PART 4—
THE GOODS OF ACTIVITY:
THE PLACE OF THE AESTHETIC IN PRACTICAL REASON

Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs. He had to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed by many of its professors to be work at all.

Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances: some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above ground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all. The spirits of the great men had disappeared.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

In part 3, we saw that the goods of love provide a basis for many of the social norms we have. That we are creatures who care deeply about others in ways indicative of love is established in the facts of our psychology regarding our capacity for loneliness. It is this natural foundation that makes it crucial to any normative theory that it accommodate in a nondistorting way the normative thoughts of love. Those theories, like those of the ancient Stoics, that would have us extirpate our capacities for love are doomed to irrelevance because they cannot accommodate the goods most central to

the meaning of life for most people, especially those we admire.^[1] We have, then, in the case of a good number of our normative beliefs a fairly straightforward naturalistic explanation of why they would emerge in the lives of human beings. That there are other normative thoughts that are not accounted for in terms of any direct function of our capacity for intimacy is clear in those normative thoughts that derive from our notions of respect. Still, it is in terms of our proclivity for self-assessment that we find an explanation for why these impartial norms emerge. Without some foothold in our psychological capacities, explanations of the emergence of our normative conceptual schemes are mysterious, inadequate, or forced like a foot into a shoe too small. It has been one of the goals of part 2 and part 3 to show how this is true regarding the normative thoughts of respect and love when pressed into a Kantian framework. It has also been a goal of these parts of the book to show that the Aristotelian framework when properly revised provides relief in the way that only a proper fit can. Because practical reason emerges within the context of living a life, the task of practical reason must be defined in terms of the meaning of life from the perspective of the agent in whose life practical problems arise. It is for this reason that the criteria of finality and self-sufficiency fit the kind of problems relevant to practical reason. And it is because we are creatures who have the capacity for loneliness and the proclivity for self-assessment that the meaningfulness of life generates the normative thoughts of love and respect. Because we are creatures of this sort, we and others appear within our deliberative field in the way that we do.

There are, however, other normative thoughts that do not emerge from these concerns, especially for the agent of integrity in the thick sense. The thoughts I have in mind have to do with what I call the goods of activity. For these goods, we need at least a working taxonomy, a phenomenology of how they appear within an agent's deliberative field, an explanation of how they come to factor into practical reason, and an account of the normative thoughts they generate.

A rough designation of the activities I have in mind can be gained by thinking about how certain activities are central to integrity and practical reason. As human goods, the activities I have in mind are central in four ways. First, they are central in terms of their intrinsic worth to the agent, independent of how they reflect on the agent's conception of himself or her-

[1] . For a modern attempt at formulating a Stoic view that does not employ the extirpation strategy, see Lawrence C. Becker, A New Stoicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

self. Second, they are central to how the agent views his or her self-esteem. Third, they are central to the agent's view of how others regard him or her as a person worthy of esteem. And fourth, they are central to many ways in which the agent views others with esteem. The discussion that follows begins with an analysis of what I call the independent goods of activity. These are goods that attach to activities that have a value independent of the esteem they confer on the agent engaging in them. The discussion then proceeds to an analysis of the value of esteem as it is dependent on the agent's engaging in activities that are independently good. The latter topic involves the agent's commitment to excellence.

I am concerned to counter two Kantian themes relating to the goods of activity. The first is the Kantian account of how value comes to be a part of the world. In this regard, I address a view defended by Christine Korsgaard that value is the product of autonomous choice, understood along Kantian lines. The second involves the Kantian attempt to account for the commitment to excellence as a duty to develop our talents. In this regard, I focus on Marcia Baron's development of the Kantian notion of imperfect duties and her denial of the category of the supererogatory. In both cases, I contrast the Kantian conceptual scheme with a naturalistic account of our normative thoughts regarding the goods of activity and excellence that is plausibly Aristotelian. According to the latter account, the independent goods of activity have their value in the fact that they are natural to us in a way that neither inactivity nor other activities are. It is because the independent goods of activity have this value prior to choice that makes them the rational objects of choice, and this is contrary to Korsgaard's view that only rational choice confers value. Against Baron, I argue that though there is room for thoughts about an obligation to develop our talents, this does not account very well for our deepest thoughts about excellence. I argue that just as it is our capacities for love and loneliness that, in part, shape the kind of integration problems we face regarding our social nature, it is our capacity for boredom, along with the capacities that underwrite that capacity, and the engagement in certain kinds of activities for their own sake that give rise to the normative thoughts related to the goods of activity. It is in understanding how the goods of activity emerge within an agent's deliberative field and how they are integrated through the criteria of finality and self-sufficiency that makes the Aristotelian account of practical reason most fitting in regard to them.

Before proceeding, however, a note is in order on the extensive set of distinctions necessary for the analysis. I have struggled to contain technical vocabulary and distinctions to a minimum. Nevertheless, the set of distinc-

tions that remains is fairly extensive and the vocabulary at points becomes technical. I have been unable to avoid this entirely, and the reason is to be found in the need for thoroughness. The variety of goods that fall under the heading of part 4 is extensive and complex. Failure to understand the complexity of these goods results in a failure to understand practical reason in human beings. Hence it is crucial to have a taxonomy that is true to the phenomena of practical experience. Detail, then, becomes absolutely essential to successful inquiry, even if keeping up with the details is sometimes taxing. I will try to provide mechanisms to reduce such taxation, but I cannot eliminate the need for work on the part of the reader. The subject matter just is complicated. Although I cannot pretend to be a Darwin or an Aristotle, I am guided by their commitment to a notion of theoretical adequacy that refuses to compromise the intricate details of the data.

I begin with the taxonomical task and some general distinctions regarding the possible activities of any particular agent. The first general distinction to note is this: one's engaging in an activity because one has the deontic belief that one ought to engage in that activity and one's engaging in an activity for its own sake without any such belief. Deontologists might object that doing x because one believes one ought to do x is to be doing x for its own sake. This may be true, but surely some cases of doing something for its own sake, like playing the piano, would not be cases of doing it because one believes one ought to. Thus we can distinguish between deontic and nondeontic activities. The latter are done for their own sake and have intrinsic rather than mere instrumental value to the agent, but they are not activities thought to be obligatory by the agent; if left undone by the agent, self-reproach would not be forthcoming on reflection.

