3.

The interests of the person of integrity associated with his or her reasons for living can be called categorical interests. They are interests apart from which there is a serious loss in the unity and meaning of one's life from one's own point of view. Sometimes this loss of meaning results in a loss of the will to live at all.

Aristotle shows a keen awareness of these kinds of interests in the Eudemian Ethics , book 1:5, where he says:

About many things it is not easy to judge correctly, but it is especially difficult to do so in regard to that which everyone thinks is most easy and within anyone's capacity to know; namely, which of the things in life is worth choosing, and such that one who obtains it will have his desire fulfilled. After all, many things that happen are such as to induce people to abandon life—disease, extremes of pain, storms, for example; so that it is evident that, on account of those things at any rate, it would, given the choice, have been worth choosing not to be born in the first place. Again, [there is] the life which men lead while they are still children. For no one in his right mind would tolerate a return to that sort of existence. Moreover, many of the things that involve neither pleasure nor pain, or involve pleasure, but of a reprehensible sort, are enough to make not existing at all preferable to being alive. In general, if we put together all the things that everyone does or undergoes, but not voluntarily (because they are not done or undergone for their own sake), and an infinite stretch of time were provided in addition, no one would choose in order to have them to be alive, rather than not. Nor again would anyone who was not a complete slave prefer to live solely for the pleasure associated with nutrition and sex, if all the pleasures were removed that knowing or seeing or any of the other senses bestow upon human beings; for it is evident that, for a man who made such a choice as this for himself, it would make no difference whether he were born a beast or a man. Certainly the ox in Egypt, which they honor as the god Apis, has a greater abundance of several of such things than many sovereigns. Similarly, no one would prefer life for the pleasure of sleep; for what difference is there between sleeping without ever waking from one's first day to one's last, over a period of ten thousand years—or however many one likes—and living the life of a plant? . . .

They say that Anaxagoras, when someone raised just these puzzles

and asked him what it was for which a person would choose to be born rather than not, answered that it would be "in order to apprehend the heavens and the order in the whole universe." (EE 1215b:15-1216a:15)^[2]

Notice that the concern in this passage is not with what makes one kind of life more worth living than another but with what makes living preferable to death. Aristotle is here concerned with the most fundamental interests that make the prospects of life at all alluring. To be sure, we would not all give Anaxagoras's answer, but the person of integrity has some such answer.

Following Bernard Williams, we may call the objects of categorical interests ground projects.^[3] They are ground projects because they serve to ground the unity and meaning of one's life from one's own point of view. In fact, they are the grounding necessary for a person's having a point of view at all such that we can attribute one basic, significantly integrated self to that person. This is in contrast to attributing no or many selves to a human. And the person of integrity is the human to whom we attribute at least one, and no more than one, basic, significantly integrated self.

Of course, people do not, in any self-conscious way, usually think of those things that play the role of ground projects as being the means to unity and meaning in their lives. They simply care about things in a way that brings focus and meaning. Something is valued categorically in this sense, then, when it is what life is most centrally about for a person and is such that its loss brings with it, at minimum, a serious loss in the coherence of life or, at maximum, a loss in the allure of life itself. The objects of categorical interests, then, appear within one's deliberative field in a very fundamental way (and depending on one's character they attach one to items in the world, a defining mark of objective eudaimonism).

Imagine a woman dedicated to being an excellent surgeon to the exclusion of all else. As far back as she can remember, she has always pursued

[2] . Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics: Books I, II, and VIII , trans. Michael Woods, Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4–5.

[3] . See Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). See also Williams's use of the concept of categorical desires in "Persons, Character, and Morality," in Moral Luck , esp. p. 11. I attempt to develop the notion of categorical interests in a way that is more closely tied both to psychological phenomena and to different kinds of reasons for action than I find in Williams and to show that we can say more about our normative concepts and how we think about resolving disputes than Williams does.

this goal, sacrificing many other valuable aspects of life along the way. After several years of medical practice and at the pinnacle of her success, she discovers that within a short time she will be permanently blind.

