Beep Beep

Posted on Feb 5 • Originally published at randomboo.com on Feb 1

DRAWING A LINE UNDER INTEGRITY

#philosophy #integrity #morality #empathy

“I lack faith in the integrity of others,” he said.

“Maybe that’s because you can see the flaws in your own,” she replied.

“Oh…” he paused.

“Hopefully you can doubt the integrity of your faith in others.”

Integrity is the world I can live in. Empathy is the force that keeps trying to redraw it.

Also, how to write about hatred without becoming it? I keep telling myself I’m done writing about morality, and then I find myself back here again, like a man who keeps quitting smoking by lighting a cigarette to celebrate.

It’s not that I enjoy the subject, morality is one of those ideas that looks clean from a distance and then, the closer you stand to it, the more it resembles a landfill with a motivational quote painted on the gate.

Still, I think I’ve finally reached the thing I’ve been orbiting, not a final answer in the sense of “I have solved ethics,” because that’s like claiming you’ve finished the weather. But a conclusion in the only way a human being ever gets one, a place you stop, because you can’t keep walking without becoming someone you don’t recognise.

Before I step into it properly, I want to look back at the trail I’ve left behind, because it matters how I got here.

It began, for me, with empathy, but not the soft-focus version people talk about at school assemblies, the one where everyone holds hands and no one has ever been cut off at a roundabout. I started with the fact that neurodivergent people are constantly described as lacking empathy, despite many of us being emotionally flayed to the bone by it. That was the first crack in the cultural story. Not “empathy is rare,” not “empathy is good,” but “what we call empathy is not one thing, and we keep mistaking the label for the machinery.”

Then I wrote about empathy as something that doesn’t elevate you so much as move into your head uninvited. Something that makes you feel other people’s pain like you’ve stolen it, and can’t return it. In that post I also noted the uncomfortable possibility that what we call kindness is sometimes not feeling at all, but performance. Not because people are evil, but because social life is a theatre and most of us learn our lines before we learn what they mean.

This came on the back of the old moral x-ray: the ring. The idea of doing what you want when nobody can see. The question that never dies because it keeps being confirmed by daily life. Strip away consequence, strip away witness, strip away reputation, and you don’t just reveal someone’s “true nature.” You reveal what binds them, you reveal whether their restraint is internal or rented.

Then I set a trap with an animal and a pill. A small, tidy scenario designed to separate two anchors: the creature’s suffering, and the person you refuse to become. If you can erase the guilt, erase the memory, erase the story, does the wrongness change? That post dragged me toward a grim but useful recognition, – morality is built on something human, and human things are fickle. If empathy is the foundation, then morality inherits its drift.

Then I wrote about being “good” for God. Not because I wanted to pick on religion as a hobby, but because it offers the clearest example of external binding. The moral code arrives shrink-wrapped. You obey because you are watched, you comply because you are threatened or promised. It can produce order, yes, but it can also produce something far more fragile: righteousness without integrity. Behaviour without ownership, morality that collapses the moment the surveillance camera blinks.

And then came the post that snapped the thread. The one I called THE CAKE IS A LIE, because I realised I’d been living inside an interface. A comforting illusion that people share the same inner operating rules, that cruelty is a deviation rather than a latent feature waiting for permission. That post wasn’t really about evil, it was about betrayal. Not “how could humans do this?” but “why did I assume they wouldn’t?”

So that’s the flow, from empathy to anonymity to selfhood to obedience to the moment I realised I’d mistaken a social display for a universal interior.

This is where I am now.

I think I finally have a technical term that isn’t just a moral mood. I’m going to use it properly, going forward, like an engineer naming a part.

Integrity.

Not as “being a good person,” not as “telling the truth,” not as a badge you wear on your chest so other people can trust you around their wallets.

Integrity, as I mean it, is self-binding.

It is the internal constraint system that holds even when the external world stops holding you.

Integrity is the smallest self/world story you can inhabit without cognitive nausea. The most minimal narrative of “who I am” and “what kind of world this is” that still lets you wake up, look at your hands, and recognise the creature attached to them.