Here I distinguish these activities primarily to put half of them aside for the moment. I want to put aside deontic activities and merely instrumental activities because they are not directly germane to the goods of activity as independent goods. Rather, the activities that I have in mind, as human goods, are those that are nondeontic activities of intrinsic value to a human agent.

For purposes of the discussion, I divide the independent goods of activity into three main groups: solitary individual activities, solitary benevolent activities, and shared activities. The first two I discuss in chapter 16; the third, in chapter 17. In each case, I begin with a general characterization of such activities and proceed to an account of subdivisions within each group, analyzing their role in the thick conception of integrity. But before turning to these tasks, I must make two further sets of distinctions.

The first set involves a division of activities into productive, contribu-

tion, and accomplishment activities. Productive activities are intended to result in a product. Building a house, cooking a meal, and writing a book are examples. Contribution activities, on the other hand, aim at enhancing the good of someone or some thing and need not involve a distinct product. Feeding the baby, advancing science, and protecting the environment are good examples. Of course, any productive activity might also be intended to contribute to the good of someone or some thing. In such case it is a productive/contribution activity. An example might be writing a book to advance clinical understanding of mental health. Finally, accomplishment activities result in some achievement, which is not necessarily a distinct product. Nor, as an achievement, is it necessarily a better state of wellbeing for someone or some thing. Good examples are playing a game, fighting a war, and earning a degree. Winning the game, winning the war, receiving the degree are the achievements—achievements specifiable apart from the well-being of those involved in these accomplishments. Nevertheless, many accomplishment activities are either productive or contributory, or include all three elements.

Another set of distinctions, which is neither exclusive nor exhaustive, is between work activities, play activities, and creative activities. In a vast number of cases, the distinction between work and play is very difficult to make out. What I will attempt to do is to make out distinctions that apply at least in the extremes. My purpose is not to come up with some essentialist definition of the difference between work and play but to pick out phenomena worthy of our attention given the current inquiry.

A work activity as I have in mind is an activity that involves labor to some degree. This contrasts with play activities that are done leisurely for their amusement or recreational features. Creative activities are those that involve the human urge to create, explore, and discover and may or may not involve labor. For an activity to involve labor is for it to involve some significant degree of taxing effort, though not necessarily of the physically taxing kind. For an activity to be done leisurely is for it to be untaxing in this sense. The distinction I am trying to capture is that between an agent's being in different dispositional states during the activity. On the one hand is a state of relative relaxation during the activity; on the other is a state that involves some noticeable taxing or draining effort. Another way of putting the distinction is that labor involves some degree of painstakingness, whereas play is lighthearted and free of painstakingness, or relatively so. The vagueness of the distinction is inherent in the phenomena. Just where the effort in an activity ceases to be leisurely or playful and when it becomes labor is not always easy to discern. But it is often clearly discern-

ible, and this has something to do with how taxing the effort involved in the activity is. That it is taxing, however, is no reason for thinking that it is not fulfilling.

Perhaps a way of understanding the distinction between work and play is in one interpretation of Adam and Eve's fall from the Garden of Eden. According to the story in Genesis (2:5–3:24), Adam's punishment included the penalty that what once came to him with ease would now come to him only by the sweat of his brow. We might interpret this to mean that before the fall, Adam and Eve's activities were entirely of the playful sort. No taxing effort was involved at all. Whereas after the fall, what was once gained with mere playful effort would now require dreaded labor.

This interpretation assumes that all effort is either of the playful sort or dreaded labor. But it is simply false that all taxing effort is dreaded labor and that all labor is dreaded. Besides, it is implausible to think of Adam and Eve as human and of the Garden as heavenly if Adam and Eve could do nothing other than play all the time. Surely there was some work that required meaningful labor. For it is certainly an odd thought to humans that meaningful labor is a punishment while unending play is paradise. Still, many equate "labor" with "laborious" effort, and thus with some notion of dreaded effort. But, clearly, this is a mistake. Some effort is intrinsically meaningful; some is dreaded; and some of each involves labor. There is no reason, then, to think that talk of meaningful labor is at all odd. Playful effort, on the other hand, is not a type of labor in either sense. This is not because it is not meaningful but because it is not taxing in the relevant sense.

Thus what we have now is an understanding of human activities that divide into production activities, contribution activities, and accomplishment activities. These involve either labor or leisure and are either creative or routine. Production, contribution, and accomplishment activities are sometimes goods of work, sometimes goods of play, sometimes goods of creativity, and sometimes goods that exhibit some combination of these factors.

Yet it might be thought that goods involving production, contribution, and accomplishment are not of philosophical relevance here. Such activities, after all, are those an agent values for their ends—for their products, their contributions, and their achievements—rather than for their intrinsic value. This objection, however, is misplaced.

To be sure, failure in productive activity is a source of frustration to the person engaging in it. But this does not show that the activity is of mere instrumental value to the agent engaging in that activity when it is successfully productive. Two facts illustrate this. The first is that an agent values the products of some activities because of the kind of effort that goes into

making them and because the products express and illustrate such effort. This is especially true of creative productive activities, such as artistic activity, for example. It is also true of productive play activities such as a child making sand castles on the beach.

The second fact that illustrates the intrinsic value of productive activities is that even where the products of such activities have instrumental value, they are often more easily and readily accessible through means other than the associated activities. The houses and meals that result from building and cooking clearly have instrumental value to the agents engaging in these productive activities. Yet there are often much easier ways of getting a house than by building it oneself or of getting a meal than by cooking it oneself. Here the presence of instrumental concerns does not vitiate the intrinsic value of productive activity.

