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⁵ Compare Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), p. 398Google Scholar, for an example of being asked to imagine too much. Laurence Thomas has suggested that no analogous problem need arise for ethical imagination, noting the differences between the virtues possible for human beings and the Vulcans of Star Trek in his “Virtue Ethics and the Arc of Universality” (Philosophical Psychology, 9 [1996]: 26–32), esp. pp. 31–32Google Scholar. In any event, extravagant imagination should not be a problem for my request to imagine an event that could occur at almost any time, any more than it was the problem for Ponce de Leon's quest for the Fountain of Youth.

⁶ It is therefore not a drawback to acknowledge that many scientists regard genetic immortality as no less improbable than teleportation. See Ol-shansky, S. Jay, Hayflick, Leonard, and Carnes, Bruce A., “No Truth to the Fountain of Youth,” Scientific American, 286, 6 (06 2002): 92–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁹ The quoted sentence is from Williams, Bernard, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Contrast Nagel, Thomas's question in The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 224Google Scholar (note): “Can it be that he is more easily bored than I?”

¹⁰ Notably by Christine Overall in chaps. 2 and 3 of Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Nick Bostrum also argues against “bioconservatives” who fear that technologies that “may make us … ‘posthuman,’ beings who may have indefinite health-spans,” in “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity,” Bioethics, 19 (2005): 202–14.Google Scholar

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¹⁸ Annas, Julia addresses Johnson, 's point in this way in “Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 78 (2004): 61–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Compare Hampshire, Stuart, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

²⁰ Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 413.Google Scholar

²¹ Johnson, , “Virtue and Right,” p. 830.Google Scholar

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²³ Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Devils (The Possessed), translated by Magar-shack, D. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 612.Google Scholar

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²⁵ Hampshire depicts this inevitability in Morality and Conflict. See also Taylor, Charles, “The Diversity of Goods,” Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Both stress the points that there is no unity of the virtues and no single interpretation of any virtue.

²⁶ The thesis may not apply to the cardinal Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. See Geach, Peter, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

²⁷ Examples include Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Hallward, P. (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 4–15Google Scholar; Bentham, Jeremy, “Nonsense Upon Stilts,” in Schofield, P. et al. , eds., Rights, Representation, and Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 328–37Google Scholar; and MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 64–67.Google Scholar

²⁸ Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 101–102Google Scholar, and Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, 2nd ed., edited by Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 289.Google Scholar

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³⁰ Alternatively, “the doctrine of the immortal soul makes clear that everyone gets an afterlife, though only some will enjoy it.” See Segal, Alan F., Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 504.Google Scholar

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³² Gewirth, Alan, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 71–73.Google Scholar

³³ Ibid., p. 136.

³⁴ Cf. Bacon, Francis, “Of Death,” in Essays (London: Oxford University Press 1966).Google Scholar

³⁵ Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 6Google Scholar

³⁶ These conditions are set out in ibid., pp. 130–39.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 204.

³⁸ Cf. Gewirth, , The Community of Rights, p. 41Google Scholar. Of course, the critique of Gewirth's Kantian rationalism deserves elaboration, some of which I try to provide in “Principles and Customs in Moral Philosophy,” Metaphilosophy, 24 (1993): 14–32Google Scholar, and, more generally in “Rights Thinking,” Philosophy, 72 (1997): 29–58.Google Scholar

³⁹ For the locus classicus of this view, see Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 477–501.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ In principle, the scope of the right to exist could be extended to all animals, all living beings, or even all corporeal things. Cf. Simpson, , “Rights Thinking,” pp. 48–55.Google Scholar