 An agent’s integrity, in Williams’ sense, is his ability to originate actions, to further his own initiatives, purposes or concerns, and thus to be something more than a conduit for the furtherance of others’ initiatives, purposes or concerns—including, for example and in particular, those which go with the impartial view. Moreover, integrity is an essential component of character, since, for Williams, an agent’s character is identical to their set of deep projects and commitments. Williams’ point, then, is that unless any particular agents are allowed to initiate actions and to have “ground projects”, then either the agents under this prohibition will be subjects for manipulation by other agents who are allowed to have ground projects—the situation of ideological oppression. Or else, if every agent lies under this prohibition and all agents are made to align themselves only with the ground projects of “the impartial point of view”, there will not be any agents. To put it another way, all will be ideologically oppressed, but by the ideology itself rather than by another agent or group of agents who impose this ideology. For all agents will then have lost their integrity, in the sense that no single agent will be an unimpaired and individual whole with projects of his own that he might identify himself with; all agents will have to abandon all “ground projects” except the single project that utilitarianism gives them, that of maximising utility by whatever means looks most efficient, and to order all their doings around no other initiatives except those that flow from this single project. What we previously thought of as individual agents will be subsumed as parts of a single super-agent—the utilitarian collective, if you like—which will pursue the ends of impartial morality without any special regard for the persons who compose it, and which is better understood as a single super-agent than as a group of separate agents who cooperate; rather like a swarm of bees or a nest of ants.