¹ Proust, Marcel, Albertine Disparue (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1992), p. 83Google Scholar. “In exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and which we vainly give ourselves so much trouble to try to discover, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.”

² Johnson, Samuel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759; London: Penguin, 1976), ch. 16.Google Scholar

³ This is the theme of Nussbaum, Martha's magnificent book The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

⁴ In this essay I elaborate a thesis which I first sketched in The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 95.Google Scholar

⁵ Cf. Taylor, Charles's idea of “strong evaluation” in “What Is Human Agency?”Google Scholar in Taylor, , Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 15–44.Google Scholar

⁶ See in particular Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), section 63.Google Scholar

⁷ Plato, , Apology, 38a.Google Scholar

⁸ Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 4, 19.Google Scholar

⁹ Plato, , Republic, 618cGoogle Scholar. The Myth of Er describes an afterworld where souls, who are about to be reborn, choose the sort of life which they will lead.

¹⁰ Aristotle, , Eudemian Ethics, trans. Woods, Michael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), Book 1, ch. 2, 1214b7–13.Google Scholar

¹¹ Cooper, John M., Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 125.Google Scholar

¹² For elements of a bibliography, see Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 129–30.Google Scholar

¹³ I shall be examining Rawls's notion of a rational life plan as an overall moral ideal, abstracting from the political role he gives it in A Theory of justice. In later writings, Rawls has said that he wishes that notion, along with the associated account of goodness as rationality, to be understood simply as part of a political conception, and not as an element of a comprehensive moral doctrine (Rawls, , Political Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], pp. 176–77n.)Google Scholar. I am unsure whether my criticisms touch the more circumscribed status he now assigns to the idea of a life plan, or whether, more generally, they have an important bearing on the foundations of a liberal theory of justice. Here I am pursuing a topic in ethics, and my reason for taking Rawls's views out of their political context is that they constitute by far the most powerful statement of the outlook I mean to question.

¹⁴ Royce, Josiah, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908), p. 168.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 408; see also pp. 421, 424.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 93, 409, 548–60.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 399.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 408. More exactly, a person's plan is “subjectively rational” if it is based on an accurate conception of his existing wants and the available knowledge concerning the consequences of his actions; it is also “objectively rational” if the future actually goes as he supposes (pp. 417, 422).

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 416–17.

²⁰ See ibid., p. 420.

²¹ Ibid., p. 422. A rational person, Rawls there observes, “does what seems best at the time, and if his beliefs later prove to be mistaken with untoward results, it is through no fault of his own. There is n o cause for self-reproach.”

²² A fine development of this objection is to be found in Slote, Michael, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chs. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

²³ Cf. Nozick, Robert's reflections on the “narrative direction” of the happy life, in The Examined Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), pp. 100–102.Google Scholar

²⁴ In his presentation of the objection just described, Slote introduces some interesting criticisms of this assumption as well (Goods and Virtues, pp. 43–45)Google Scholar. There is also a very suggestive critique of this assumption in Seel, Martin, Versuch über die Form des Glücks (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), pp. 102–13.Google Scholar

²⁵ Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ I develop the point somewhat in The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly in ch. 2.Google Scholar

²⁷ Williams, Bernard, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 170CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Williams, , Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 67–69.Google Scholar

²⁸ For further reflections along these lines, see my “Denken urtd Handeln,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 45, no. 2 (1997), pp. 183–95.Google Scholar

²⁹ Williams, , Moral Luck, pp. 34–36.Google Scholar

³⁰ Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 407.Google Scholar

³¹ See Elster, Jon, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 423.Google Scholar