And if that’s what integrity is, then integrity is not compromised by minor failures in the usual moral sense. You can lie, regret it, and still remain compatible with yourself. You can be rude, feel ashamed, and repair it. Those are dents, those are stains, annoying, but metabolise-able.

Integrity compromise is something else.

Integrity compromise is when your existing story can’t metabolise what just happened.

It’s when reality arrives like a brick through the window and your internal architecture doesn’t just crack, it becomes uninhabitable. Not because you’ve done something “wrong” in a rulebook sense, but because you can no longer live inside the world you thought you were living inside.

That’s why betrayal hits differently to harm.

Pain can be explained, pain can be endured, pain can be refiled under the usual human categories: accident, stupidity, weakness, misfortune. Betrayal is different because it says: the map you were using is inaccurate, and you didn’t just misunderstand the road, the terrain. – You misunderstood what the world is.

This is also why integrity can be built in two ways.

Some integrity is internally authored, slowly forged, hammered into shape by reflection, guilt, repair, shame, responsibility. You build it the way you build muscle: by straining, failing, recovering, learning what weight you can bear without tearing.

However, some integrity is externally scaffolded. – Borrowed.

You model yourself on a person you admire, you anchor your “should” in a community, a tradition, a leader, a parent, a sacred text, a moral authority. You inherit the shape and live inside it. Day-to-day it can be stronger, even comforting, because the choices are pre-made. The structure is already there, you only have to follow the IKEA instructions.

But externally scaffolded integrity has a weakness that internally authored integrity doesn’t have in quite the same way: it is brittle under betrayal.

If the person you anchored yourself to changes, or is revealed to be rotten, you don’t just lose an influence, you lose a load-bearing beam. Suddenly you have to reconcile not only what they did, but what it means that you used them as a template. Your world-model becomes incompatible with the reality of your chosen pillar.

That’s the compromise, that’s the crack.

And I want to name this properly too, because it’s everywhere, and once you can see it you start spotting it like mould.

Borrowed integrity. – Identity anchored in someone else.

Proxy conscience. – A moral compass rented from authority.

Delegated self. Where your “should” comes from outside, and you only experience it as an instruction, not as ownership.

This is why religion doesn’t fail merely because it’s “copy and paste.” That phrase is too easy, too smug, too clean. Religion can be profound, stabilising, even humane. That’s not the point.

The point is that it fails, when it trains delegation instead of internal constraint.

When morality is primarily obedience, you get what obedience always gets you: compliance when watched, drift when unwatched, and sometimes atrocities when authority demands them. Not because people suddenly become monsters, but because the binding agent was never inside them. It was outside, looming, and labelled “God,” “law,” “country,” “tradition,” “purity,” “order.”

So here’s the distinction I’m cementing, going forward, because it’s the spine of this entire conclusion.

Obedience morality is external binding. “God said,” “the law says,” “my group says,” “my leader says,” “my family says,” “this is how we do it.” Remove the authority, and the constraint weakens or collapses.

Integrity morality is internal binding. “If I do this, I become someone I can’t live with.” Remove the authority, remove the witness, remove the reward and punishment, and the constraint remains, because it is attached to identity, not surveillance.

This is also where I need to correct myself, slightly, because I can hear the easy counterargument forming in the mouth of anyone who wants to dismiss this as melodramatic.

It is tempting, when you’ve seen enough cruelty, to say “most people have no empathy” or “people don’t feel anything.” I’ve said versions of this in anger, in despair, in that hollow post-betrayal state where you feel like the only sober person in a pub full of laughing arsonists.

But that generalisation weakens the argument, and more importantly, it isn’t accurate in the way that matters.

The problem isn’t that empathy is absent.

The problem is that empathy is not universal as an experience, and not reliable as a moral foundation.

Morality may not be “real” in the cosmic sense, not a property of the universe like gravity, but it is real as a constraint system. It exists in the way a border exists, not because the earth naturally draws lines, but because humans do, and we bleed over them.