The observations regarding the intrinsic value of productive activities apply in part or in whole to contribution activities and to accomplishment activities as well. Contribution activities always have an instrumental aspect to them. Still the improved or maintained states of their beneficiaries are sometimes very difficult to distinguish from the capacity to engage in the activities themselves. Jogging, for example, might be valued in part because it contributes to the maintenance or improvement of one's health. But the intrinsic enjoyment of one's health might sometimes be nothing more than the enjoyment of the activities that exemplify that state of health. A jogger's appreciation of his or her health may be nothing more than the appreciation of jogging itself. Yet, even where contribution activities have an intended benefit distinct from the ability to engage in the activities themselves, the presence of instrumental concerns does not preclude intrinsic value. Nowhere is this more evident than in the nondeontic activities associated with personal love. Parenting activities actually derive their intrinsic value from the fact that they are contributory to the well-being of the child. The interest in being the benefactor of the child as a source of nurturing clearly illustrates this. It is not simply that the child's welfare needs are met but that some of these needs are met through the activities of the parent, though they might have been more easily, but not better, met by others. A parent who does not intrinsically value some of these activities independent of any sense of obligation simply does not have parental love for the child. The same is true of a parent whose dispositions are sensitive only to the results of such activities without any desire to participate in the activities that procure these results.

The achievements of accomplishment activities are not always as distinct from the activities associated with them as one might think. The good

of winning at chess, for example, cannot be specified without a description of the activity of playing chess itself. Such achievement cannot be intrinsically appreciated without an intrinsic appreciation for the activity that culminates in the victory. This is also true of earning a degree. Valuing a degree is one thing; valuing an earned degree is another. In fact, when accomplishment activities are valued intrinsically as nondeontic activities, they are of just this sort. Otherwise, it is only the results of such activities that are valued. Nevertheless, the value of the pursuit of knowledge, for example, does not diminish with the sometimes successful elimination of ignorance. Nor does it diminish when improvements in knowledge serve as stepping-stones to further achievements. Those who appreciate chess know that winning at it improves one's skills and enhances the appreciation of the activity, as long as there is some possibility of losing.

It should be clear then that the intrinsic value of productive activities, contribution activities, and accomplishment activities is not vitiated either by the fact that these activities have goals and ends or by their involving labor. Here I mean merely to assert that these are work activities only when they involve effort that is inconsistent with their being done with complete leisure. They involve some significant degree of taxing effort. Thus a work activity, as an intrinsic good, is inconsistent with an agent's aversion to all nonleisurely, taxing effort in such activity. Should someone be aversive in this way to these activities, either their value to the agent is merely extrinsic or they are not valued as goods of work. Work activities involve some significant degree of taxing effort, and this labor is part of their intrinsic value. Later I will argue that a world without opportunity for such labor would be an intolerable environment for human beings.

I turn now to the discussion of the independent goods of activity, beginning with individual solitary activities. In the course of this discussion, my first critical concern will be to evaluate Korsgaard's conception of value and how it applies to these goods. I will later discuss the topic of excellence and Baron's treatment of the duty to develop our talents.

16.—
Solitary Activities

An activity is solitary if it is either done alone or if done with others, the sharing of the activity (as opposed to its results) has only instrumental significance to them. An activity is an individual one if the agent's interest in it is satisfiable apart from any intrinsic interest in the satisfaction of anyone else's interests. Thus not all solitary activities are individual activities, though some very important ones are. Some solitary activities, for example, do not have independent beneficiaries. In normal circumstances, playing chess with a computer is a good of this sort, because the benefit of the activity accrues only to the agent and the playing of the game is itself the benefit. Such activities we can call solitary individual activities. Other solitary activities do have independent beneficiaries and can appropriately be called solitary benevolent activities. Gift giving is often a good example, though there are others, as we will see. Personally benevolent solitary activities have intended beneficiaries who are personally related in an agent-centered way to the agent engaging in the activity. A mother nursing her infant is (under appropriate circumstances) an excellent example, as is a father building a playhouse for his children. Impartially benevolent solitary activities have intended beneficiaries who are not personally related to the agent. Providing Christmas gifts for disadvantaged children might take this form. In all these cases, I have in mind nondeontic activities, activities that if left undone would not result in the agent's self-reproach on reflection. We can summarize, then, as follows:

I. Solitary individual activities without independent beneficiaries

II. Solitary benevolent activities with independent beneficiaries

A. Personally benevolent activities with loved ones (family, friends, neighbors) as independent beneficiaries

B. Impartially benevolent activities with familiar and unfamiliar strangers as independent beneficiaries

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an analysis of these activities with an eye to a better understanding of how they find their place within the structure of the psychology of those we admire most. In section 1, I will begin with some comments on our capacities for boredom and how this fact about us is telling in regard to how these activities appear to us as good within our deliberative field. They appear to us, I argue, as worthy of choice in the Aristotelian sense that they, among other things, make life worthy of choice from our point of view. Without some threshold level of these goods, our own agency would not even matter to us. Hence an adequate phenomenology of these values reveals that an ontology of value, like Korsgaard's, that starts with the value of rational agency distorts the value of these goods as they appear within our deliberative field.^[1] Section II discusses solitary individual activities; sections III and IV, personally benevolent solitary activities; and section V, impartially benevolent solitary activities. Only in a later chapter will I discuss Baron's views and the commitment to excellence in some of these activities.

1.

In a delightful essay on boredom, Robert Nisbet has said that humans are apparently unique in the capacity for boredom:

We share with all forms of life periodic apathy, but apathy and boredom are different. Apathy is a depressed immobility that can come upon the organism, whether amoeba or man, when the environment can no longer be adequately assimilated by the nervous system, when the normal signals are either too faint or too conflicting. It is a kind of withdrawal from consciousness. Once sunk in apathy, the organism is inert and remains so until external stimulus jars it loose or else death ensues.

Boredom is much farther up the scale of afflictions than is apathy, and it is probable that only a nervous system as highly developed as man's is even capable of boredom. And within the human species, a level of mentality at least "normal" appears to be a requirement. The moron may know apathy but not boredom. Work of the mindlessly

[1] . See Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 4, 131–66.

repetitive kind, which is perfectly acceptable to the moron, all else being equal, quickly induces boredom in the normally intelligent worker.^[2]

Both apathy and boredom are states of an organism in which the organism cannot take an interest in activity. In the case of apathy, the indifference to activity is because the stimuli within the organism's environment are either too faint or too demanding for the organism to assimilate. Ironically, too much stimuli can shut the organism down. Boredom, however, is not like this. Boredom is not due to faint stimuli or to the bombardment of stimuli but to the lack of anything in the organism's environment that is stimulating even when assimilated. It involves a lack of anything interesting to do.^[3]

There is another difference between apathy and boredom that Nisbet does not mention, though it is implied in other things he says. Apathy is not a state of discontentment, but boredom is. Cats, for example, often seem apathetic but seldom bored. There is a limited range of activities that interest a cat. If these are not available, the cat simply goes to sleep. For the normal human this is not true. When a normal human has had a certain amount of sleep and there are no activities available of interest, eventually the normal human experiences a profound state of discontentment. This discontentment, of course, is the state of boredom, which involves an intense desire for meaningful activity where there is a lack of anything interesting to do.

