits of agency itself.

Let us consider another case. Dorothea has made a personal moral commitment to boycott Amazon, based on the belief that the company’s labour practices are ethically objectionable. She has cancelled her Prime membership, avoids shopping on the platform, and makes a consistent effort to steer clear of Amazon-affiliated products and services. This is not an act of virtue signaling; Dorothea rarely discusses the decision with others. Rather, it is a way of living more closely in line with her convictions.

As part of her long-term financial planning, Dorothea chooses to invest in an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) index fund. She makes this choice deliberately, hoping to align her financial life with her moral stance. Yet she also knows that Amazon remains a major holding in the ESG portfolio: despite its controversial labour record, Amazon is included due to its economic dominance and comparatively strong environmental metrics. Dorothea understands that, given her limited time, expertise, and resources, selecting individual ethical stocks or designing a customised portfolio is not currently feasible. The ESG fund is, in her view, the best available option.

Even as Dorothea benefits from Amazon’s profits, she doesn’t feel unambiguous satisfaction. Her financial gain is tempered by a sense of moral discomfort, an awareness of contradiction that she neither denies nor resolves. If she were to celebrate her returns without hesitation, it might signal a deeper fracture between her values and her lived responses. But to feel conflicted, to register the dissonance between principle and benefit, is precisely what preserves her integrity. In this sense, discomfort itself becomes a form of awareness – a sign that integrity, in the context of complex systems, may lie not in purity, but in the ongoing effort to remain ethically awake. Dorothea acknowledges the complexity: that the structures of this messy life often force us into forms of complicity, and that even the most sincere commitments can be compromised by systems we do not fully control.

Dorothea’s awareness reflects the inwardness Kierkegaard sees as essential to ethical life. Kierkegaard would not fault her for contradiction, but would take seriously the fact that she does not explain it away. In feeling discomfort rather than resolution, Dorothea demonstrates precisely the kind of ethical seriousness Kierkegaard demands: the willingness to stand transparently before one’s own divided condition with responsibility. Dorothea’s integrity is not only psychologically lucid, as Williams might say, but also ethically earnest in the Kierkegaardian sense.

Yet Kierkegaard would not allow Dorothea to settle even into honest discomfort. For him, the ethical demand is infinite, not something one meets once, but something that must be confronted again and again, with renewed seriousness. Kierkegaard would still press her with difficult questions: Is this compromise temporary or permanent? Is it truly the best she can do, or has she begun to accept contradiction as inevitable? Has her discomfort become a ground for deeper self-examination, or merely a way to tolerate complicity without transformation? Kierkegaard’s question would not be whether Dorothea feels conflicted, but whether she is letting that conflict shape her.

These questions do not have easy answers, and that is precisely the point. Dorothea’s situation resists moral closure. Her case reveals that living with integrity, especially in a world of structural entanglement, often means wrestling with discomfort and contradiction. What matters is not that we eliminate these tensions entirely, but that we refuse to deny them, distort them, or outsource our ethical responsibility to structural systems outside us. Because the ethical life is not merely about managing contradictions, but about allowing those very contradictions to confront the self, to call it into deeper honesty, responsibility, and renewal. Ethical integrity, on this view, is a restless commitment to remain answerable to one’s highest ethical vision, even when the path is uncertain.

The self

The preceding examples assume a self capable of ethical response. But what if the self itself is in crisis? If ethical integrity depends on the self, then understanding the nature of that self becomes essential. This raises a troubling question: what if the inward self is not already ethical? What if, upon turning inward, a person finds no ethical urgency – only self-interest, or confusion, or apathy? If integrity begins with self-honesty, does it collapse when the self is ethically empty?

This is the problem Kierkegaard builds his ethical and religious philosophy around. In seeking to understand the nature of the self and how ethical life emerges from within it, I turn to The Sickness Unto Death, where Kierkegaard writes:

“The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself.” [4]

To clarify this formulation, I understand it as a three-part reading:

• First, “the self is a relation”: The self is not static or fixed. Rather, the self is a synthesis, a tension, between opposing dimensions: the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity – in Kierkegaard’s words. Someone may fulfil all visible roles (career, relationships, obligations) yet also feel, without quite knowing why, an inner contradiction. This is not merely psychological discomfort. It reveals the condition of the self as stretched between what it concretely is and what it is called to become. The contradiction is not an obstacle to selfhood; it is the very space in which selfhood must emerge.
• Second, “relates to itself”: The self becomes actual only when it becomes conscious of this condition – of being a synthesis, and of the responsibility to become itself. This is more than self-awareness in the ordinary sense. It is the realisation that the self is not complete, but something that must be taken up as a task. Here despair often arises, not merely emotional distress or sadness, but the condition of being misrelated to oneself. Despair can take the form of refusing to be oneself, or even of trying to construct a self in defiance of the very condition of its being.
• Third, “the self is… the relation’s relating to itself”: In other words, the self is not a thing but an activity, a continual movement of becoming. It must be appropriated again and again in inward reflection. For Kierkegaard, this process reaches its truth only in relation to “the power that established it.” That power, he is clear, is God. In Kierkegaard’s Christian framework, the self becomes whole only when it stands transparently before God. When that relation is denied or ignored, the self collapses into despair. When it is embraced, the self becomes itself in the fullest sense.

