On the Integrity of Life
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with hazard and even the wretchedness of existence is bound to moral dis-tinctions. Good and evil, right and wrong, and other terms designate or name what crystallizes and makes life whole or, conversely, what demeans, A third and crucial point of Buber’s insight: the work of freedom fraught
destroys, and disintegrates life. Oddly enough, actions and relations that pro-mote and ensure life in oneself and others bring a new coherence, a new form, to human life. The “good” is the elusive and tentative unity of virtue and well-being in human existence. Evil rips individual and social existence apart
and, through their disintegration, brings life to an end, to death. The idea of the integrity of life must clarify the meaning of “goodness” in its various dimensions and how these cohere with the wholeness of life.The integrity of life bundles together ideas important to religious and
non-religious humanism. It does so without pitting theological and human-istic outlooks against one another. Like neohumanists, the shift is from the sole priority of self-realization found in classical humanism to the “finality of the other.” Theological humanism presses that insight further. Human
transcendence reaches the other, but then also to the integrity of life and the presence of the divine known within, but not limited to, specific religious communities.The integrity of life means, first, the integration of distinct levels of goods
into some livable form, always threatened and always vulnerable, but without which personal or social life is impoverished. The integrity of life also requires, second, a life dedicated to respecting and enhancing the proper integration of those goods and thereby a commitment to the well-being of
other forms of life. ness that is the proper aim of human existence with all of its vulnerability and fallibility. Our account of the human good proceeds, then, in terms of these meanings of the “integrity of life.” That is followed with an explana-Spiritual integrity is thereby the wholeness and steadfast-
tion of the imperative of responsibility as the norm for right actions and social relations that contribute to the integrity of life.Vitalities and Vulnerabilities of Goods
From Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, moderns like Joseph Butler and current thinkers, many have noted that human beings are situated in existence through interlocking modes of life, each marked by vitalities and vulnerabilities. (^4) Human beings are living creatures within and not against the
wide community of finite life on this planet. We are and also threaten our existence through relations with others. Human beings social beings who sustain