Some have speculated that our capacity for boredom is in some sense an evolutionary function of the fact that, as a species, we had to develop a highly sophisticated nervous system in order to survive in our natural environment. The capacity for a state of highly pitched attentiveness together with highly developed cognitive powers, so the speculation goes, not only were adaptive to the environment but also rendered us vulnerable to boredom. In fact, boredom itself might be an adaptive mechanism, one that forces human organisms to develop their cognitive and perceptual ca-

[2] . Robert Nisbet, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 23.

[3] . See Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society , ed. Orrin E. Klapp (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986). For a discussion with a focus more directed to physical health, see Augustin M. de la Pena, The Psychobiology of Cancer: Automation and Boredom in Health and Disease (New York: Praeger, 1983). See also, Martin E. P. Seligman, Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (San Fransisco: W. H. Freeman, 1975).

pacities in a way that ensures creative adaptability. Without the restlessness that comes with inactivity, our cognitive and cultural development would have been much different. But be this speculation as it may, we are, in fact, extremely vulnerable to boredom. Left to boredom long and intense enough, we do not simply go to sleep; we go insane.

This fundamental fact about our psychology should play a central role in any conception of the human good and practical reason in at least two ways. The first has to do with the way in which the goods of activity are phenomenologically present within an agent's deliberative field. They must be present as intrinsic goods rather than mere instrumental goods, and they must fall under relevant value categories. Just as our capacities for self-assessment lead to ourselves appearing as ends within our deliberative field, and just as our loving capacities lead to our loved ones appearing there as beloved ends, our capacity for boredom and the capacities that underwrite it lead to some activities appearing within our deliberative field as ends, as activities to pursue for their own sake. Moreover, the goods of activity appear within an agent's deliberative field under relevant value categories. As goods that answer to our capacities for self-assessment, we appear within our deliberative field not only as ends but as ends worthy of respect. As goods that answer to our loving capacities, our loved ones appear within our deliberative field not only as ends but as beloved ends. These are, respectively, the relevant kinds of value categories for these goods. The goods of activity, however, appear within our deliberative field under other value categories. Among them are "interesting," "satisfying," "fascinating," "delightful," "amusing," and "captivating." That is, the nondeontic goods of activity appear within our deliberative field as activities that are good in that they are interesting, satisfying, fascinating, delightful, amusing, or captivating.

For now, the most important thing to notice about the value categories relevant to nondeontic activities is that they are all, in a broad sense, aesthetic categories. To be sure, these categories need not involve the kind of aesthetic appreciation involved in high art; nevertheless, to find something fascinating or delightful, for example, is often (though not always) far closer to involving the category of beauty or some other aesthetic category than the categories of respectable, loving, or morally good. Thus this fact about the value categories relevant to the goods of activity raises the important and largely neglected issue of the role of the aesthetic within practical reason. I will have much more to say about this as we go along.

The second way in which the fundamental facts about boredom and our

psychology should play a central role in any conception of the human good and practical reason is that some threshold level of these goods is of categorical value to any remotely normal human agent. It is the fact that boredom is a threat to our very survival that makes the goods of activity categorical goods, and it is this fact that explains the phenomenology of the appearance of the goods of activity within our deliberative field as, in a broad sense, aesthetic goods. But if this is true, then our agency is a value to us, that is, it appears within our deliberative field as good to us, only if we do not find life utterly boring. And, in order for this to be true, we must have some activities that are available to us because they are in one way or another aesthetically appealing. If we do not find some activities available to us that are interesting, satisfying, fascinating, delightful, captivating, or the like, we will eventually either fall prey to apathy toward our existence or be driven insane by the effects of boredom. This, I believe, should lead us to reject the notion that value comes into the world only as the result of rational agency, as Korsgaard and Kant seem to have it. Rather, it seems that rational agency is valuable only if other things are valuable. And this is a comment on how things appear within our deliberative field: Our agency does not appear to us as good within our deliberative field when all the activities that appear there are cloaked in utter tedium and devoid of aesthetic appeal.^[4] In Aristotelian terms, the life of agency without the goods of activity is unworthy of choice when the activities of that life are utterly tedious and boring.

I do not see how either Kant or Korsgaard can account for this fact about our valuing our lives and ourselves. Kant has it that respect for our rational agency prohibits our taking our own lives, regardless of how dreary life might be. Kantian internalists must give an account of this, and doing so is difficult. On the internalist view, just the thought that we are rational agents is enough to give us reasons for living, even if everything else about our lives is meaningless. Of course, this is just false. If everything else is meaningless, then our lives and our agency are meaningless from our own points of view. Nor will it do to say, as Korsgaard does, that the value of life is the foundation of all value. One can value one's life only when one can value a way of living. Were the value of life fundamental in Korsgaard's sense, then any way of life would be minimally worth living. She also says, "The price of denying that humanity is of value is complete normative

[4] . I will say more about this in the final chapter where I discuss the role of pain in practical reason.

scepticism."^[5] No. The consequence of complete normative skepticism is the denial of the value of humanity, and were it the case that the only ways of life open to humans were utterly tedious and boring we would be complete normative skeptics. We would judge that human life and agency are not of much value because there would be no way of life open to humans that would make human life worthy of choice.

An understanding of boredom, then, is helpful in understanding the phenomenology of how the goods of activity appear within an agent's deliberative field. But it is also helpful in understanding the natural ontology of these values as the explanation for the phenomenology. The goods of activity, like the goods of respect and love, have their foundation in the psychological capacities of the agent.