Kierkegaard’s claim is unmistakably theological, but its existential force extends beyond religious belief. Even without invoking God, the insight holds: the self is not a possession but a task, a demand we are summoned to take up. Ethical life begins in the recognition that we are unfinished, and that we are answerable not to abstract rules, but to an infinite demand: the call to become who we truly ought to be.

The call

If integrity is an inward response to a call, a deeper question follows: Who calls? Where does that ethical demand come from, if not from fixed norms, social roles, or pre-given identities?

For Kierkegaard, the answer is theological: the call comes from God, the source of what he names the infinite requirement. But even for those who cannot follow him into theology, the structure of the insight remains, as these themes resonate beyond Kierkegaard’s Christian frame. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger offers a secular account of the call.

For Heidegger, the ‘self’ (Dasein) is defined not by what it is, but by what it can become. It is a being always ahead of itself, constituted by possibilities. Most of us, most of the time, fall into the everyday distractions of what he calls the ‘they’ (das Man). In this mode, we fall into what Heidegger calls inauthenticity, or a failure to live in conscious relation to our own existence. Yet Heidegger identifies a moment of rupture: the call of conscience. As he writes in §56 of Being and Time, conscience is a call that interrupts Dasein’s absorption in das Man, summoning it back to itself:

“It calls Dasein forth (and ‘forward’) into its ownmost possibilities, as a summons to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self. The call dispenses with any kind of utterance. It does not put itself into words at all; yet it remains nothing less than obscure and indefinite. Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent. In this way it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces the Dasein which has been appealed to and summoned, into the reticence of itself. The fact that what is called in the call has not been formulated in words, does not give this phenomenon the indefiniteness of a mysterious voice, but merely indicates that our understanding of what is ‘called’ is not to be tied up with an expectation of anything like a communication.” [5]

In this passage, Heidegger’s language is unusually direct, and I resist paraphrasing it too heavily. What matters is that conscience is a call from within, it does not say anything, it discloses. It draws Dasein out of its dispersion in the das Man and back toward its ownmost potential through silence. And to explain the root of the call, Heidegger says:

“if the caller is asked about its name, status, origin, or repute, it not only refuses to answer, but does not even leave the slightest possibility of one’s making it into something with which one can be familiar when one’s understanding of Dasein has a ‘worldly’ orientation.” [6]

To respond to this call is to enter what Heidegger calls resoluteness, which “does not withdraw itself from ‘actuality’, but discovers first what is factically possible.” To be resolute is to hear the call of conscience, to accept one’s thrownness (the fact that we did not choose our situation but are nonetheless responsible for it), and to act with deliberate commitment.

Heidegger’s account of conscience extends and transforms Kierkegaard’s insight. Where Kierkegaard names the source of the call as God, Heidegger leaves it unnamed, but no less commanding. In this light, integrity is about listening to the inward summons and acting with clarity, even in the face of everything we would rather turn away from.

In the world of activism, conscience is a word we hear often. It’s written into international law – Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights names “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” as a basic right. It’s central to the term “prisoner of conscience,” popularised by Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, to describe those imprisoned for “expressing an opinion which he honestly holds.” Over time, the word has become part of our shared vocabulary. There’s also a song in Vietnamese that a dear friend of mine often sings, written and performed by Phan Văn Hưng. It’s called Trái tim tôi là bến (My Heart is a Shore). In it, he writes:

“Chấm máu tôi mà viết
về lương tâm con người”

“Dip my blood to write
of the conscience of humankind”

This line reminds me that conscience – lương tâm – is something we sing about. Something we suffer for. Something marks the point where the human voice rises trembling but refusing to disappear. Something reflects the individual’s struggle to live with integrity – to live truthfully.

Integrity across conditions

A common objection to integrity is that it assumes a freedom not equally available to everyone. When someone is enduring systemic injustice, poverty, or constant threat, is it fair to speak of integrity as if it were equally within reach?