The trauma of her discovery is easy to imagine. Her life is in shambles because she has lost her ground project and with it her point of view toward her life and its future. A guiding perspective is impossible because she lacks a point of view from which to assess her life, except in terms of what has been lost. The thought, "I am the person who has lost that which is most important to me, my surgical practice," is what we may call her identifying thought, a thought that need not be self-conscious but implicit within a person's overall psychology. It is the kind of thought that allows a person to express identification with his or her life and its components. In this sense, an identifying thought is an answer to the question, Who am I?

Of course, the question, Who am I? is not unambiguous. It is important, then, to be as clear as possible on what it does and does not mean. It is not a question regarding the identification and reidentification of particulars, as applied to persons. The person who suffers puzzlement regarding the question as intended here is not confused about whether she is Sue or Sarah or Jane or Jill. She might know very well that she is Sue and nonetheless be puzzled in a way that raises the question, Who am I?

Rather than reflect puzzlement over the reidentification of particulars in this sense, the question reflects a different quandary. It is the quandary over how to identify with one's life so that it provides a sense of who one is in terms of which one's past, present, and future are comprehensible as a significantly integrated whole. The puzzlement arises in contexts in which an agent faces the future without adequate direction. The need is to bring to bear thoughts of oneself and what one values to resolve the issue of direction, where there is an absence of the relevant sorts of thoughts that will provide this guidance into the future. The thoughts that do provide this sense of self and that prevent or resolve such puzzlement I am calling the agent's identifying thoughts.

Further clarification of what is meant by an agent's identifying thoughts is revealed in the experience of emotions of self-assessment.^[4] A positive example is that of pride. It is in terms of the thought that one has exceeded some minimally acceptable standard of expectations that one experiences the emotion of pride. As such, it is a thought that identifies the agent as one worthy of special self-affirmation. A negative example is that of self-

[4] . see Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

contempt, where the thought that one is a person of a certain sort identifies one as unworthy of respect.

As with emotions of self-assessment, certain interests are possible only with identifying thoughts that reflect a conception of oneself as a significantly unified personality over time. The interest in being a good parent is an excellent example. Absent other concerns, a person having the interests and character of a good parent would be puzzled regarding the direction of life at the unexpected loss of his or her child. Other interests, however, cannot play this role in a person's identifying thoughts. Under normal conditions, the thought that one has not had quite enough sleep does not raise the puzzlement over who one is and the direction of life, even where there is some interest in a bit more sleep.

Note that a person, such as the woman in our example, who has completely lost her ground project has only a backward-looking identifying thought. As such, it gives her no direction for her life. It gives her no identity in terms of her future. It tells her who she was rather than who she is and who she is to be. Such disarray in terms of her identifying thoughts reveals that her loss was that of a ground project, rather than something of less importance.

To have reasons for living, then, she needs an identifying thought that directs her toward the future. In this sense, her identifying thoughts must be motivating ones, the kinds of thoughts generated by a positive interest in life. Unless motivating thoughts emerge, there will soon be no identifying ones. For the emergence of new identifying thoughts requires the appearance in her life of a new ground project in which she has a categorical interest.

Not all identifying thoughts, however, are either backward looking or based on motivating categorical interests. Some such thoughts express categorical aversions. These are aversions to actions or ways of life that have serious consequences for the agent. The consequences are that if the person performed such actions or participated in these ways of life serious disunity of the self and loss of meaning in the person's life would result. This might extend to a loss of a will to live at all. The cliché, "I would rather be dead than red," is putatively an identifying thought that expresses a categorical aversion. But like purely backward-looking identifying thoughts, these thoughts do not express reasons for living. Only motivating categorical interests in ground projects can provide this. A person of integrity, as we will see in later chapters, has both categorical interests and categorical aversions. Yet one's life has categorical value from one's own point of view only if one has a categorical motivating interest in a ground project. Within such a

project and among such interests might be the interest in being an agent of pure practical reason and governing one's life in accordance with the CI procedure. If so, then such an interest serves the most fundamental integrative task of that psychology. There is nothing, then, about the concepts of categorical interests and categorical aversions as employed here that rules out Kantian internalism in advance of the application of the integration test.