In this regard, it is important to distinguish a capacity from the capacities that underwrite it, as it is equally important to understand the similarities between the accounts of the goods of love and respect and the goods of activity and their roles in practical reason. Loneliness is one psychological state for which most humans have the capacity. Those who have this capacity, however, have it as a result of other capacities they have, among which are the capacities for love and intimacy. But there are others; for instance, the capacities for memory and desire. Indeed, loneliness involves the desire for love and intimacy, often with some particular person. The remembering of a loved one who is absent with a desire for the loved one's company triggers the loneliness. Thus a being devoid of the capacities for love and intimacy and the desire for them would be immune to loneliness: If you are not a person who values others as ends of a certain sort, you are simply not capable of loneliness.

It is the fact that the capacity for loneliness is a function of the capacities of love and intimacy that loved ones cannot be taken as mere means to the amelioration of loneliness. Rather, loneliness is a function of the fact that a person's affective capacities include love, the valuing of specific others as ends of a certain sort. Hence the naturalized ontology of value explains the phenomenology of both how the goods of love appear within an agent's deliberative field and ultimately why the agent has the normative thoughts of love, why the agent justifies things in the way that he or she does. In other terms: An understanding of loneliness and the capacities that underwrite it explain the place of the goods of love within practical reason.

Something similar regarding the capacity for boredom and the capaci-

[5] . Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity , 163.

ties that underwrite it explains the role of the goods of activity within practical reason. Among the capacities that underwrite the capacity for boredom are the capacities to find things interesting, satisfying, amusing, fascinating, or captivating. These latter capacities explain why activities appear within an agent's deliberative field as good under the relevant value categories and as ends of a certain sort. What is crucial to note is that these capacities are aesthetic capacities. Observations about the effects of boredom, then, show that aesthetic capacities are fundamental to the structure of our psychology, which explains why the goods associated with the capacities that underwrite the capacity for boredom are, at some threshold, categorical goods. This means that not only are some aesthetic goods categorical, but that any acceptable theory of practical reason must afford them this status. Otherwise, the theory is contrary to the natural ontology of value. But I will argue not only that the aesthetic goods of activity at some threshold level are categorical goods but also that the norms associated with these goods are symmetrical in their regulative functions regarding the goods of respect and love. If this is true, then, if we think of moral norms as those associated with respect, sympathy, and love for others, then aesthetic norms and moral norms are symmetrical in their regulative effects.^[6] Hence an understanding of the capacity for boredom and the capacities that underwrite it explain why the goods of activity play the role they do within practical reason. As such, the account here provides a naturalistic ontology of value.

In what follows, I want to see how these thoughts gain credibility as we take a closer look at the goods of solitary activity.

2.

The first kind of activities to consider are solitary individual activities. These are activities that do not have independent beneficiaries and are either done alone or if done with others, the sharing of the activity has only instrumental value to the other participants.

[6] . Of course, one might not want to identify morality with only these concerns but with rationality all things considered, where full rationality and hence morality make a place for the aesthetic. Kant's view of full rationality has it that impartial respect regulates but is not regulated by the aesthetic. I do not believe his arguments succeed for the kinds of reasons given here in part 4. For other views on morality as involving rationality, all things considered, see Lawrence C. Becker, Reciprocity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), and my "Frankena and the Unity of Practical Reason," Monist (July 1981): 406–17.

Consider work activities. Again, Nisbet is interesting. He says:

Work, more or less attuned to the worker's aptitudes, is undoubtedly the best defense against boredom. As Denis Gabor emphasized, work is the only visible activity to which man may be safely left.

And later:

There have been workless strata before in the history of society. Think only of the half-million in imperial Rome on the dole . . . out of a total of two million people. The results were unsalutary, to say the least, and Toynbee gave this "internal proletariat," with its bored restlessness, its unproductivity, and its rising resentment of the government that fed it, credit for being, along with the "external proletariat" or invading barbarians, one of the two key causes of the eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire. In the modern day, chronic joblessness, especially among youth but in other strata as well, not overlooking the retired elderly, produces its baneful results, ranging from the mindless violence of youth on the streets to the millions of elderly who, jobless and also functionless, lapse into boredom which all too often becomes apathy and depression.^[7]

Though these observations are hardly the product of hard, systematic social science, they do suggest as fact that where humans are not involved in meaningful work destructive restlessness is the result. The point is not simply that if people have to busy themselves with work they will have no time for mischief. Rather, it is that there are no other kinds of activities that engage humans deeply enough over time in a way that prevents the kind of restlessness that results in such destructiveness.

Though there is much to be said for these general comments on work, we need here to be more fine grained in our specification of work activities. Are there significant domains of work activity—activity that involves labor—that are both solitary individual activities and of central importance in many persons' lives as independent goods, as good independent of the esteem they confer? If so, are they productive activities, contribution activities, or accomplishment activities, or all of these? Must at least some be creative, or can they all be routine? These are some of the questions that must be addressed here. But remember that the emphasis in this context is on the issue of survival, not the issue of flourishing. It is one thing to say that someone's life is less flourishing than it could be if it lacks all opportu-

[7] . Nisbet, Prejudices , 23–24.

nity for meaningful work. It is quite another to say that such a life would not be worth living for many, regardless of what else life includes.

It is plausible that over time creative activities of both work and play are essential to avoid the debilitating effects of boredom for any normal human. For a person of average intelligence, the lightheartedness of play loses its appeal eventually and probably very quickly.^[8] This is likely true of children as well. It is only from the perspective of an adult that most of the activities that appear meaningful to a child are play activities. Most probably involve the same kind of effort that goes into adult labor. Indeed, boredom sets in for an average child when its activities cease to challenge, to demand effort, to tax to some significant degree. Play actually seems to have its place in human psychology as a temporary leave from other types of activities. This explains why leisure soon becomes excruciatingly boring for the average person. That some of the activities of both play and work would not need to be solitary and individual in the relevant senses is implausible. Cognitive development alone would suggest that a significant portion of learning activities for both children and adults is solitary in this sense. That it is gives our lives much of its meaning when we are not engaged more socially. Learning activities of either work or play are often solitary in the relevant sense.

Also, a life full of every good thing except meaningful creative labor would no doubt soon become terribly burdensome for most. Play alone cannot relieve the weight of merely instrumental effort, of deontic activities, and of what can become humdrum routine. If not offset by the excitement of discovery and creativity that demands labor, it is simply insufficient as a panacea regarding boredom. Not even the knowledge that one is loved and that one loves others is sufficient over a protracted period. Love must become active, more than playful, and have some degree of discovery in it to be sustaining for very long. For it is a fact about personal love that if it does not remain dynamic it dies, and sometimes probably from boredom.

