It is helpful to think of the different ways of life that a person confronts when required to make an important decision about his future as representing different parts or aspects of himself, each part being developed in a way that requires the neglect or subordination of certain others. Choices of this sort are inevitable in any moderately complicated human existence, and one of the great challenges of personal life is to discover the way of living that best accommodates all the different things one wishes to do and be. Since it is impossible to be them all, however, it is even more important to discover which way of life is most likely to preserve a relation of fellow-feeling or friendship, as Aristotle calls it, among the different parts of one's own self, some of which must necessarily be subordinated for the sake of others. A person whose soul has, in Aristotle's phrase, "friendly feelings" toward itself, a person whose parts are not openly at war or engaged in subtler contests of repression and revenge, possesses a quality of wholeness that is best described by the simple term "integrity." Most often, of course, we use this term to describe the steadiness of action and purpose, the reliability of character, the dignity of self-respect that a person shows in relations with others and in his or her conduct generally. It is difficult, however—if, indeed, it is possible at all—to sustain an outward constancy of this sort without the inward friendship of which Aristotle speaks. If a person's soul is divided against itself the pressures of the world are likely, in time, to explode whatever fragile truce has been established among its parts. The alternative is not the elimination of all conflict in the soul—after Freud we cannot hope or even wish for a psychic unanimity of this sort. Nor is it the kind of harmonic ordering of higher and lower parts that Plato proposes in the Republic, an ordering that no longer has for us the naturalness it had for him. The alternative is sympathy toward oneself, and to a large degree it is on this attitude that the basic good of integrity depends.
Though the measure of integrity that a person achieves is in part, like most things, a matter of luck (including the luck of his original endowment of feeling and intelligence), it is also a function of the various choices that he makes, for these are likely, over time, either to strengthen the friendly attitude that Aristotle describes or to encourage its opposite—self-hatred and a spirit of regret. It is this difference, a difference in the consequences that important choices have for the achievement or preservation of integrity, that marks the line, in personal matters at least, between those decisions that show good judgment and those that do not. If we say, for example, that someone has shown good judgment in his choice of a career, it is not because the particular career he has chosen—the career, say, of a scholar, artist, athlete, or entrepreneur—is intrinsically superior to the others he might have pursued instead. We have no basis for making such comparisons, at least with regard to those ways of life that have a prima facie claim to worthiness (of which the number is large even if it is not infinite). There is, however, another way of understanding what is meant by the claim that a person has shown good judgment in making the decisions that have turned his life in one direction rather than another. To assert this is to claim that he has chosen a life which allows him the reasonable hope of a stable friendship among his different parts, among the interests he has had to abandon or subordinate and those at the center of his life (a condition of the soul which, though often associated with some rough matchup between a person's career and his abilities, may be present where the matchup is absent and missing where it exists). When we call a personal decision wise or say that it shows good judgment, what we mean is that it promotes integrity by increasing the chances that the person who has made it will be able to live with himself on amicable terms. In the domain of personal life, wise judgments lead to integrity and unwise ones to disintegration and regret. This is the only meaning these terms can have, in this domain at least, so long as we lack a scale along which to rank the worthiness of the different ways of life to which human beings may reasonably and responsibly devote themselves.
(Anthony T. Kronman, "Living in the Law," The University of Chicago Law Review 54 [summer 1987]: 835-76, at 854-6 [footnotes omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 