It’s true that structural conditions shape what people can afford to risk, how freely they can choose, and whether they have the space to reflect in the midst of fear or survival. But to acknowledge those constraints is not to deny the ethical demand. To assume that those who are oppressed are incapable of striving for integrity is not an act of compassion, it is a form of dismissal.

If integrity, as Williams suggests, is the capacity to act from the deep commitments that make us who we are, then that capacity may show itself most clearly when those commitments are tested. For Kierkegaard, the ethical life begins in the struggle to go inward and live in honest relation to oneself. Heidegger adds another layer: conscience as a summons from within that pulls us back from distraction. To live with integrity is to hear that call, to accept one’s thrownness, and to take up the task of becoming oneself.

None of this depends on privilege. In fact, those who benefit from the prevailing order may be less exposed to the friction that awakens the ethical life, less compelled to hear the call, less pressed to answer it. Comfort can blur conscience; institutions can reward the appearance of virtue while discouraging self-examination. The danger in hardship is that integrity becomes costly; the danger in comfort is that it feels unnecessary.

Integrity is not guaranteed by any condition. It is sustained through effort, the effort to remain honest with oneself, inwardly awake, and personally responsible. That effort may be harder in some circumstances than others, but it is not exclusive to any class, position, or condition. Integrity is not given from the outside, but taken up inwardly. It is one of the few ethical resources we do not need permission to claim. It begins wherever we are.

 

Notes

1. In this essay, I use the terms moral and ethical in a way that reflects key concerns in the work of both Bernard Williams and Søren Kierkegaard, without aiming to formalise their definitions. Broadly, moral refers to socially shared norms, universal duties, or obligations, while ethical points to the broader question of how one lives, particularly in relation to personal integrity. This distinction aligns with Williams’s critiques of impersonal moral systems and with Kierkegaard’s account of the ethical life.

2. I do not aim to avoid God, nor to sidestep the religious core of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. I recognise that, for Kierkegaard, the self ultimately becomes itself only in relation to God, and that the religious life is the highest stage of human existence. At the same time, my intention is to draw on Kierkegaard’s existential insights without necessarily adopting his theological commitments in full. This is an attempt to transpose its existential urgency into a register where it continue to speak meaningfully, even to those outside a religious framework.

3. Heidegger’s Being and Time offers one of the most profound secular accounts of existential responsibility. I’m still surprised that a thinker capable of such insight could later join the Nazi Party. My engagement with Heidegger’s early work is not an endorsement of the man, but an effort to think with a text that continues to illuminate something essential about ethics.

4. In seeking answers to questions that are, ultimately, my own, I may have misunderstood or stretched the philosophers I’ve drawn on. But this risk is part of the willingness to think seriously and in good faith. If something here seems missing or wrongly taken, I welcome the chance to discuss. Please reach out: viyen.me@gmail.com.

5. Phan Văn Hưng, “Trái tim tôi là bến”. I received this original version from a dear friend, anh K., and uploaded it to SoundCloud with his permission:

 

 

References

Primary texts

[1] Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, co-authored with J.J.C. Smart. Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 86. PDF link.

[2] Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay. Grapevine India Publishers, Part Two, Chapter 2: “Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality.”

[3] See [2] above.

[4] Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay. Penguin Classics, Part One: “The Sickness Unto Death is Despair.”

[5] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Blackwell Publisher, 1962, p. 318. PDF link.

[6] See [5] above, p. 319.

Philosophical commentary & encyclopedic sources

Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, “Integrity”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/integrity

Sophie-Grace Chappell and Nicholas Smyth, “Bernard Williams”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/williams-bernard

John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans, “Søren Kierkegaard”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/kierkegaard

Secondary sources & articles

Daniel D Moseley, “Revisiting Williams on Integrity,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2014): 53–68. PDF link

Bernard Williams, “Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence,” in Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 40–53. PDF link

Peter Benenson, “The Forgotten Prisoners,” The Guardian, May 28, 1961. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1961/may/28/fromthearchive.theguardian.

Ilario Colli, “The Finite and the Infinite in Kierkegaard’s Notion of Selfhood,” May 14, 2021. https://ilariocolli.com/articles/the-finite-and-infinite-in-kierkegaards-notion-of-selfhood.

Simon Critchley, “Being and Time, Part 7: Conscience,” The Guardian, July 20, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/20/heidegger-being-time-critchley

Case material

Tom Aylott, “Fidelity Manager: Amazon Belongs in an ESG Fund, But We’re Advocates for More Employee Rights,” Trustnet, September 23, 2022. https://www.trustnet.com/news/13330047/fidelity-manager-amazon-belongs-in-an-esg-fund-but-were-advocates-for-more-employee-rights