Regarding the aesthetic categories relevant to work activities: It is plausible to think that categories such as "fascinating" and "captivating" are the most relevant. To involve labor, the activities must be challenging, and, to

[8] . For a general study of play, see M. J. Ellis, Why People Play (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973). Also, see Play: In Animals and Humans , ed. Peter K. Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). The reader should keep in mind that the concept of play in these studies is a broader concept than the one being evaluated here. The emphasis here is on play as a leisure activity, which is certainly not coextensive with the meaning of the word "play" in ordinary discourse.

avoid the dreaded kind, the labor must be to some degree fascinating and captivating. Without some threshold level of work activity that is both captivating and challenging, any reasonably intelligent person is vulnerable to the devastating effects of boredom; mere play will not suffice. Indeed, it is plausible that the more intelligent the creature, the larger the role aesthetic goods, especially aesthetic activities that are captivating and challenging, play in its psychology.

However, to argue that play is not sufficient to displace boredom is not to argue that it does not have an essential place in human experience. Just as play can become tiresome, so can work, even meaningful work. Periods of intense creative activity are very rewarding, but they are also draining. So are routine, uncreative work activities. This is because they involve labor, and protracted labor of any sort is exhausting. It leaves a person not only in need of rest—periods of inactivity—but in need of lightness of activity, in need of play. Imagine what life would be like if there were only the options of labor or inactivity. Not only would such a life exact a heavy toll on each person's individual interests; it would wreak havoc with personal relationships. For the only active associations with others a person would have would always have some taxing dimension to them. Over time, this would be more than an inconvenience; it would be unbearable. Yet this is only one thing that makes a life of mere work and rest so debilitating to those who find themselves forced into it. The children of the poor probably get more rest than they do play, and it is perhaps as much the lack of play as anything else that takes the sparkle from their eyes.

Recognition of the importance of creative activities, however, should not lead us to underestimate the value of routine activities. The inability to sustain creative engagement itself makes it imperative that if the human organism is to survive it must find much of routine activity inherently rewarding. That humans do find much of this activity rewarding goes a long way in explaining why humans have survived the vicissitudes of evolution. It explains why they have retained enough interest in themselves and their environment to find the struggle worthwhile. Thus the fact that an activity is routine should not in itself lead us to think that it is of mere instrumental significance in an agent's life. Rather, it is a life confined to the routine, without periods of creative work and leisure, that is debilitating.^[9]

[9] . Whatever fails to survive of Karl Marx's economic thought, surely many of his observations on this topic are genuine contributions to social psychology. See especially his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 . Selections are in-cluded in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972).

Otherwise, the routine itself contains much activity that is intrinsically indispensable. Though meaningful routine might not be fascinating, some level of it is very satisfying, a less intense level of aesthetic experience. Were routine activities not at all satisfying, we would be hard-pressed to cope with life.

It is plausible then that the integration of routine work activities with creative work and play is not only necessary for a life of flourishing. Some degree of this seems necessary for the very survival of human integrity. The lack of it threatens the human ability to maintain an interest in life over time.

But why think that any of these activities must be solitary individual activities? The argument that some of them must be centers on two features of these kinds of activities. One involves creative activities; the other, routine contribution activities regarding one's own welfare.

There is a sphere of creative activity that is independent of the contribution feature of work activity. It exemplifies itself in the pursuit of art for art's sake and sport where the emphasis is not on winning but on how one plays the game. In both, the emphasis is not on contribution but on authenticity. In fact, the authenticity of creative activity with the concern for purity of pursuit is a mark of an agent's valuing creativity for its own sake. This is true whether it is in art, sport, the pursuit of knowledge, or wherever. Thus to engage in an activity to display for others one's cleverness at novelty may indeed be very creative, but it is not thereby valued for its creative dimension. Rather, the thought that there is a connection between the purity of one's activity and its being one's own is central to its being valued for its creative aspect. Therefore, the satisfaction of exercising one's own skill or insight is irreducibly individual in this aspect of the value of creativity, even when other more social dimensions are present.

On the other end of the spectrum are individual interests connected with the activities of routine everyday experience. These are basic welfare interests related to food, shelter, and health maintenance. The desire to contribute to one's own welfare and development is a normal desire for most of us. The valuing of such activity is not always reducible to the thought that it results in an acceptable state of welfare or personal development. For one might be disappointed that one's welfare has not resulted from an activity that is one's own. In fact, it is a feature of any plausible view of hu-

man welfare that an agent makes some contribution, however small or indirect, to his or her own welfare. Another feature is that the agent values some activities of this sort for their own sake. What clearer sign could there be that a person is deeply self-alienated than that he or she finds none of the routine activities of self-care intrinsically rewarding?^[10]

There are, of course, many cases in which some such contributions are not possible for any particular agent. Still it is hard to conceive of human welfare where it is not a loss for the agent that the agent could make no contribution of this sort. If this is true, then at least some (I suspect many) activities of contribution to one's own welfare are those an agent values intrinsically as individual goods. Some such activities would be pursued where possible by most people, even where they were completely and easily eliminable without loss of their other contributory ends. Being a mere patient, then, regarding one's welfare needs is a fantasy only for the overworked. Just as dreams of freedom from welfare needs and activities is one kind of nightmare, a world scarce in work activity is another. I also suspect that most people would pursue some work activities involving their own welfare needs, even at a significant cost to themselves.

Yet it might be objected that some people, due to extreme physical handicaps, cannot engage in contribution activities regarding their own welfare. Though their disabilities are a loss to them in just this regard, still they are among the most admirable and well adjusted people. They are certainly not people who have lost the basic elements of human integrity.

There are several things that must be said in response to this, none of which denies that there are indeed such people. The first is this: To argue that individual contribution activities are categorical goods is not to argue that they are universally so, however close they come to being so. It is to argue that they can and do function in a manner that often involves a person's identifying thoughts in important ways. The second thing to note is that we recognize as truly exceptional those who are well adjusted and admirable despite these handicaps. We stand in wonder of how they could survive, given their losses. Also, our attitude toward their integrity is admiration rather than pity, and our identifying thoughts reveal doubts that we could survive such misfortune.^[11]

[10] . For an interesting study relevant to this issue, see Seligman, Helplessness .

