We all strive to have integrity to our commitments. But when democracies give political influence to citizens with opposing religious, moral, or philosophical commitments, integrity seems to come at the expense of civility. If I advocate with integrity for a commitment that conflicts with yours, I seek to compel you to submit to laws that your own commitments may give you no reason to follow. I thus preserve my integrity only by violating your integrity, a result that dissolves our political relationship into alienation, hostility, and oppression.

But my dissertation challenges this tension between integrity and civility by examining citizens whose religious, moral, or philosophical commitments do not require them to legally impose their terms on citizens with opposing views. I consider examples such as Amish citizens, who maintain their integrity precisely by refusing to legally compel citizens who are not Amish to comply with their religious commitment. I argue that the commitments of many citizens are compatible with this model of political engagement – and that these citizens are in a fortunate and promising position: for them, unfaltering civility is compatible with uncompromising integrity. But citizens like these are also interesting, I argue, because instead of falling into either of the conventional categories in political theory, they pose incisive challenges for both.

On the one hand, citizens who draw on their commitments to advocate for laws that their neighbors have no reason to accept are perfectionists. Perfectionists insist that restraints on their political advocacy would unfairly violate their integrity, but citizens like the Amish prove that integrity is compatible with restraint – and indicate that the problem actually lies with the uncivil requirements of perfectionists’ commitments. On the other hand, political liberals argue that in order to reject perfectionism, citizens must endorse political terms that can be justified by public reasons that any citizen could accept. But for citizens I call nonperfectionist integralists, endorsing public reason is both unnecessary and impossible: unnecessary because they can achieve civility without endorsing political liberalism and merely by drawing on their commitments – and impossible because the balance of public reason is prone to conflict with their commitments. The result is that even though they are model political liberal citizens, nonperfectionist integralists cannot endorse political liberalism, and they occupy a vulnerable and unstable position in the political liberal polity.

Political liberals seek to avert this outcome by allowing nonperfectionist integralists whose commitments clash with the law’s requirements to claim the status of conscientious objector. But I argue that a right to conscientious objection only kicks the problem down the road: insofar as it too is conditioned on political liberalism’s terms, this right is just as alien and unresponsive to citizens’ commitments as political liberalism’s laws. The result is that conscientious objection is not adequate to guarantee that the political liberal polity can keep citizens’ integrity secure.

When they cannot have both, political liberals choose civility and perfectionists choose integrity. But my dissertation shows that there are citizens who can achieve both civility and integrity. These citizens are neither political liberals nor perfectionists, however; instead, they suggest a framework for democratic engagement that has unexplored advantages over existing models. Political liberals have understandably tended to put civility first and draw political theoretic implications from there. But the conclusion that nonperfectionist integralists fall outside political liberalism’s constituency indicates that theorists who begin with civility end up leaving citizens’ commitments behind. Yet this conclusion also suggests that theorists do not need to be shy about putting citizens’ commitments first. Rather than approaching citizens’ commitments with a wary sheepishness that consigns them to a subordinate or private place, nonperfectionist integralists can position commitments that are compatible with civility at the center of both the theory and public life of liberal democracies, then focus their efforts on fostering conditions in which citizens who make these commitments can also live with integrity.