Democracies seem to pit civility and integrity against each other. If I draw on my religious, moral, or philosophical commitment to advocate for laws that conflict with your commitment, I maintain my integrity at the cost of violating your integrity. Yet if I try to be more civil and only engage in political actions that do not depend on my commitment, I seem to throw away my integrity to my commitment. 

But some citizens can escape this dilemma. Drawing on the example of the Amish, my dissertation locates promising but unexplored political space where citizens can achieve both unfaltering civility and uncompromising integrity. This space is possible because many robust religious, moral, or philosophical commitments have no reason to require their adherents to legally impose their requirements on nonadherents. Citizens who make these commitments comply with political liberalism’s restraints without compromising their integrity. But this does not mean that these citizens are political liberals. Indeed, these nonperfectionist integralists – citizens of integrity who comply with political liberalism’s restraints – cannot be political liberals because the publicly justified laws of political liberal democracies are unresponsive to features of their commitments that they cannot translate into public reasons. These citizens can therefore neither endorse political liberalism’s framework of legal justification nor publicly justify their refusal to comply when that framework generates laws that conflict with their commitments. Meanwhile, a right to conscientious objection conditioned by the same publicly conditioned consensus only kicks this problem down the road. The troubling result is that citizens of civility and integrity who uphold political liberalism’s values and comply with its restraints cannot endorse political liberalism – and they occupy an insecure place in the political liberal polity. 

My continuing research further investigates this space along two tracks – one that considers the position of nonperfectionist integralists within liberal democracies, and one that evaluates whether nonperfectionist integralism might serve as a democratic framework in its own right.