[11] . Whether the hearing world and the signing world with its distinctive language are both impoverished when inaccessible to each other is an interesting and important issue. But it is not an issue of being physically handicapped in the sense that I intend here. See Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).

Finally, we must understand the options of those who do survive with such handicaps regarding the ability to engage in these welfare contribution activities. If such a person is a talented person who has opportunity to develop that talent, his or her chances for survival increase tremendously. Why? Because an extremely physically handicapped person with significant intelligence but without opportunity for development must suffer through hours and hours of inactivity. But even where there is talent and opportunity for creative activity, the adjustment to the passivity in the routine regarding the agent's welfare needs will be most difficult. Those of us not physically handicapped can hardly appreciate the difficulties of adjusting to a routine filled with someone else's activities rather than our own. Our routines are active and interestingly so, even when they are uncreative, and this is a great blessing.

I conclude then that there are many intrinsically valued solitary activities of the individual sort. Many are in all probability of categorical importance to most of us as independent goods of activity. Writing a book is most valuable to its author (at least to an author of a certain sort) in that it is both challenging and fascinating. That it might make a contribution is, of course, a reason to think it worthy of publication, but writing a book and publishing a book are different activities. Any real writer, or artist, or musician, or scientist will tell you that what drives his or her work activity most is that it is fascinating and challenging. That some will take this claim with either dull surprise or disbelief only reflects their lack of understanding of what life is sometimes like for others. And though it is difficult for any of us to say what it is like to be a bat, some of us know what it is like to be a writer, an artist, a musician, or a scientist. It is to be taken with one's work, to be fascinated by it, to be captivated by it, to be lost in it. To be stripped of it is to be left in a world without color. The same, of course, can be said of many other workers and for many other kinds of work from carpentry to dentistry and from teaching to designing.

3.

In contrast with individual solitary activities is another group of activities that are done alone in the relevant sense and are of intrinsic value to the agent. But, unlike solitary individual activities, they have beneficiaries other than the agent. The agent is still an intrinsic beneficiary of the activity in the sense that these activities have intrinsic as well as (perhaps) instrumental value to the agent. But there are others who are independent beneficiaries of these activities in the sense that they either do not partici-

pate in the activities themselves or if they do, the activities themselves have only instrumental value to them. For this reason, these activities are solitary but are other-as well as self-regarding. The idea is that some activities are intrinsically valuable to an agent because they are intrinsically related to the satisfaction of someone else's interests. It is because these activities are both solitary and other-regarding that I call them solitary benevolent activities, remembering that they are nondeontic activities. Thus the issue for the remainder of this chapter is this: What role does the intrinsic interest in solitary benevolent activities play in the integrity of the agent of integrity in the thick sense?

Recall from earlier discussion that there are two types of these solitary activities, personally benevolent solitary activities and impartially benevolent solitary activities. Personally benevolent activities have independent beneficiaries personally related to the agent through some form of personal love or close personal attachment. Impartially benevolent activities have independent beneficiaries not specially related to the agent. I will say more about the latter activities later, but first I must address the former.

Personally benevolent solitary activities are done for the sake of one's loved ones, that is, for one's friends, family, neighbors, or community in some larger sense. As beneficiaries, loved ones are independent by virtue of not sharing the activity with the agent as an intrinsic good. Thus they are independently related to the activity as a good but personally related to the agent. Consequently, there are at least as many types of personally benevolent activities as there are personal relationships. Since my aim here has its limits in the structural significance of these goods to human integrity, I will restrict discussion to contribution activities of the personally benevolent sort. I will not attempt anything like a complete account.

Remember that contribution activities aim at enhancing the good of someone or some thing. Personally benevolent solitary activities of this sort, then, are those that aim at enhancing the good of someone with whom the agent has a loving relationship—a family member, a friend, or a member of the community. Of special importance are the agent's interest in the welfare of loved ones and the interest in being their benefactor.

Consider the nurturing activities of a parent toward a beloved child. Earlier we saw that any loving parent feels obligated to engage in some activities regarding the welfare interests of the child by virtue of parental love. Without such a feeling, we are at a loss to make sense of the parent's love. We are at a similar loss if we find the parent averse to all nondeontic activities regarding the child's welfare interests. Imagine a parent who looks with dread on any and all welfare-related activities regarding its child. Within

the agent's deliberative field, all such activities are viewed as cloaked in tedium. All are done either out of some sense of obligation or simply as instrumentally important to the child's well-being. It is not that the parent does not want the child to prosper. Indeed, this parent wants benefits to accrue to the child in excess of what he or she feels an obligation to provide. But there remains an aversion to the activities that are the means that provide these benefits, an aversion that is outweighed by the concern for the child's welfare. Is this parental love?

Whatever else the concern such a person might have for the child, it is difficult to make sense of it as parental love. Personal love—of whatever type—takes delight in caring for loved ones. Some threshold level of these activities appears within the loving parent's deliberative field as delightful, which marks these activities as the kind of nondeontic activities in question. To force them into deontic or moral categories is to distort the kinds of goods they are. Thus, for example, never taking delight in providing the welfare benefit of emotional security for one's child through nurturing activities is simply incompatible with parental love.

To appreciate the kind of value these activities have, we need to pay careful attention to their phenomenology. What we need is a better understanding of when a delightful experience is aesthetic in the broad sense? Contrast three different cases of finding something delightful: (i) finding it delightful that a state of affairs obtains, for example, that your children are happy; (ii) taking delight in the results of your actions, for example, that your actions bring joy to your children; and (iii) taking delight in activities themselves, for example, taking delight in playing with and nurturing your children. In the first case, one could take delight in a state of affairs that is entirely unrelated to one's actions. Think, for example, of being away from home and learning that your children are doing well. The feeling that comes from such good news does not seem to me particularly aesthetic, even in a broad sense. Nor would the feeling that comes from knowing that your children are pleased that you had prepared their favorite meal for them while they were away all day at school, which would be an instance of (ii). You might find preparing the meal onerous except for the fact that it has the payoff of bringing joy to your children. But consider the person who would take delight not only in the fact of the payoff but also in preparing the meal itself. One of two things might be true. First, such a parent might take delight in cooking independent of the other delight in the payoff. Suppose this is true. There remains the question of whether the two delights are simply two instantiations of one kind of experience or whether they are two different kinds of experience. I believe there are good rea-

sons for thinking that it is the latter and that this is important for practical reason.