Empathy, meanwhile, is not a single moral virtue humming steadily inside every person. It is a system, a biological machinery with variable sensitivity, and a mind that interprets it through culture and identity. People can feel intensely in one context and go numb in another. They can cry at a film and laugh at a stranger. They can donate to one cause and spit on another. They can love their neighbour and dehumanise someone across a border without experiencing any contradiction at all.

So I’m not going to say empathy “doesn’t exist.” I’m going to say the folk concept doesn’t. The simplistic cultural idea that empathy is one thing, stable, morally virtuous, and universally experienced.

Empathy exists, but it behaves more like weather than like a compass.

Which brings me to the reframe I needed.

For a long time I spoke about empathy as if it could be calibrated, as if upbringing and culture set the dial and then you walk around with your empathy set to “medium-high” like it’s a thermostat.

But empathy isn’t calibrated once. It’s constantly reacting and evolving. It’s immediate, it’s fast, it can drag you into donating money, or into screaming at someone over a lane merge, before logic has even put its shoes on.

So I’m going to stop talking about “calibration” as if it’s static, and start talking about routing.

Empathy isn’t calibrated, it’s routed by context, identity, threat, and permission.

And reason doesn’t usually “catch up” in the noble sense people imagine, where logic arrives like a wise teacher, takes empathy by the hand, and leads it toward virtue.

Reason writes the patch notes.

It explains what already happened, it justifies what already moved, it constructs a story that makes your actions compatible with your self-image.

Morality isn’t always reason steering empathy, it is often reason explaining empathy after it already moved.

This, incidentally, explains so much of human wickedness without requiring demons or metaphysical corruption. If empathy is a storm system, and reason is the newsroom reporting on the storm after it hits, then you start to see why people can commit cruelty and still feel righteous. They are not lying to you, they are patching themselves into coherence.

Now we reach the fork in the road. The place where I can feel two different conclusions pulling at me like tides.

One conclusion is cold but coherent.

Morality as engineered coordination. A cultural technology built on empathic machinery plus incentives. Groups that punished murder, betrayal, and internal collapse survived longer than groups that didn’t. Rules came first, feelings followed. Over time, some of those rules were internalised, and we began mistaking the internalised constraint for cosmic truth. Morality, in this view, is a human invention that behaves like a tool, – it can build, it can blunt, it can be used as a weapon. Integrity, in this frame, is a personal stabiliser that resists corruption when the surrounding network goes rotten.

The other conclusion is “uncomfortably too human” but honest.

Morality as identity-preservation. Morality is the set of acts you cannot do without self-annihilation. It is not “goodness,” it is compatibility. A boundary beyond which you no longer recognise yourself. Empathy supplies the vividness, the immediate feeling of another’s reality; integrity supplies the “no,” the refusal that holds when feeling shifts, when permission is granted, when consequences are removed.

You can fuse them, and the fusion is perhaps the most complete model.

Morality is a coordination technology that sometimes gets internalised as integrity. The best morality is the kind that survives when coordination fails.

But if I’m honest, if I strip away the academic neatness and listen to what actually binds me when nobody is watching, I land in the second conclusion.

Because I have seen enough to know that coordination can be corrupted. Incentives can be inverted, institutions can become engines of harm, entire cultures can be persuaded that cruelty is virtue, and that the people being crushed are not quite people.

If morality is only coordination, then it is always one charismatic demagogue away from becoming a bonfire.

What matters, what I keep coming back to, is what remains when permission arrives.

And this is the sentence that finally pins it down for me, the one that feels like it should have been obvious years ago, but apparently my brain needed a long scenic route.

Empathy predicts what you’ll feel. Integrity predicts what you’ll refuse.

Empathy is the weather. Integrity is the architecture.

Empathy can flood a room. Integrity decides where the walls are.

Now we can return to the line at the top, and it won’t just sound poetic. It will be literal.

Integrity is the world I can live in.

Empathy is the force that keeps trying to redraw it.

Integrity is the story I inhabit. The minimum viable narrative in which people are real, suffering matters, and I am not the kind of creature who takes pleasure in terror.

Empathy is the engine that updates my perception of who is real, moment to moment, depending on proximity, vividness, tribe, fear, hunger, exhaustion, permission. Sometimes empathy expands my world. Sometimes it shrinks it to a pinprick.

When empathy expands, it can make me kinder than I planned to be, it can make me stop, help, give, soften, apologise, even when it costs me. It can pull goodness out of my mouth before I’ve had time to calculate it.

When empathy shrinks, it can make me dangerous in small ways. It can turn a stranger into an obstacle, it can turn a car into a threat, it can turn a disagreement into a war, it can turn a person into a symbol, and symbols are easy to hurt.

The reason morality feels so unstable, so full of hypocrisy and contradiction, is because people mistake empathy for integrity.

They think their good feelings are their moral backbone. Then the weather changes, and they discover their backbone was fog.

But integrity, as self-binding, is different. It is not the feeling, it is the refusal.

It is the part of you that remains when you are angry and still chooses not to hit. When you are anonymous and still chooses not to cheat. When you could exploit and still chooses not to, not because you fear punishment, not because you crave praise, not because you think a cosmic judge is watching, but because there is a line you will not cross without ceasing to be someone you can live with.

This also reveals why my own recent break felt so violent.

I didn’t just see cruelty, I saw pleasure.

And pleasure is not an accident, pleasure is not a lapse, pleasure is not “I didn’t know.” Pleasure is a statement about compatibility.

A person who enjoys another human being’s terror is living inside a world-model where that terror is either not real, or not relevant, or deserved, or funny, or nostalgic. They can live in that world, it is habitable to them.

I cannot.

And that is not moral superiority, it is not a halo, it is not proof that I am “good.”

It is simply a fact about what kind of world my integrity requires in order to function.

If the surrounding world shifts far enough toward cruelty-as-entertainment, toward dehumanisation-as-hobby, toward permission-as-joy, then my integrity becomes incompatible with reality. Not because I’m delicate, but because the architecture I need is no longer supported by the ground.

That’s what I meant when I said the cake is a lie.

Not that kindness never existed, not that morality is fake in every sense, not that everyone is secretly evil.

But that I mistook a shared interface for a shared interior.

I assumed the constraints I live by were universal, or at least broadly distributed. I assumed most people’s “no” came from the same place mine does: an internal binding, an integrity morality.

And what I realised, watching that image circulate with fondness, was that for many people the binding is external. It is coordination, it is surveillance, it is “don’t do that because we don’t do that,” which is very different from “I cannot do that and still be me.”

Remove the network, remove the witness, remove the social cost. Add permission, add a target labelled “enemy,” add a narrative that reclassifies pain as deserved. –

And the redraw begins.

Empathy routes away, reason writes patch notes. The world becomes compatible with things that should not be compatible with any world that still calls itself civilised.

So where does that leave me, finally, after all this pacing?

It leaves me with something simultaneously bleak and stabilising.

Morality is not a cosmic law I can appeal to, it is not a guarantee built into human nature, it is not a universal experience shared equally among brains, cultures, or contexts.

Morality is a constraint system humans build, sometimes wisely, sometimes violently, sometimes beautifully, sometimes as camouflage.

Empathy is the machinery that can make other people real to you, but it is variable, state-dependent, and easily rerouted.

Integrity is self-binding. The internal architecture that holds when empathy shifts and when permission arrives.

And if there is any hope in that, it is not in trusting that people are good by default, because that’s the old illusion and I can’t climb back inside it.

The hope is in something more stubborn and more personal, that integrity can be authored, it can be built, and it can be reinforced until it doesn’t require an audience.

Not perfect, not saintly, not immune to weather.

But durable enough that when the world tries to redraw itself into something uninhabitable, you can at least say – I see what you are asking me to become, and I refuse.

Because in the end, I think that’s what morality is for me.

Not a truth floating in space.

But a line, a refusal, a world I can live in.

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