One very important reason for thinking that the delights in this case are of different kinds is that approximate synonymous expressions for one experience cannot be substituted for the other. For example, instead of describing the experience of finding the cooking itself valuable, we might say that it is interesting, fascinating, or captivating. But to substitute these descriptions for the delight taken in the state of affairs of your children being pleased at having their favorite meal seems odd, to say the least. Imagine thinking that it is interesting that your child is pleased or finding such a fact fascinating or being captivated by it. None of these seems to capture the relevant sense of delight, yet they seem to apply rather straightforwardly to finding the cooking itself delightful.

The second possibility is that it is not cooking alone that you find delightful but cooking for your children, where the cooking is not valued merely instrumentally. In this kind of case, it seems that the activity of cooking also falls under another description. For instance, you might intrinsically value cooking as an instance of another kind of activity that you intrinsically value. If you see your cooking as a nurturing activity and if you intrinsically value nurturing activities, then you might intrinsically value your cooking for your children in a way that you might not value cooking per se. This would be to place intrinsic rather than mere instrumental value on your activity; hence you would not value your activity merely for its results. Now suppose that you take delight in cooking for your children and you take delight in the fact that your children are pleased with their favorite meal. Are these two different delights, and are they of different kinds? Are they phenomenologically distinct? I believe that they are, though their distinctness is easily overlooked.

One might find it interesting, fascinating, and captivating to cook for one's children in a way that one does not find it interesting, fascinating, or captivating to cook per se. To do so is to find the nurturing of one's children interesting, fascinating, and captivating. If you are a parent of this sort, then you take aesthetic delight in some of your nurturing activities in that you find them interesting, satisfying, fascinating, or captivating, but you also take nonaesthetic delight in the results of these activities. If this is true, then for some people the capacity for boredom is underwritten not only by the capacities to find some activities interesting, fascinating, captivating, and the like but also by social capacities, among which are loving capacities. The loving parent is not only one who can take loving delight in the results of her nurturing activities but also one who can take aes-

thetic delight in and be fascinated and captivated by nurturing activities. Any adequate conception of practical reason that applies to loving parents must therefore recognize the role of aesthetic reasons in their normative thoughts. Later, I will argue that these observations have previously unnoticed implications for a normative conceptual scheme, namely, that not only do various goods that give rise to deontic beliefs symmetrically regulate each other, but also the deontic and the nondeontic, the moral and the nonmoral, are symmetrical in their regulative functions.

There are, of course, moments when the delight subsides in the case of deontic activities, and the sense of obligation internal to personal love must take over. But the dispositions of a person who anticipates with dread any thought of welfare-related activities regarding loved ones are not those of love. Nor are those of the person who does not find intrinsic value in some such activities that are independent of what the lover feels is owed to loved ones. Thus the loving parent takes delight in some activities that contribute to the child's good independent of any sense of obligation he or she has toward the child. As a source of personal delight, the loving parent sees these activities not only as beneficial to the child but also as a part of the parent's own good. Without this conception of parental good as including contribution activities of this sort, we are unable to understand a person as a loving parent. If this is true, then our intrinsic interest in many loving activities underwrites our capacity not only for loneliness but for boredom as well. Without loving activities, we are vulnerable to the loneliness that fills the space where nonaesthetic delight should be, and without some loving activities being interesting, fascinating, and captivating, we are without the aesthetic delight that wards off boredom. That there should be a confluence of these interests and capacities should not be surprising on reflection. It is nature's way of getting us to enjoy what is good not only for us but also for the species.

One might admit this, however, and question whether any of these activities must include labor. Is it not enough simply to want to play with one's child and leave the labor to others, if one can? The problem with this suggestion is that it involves an impoverished conception of nurturing. If we confine the concept of nurturing to play activities, it is difficult to distinguish loving a child in a parental way from some lesser form of attachment. Suppose I enjoy playing with my neighbor's children, and I care for their welfare in that I am committed to their welfare needs being met. Being less affluent than myself, my neighbors need assistance that I am willing to provide in meeting the welfare needs of their children. The parents do the nurturing, enjoying a good bit of it; I pay the bills, without a trace

of resentment; and I play with the children, aversive to any of the activities that constitute the nurturing. Perhaps I love the children, but there would be a clear distinction between the love I have for them and the love their parents have for them. Moreover, this judgment seems confirmed by the increasing difficulties we have with a conception of fatherhood confined exclusively to the role of secondary care: Too many secondary care responsibilities dull the capacity for primary care and thereby dull the capacity for parental love.

Furthermore, the degree of caring about the child's welfare and the delight in activities that secure it will not only exceed the feelings of obligation to the child. They will also exceed the feelings of obligation to others for whom the parent has impartial respect and esteem. Later, we will see how this works out regarding the priorities problem and the goods of activity. For now it is sufficient to point out that some commitments involving personal benevolence take priority over some impartial commitments. Here this is true of the intentional dispositional states of someone whose integrity involves parental love and the ground project of parenthood but who also has simple respect and esteem for others. But, in this case, the activities are nondeontic, solitary activities. Thus the integration problem is to be understood as the deontic having to make a place for the nondeontic. This is not an insignificant fact about a normative conceptual scheme, one I will discuss in more detail later when I discuss Baron's views.

For the moment, however, consider, a loving parent making a lifeaffecting choice that makes possible some significant degree of these contribution activities regarding a beloved child. Would this show a lack of respect for others, even if it diminished to some degree the capacity or opportunity to assist others with their rights? If so, the integration of parental affection and impartial respect can only take the form of subservience of the personal to the impersonal and the nondeontic to the deontic. But this is simply not our understanding of these concepts.

If we assume that you are a loving parent to your daughter, say, and a respectful person, it is not a sign that you do not respect others if in some contexts you give priority to personally benevolent activities regarding your daughter over some of the interests of respectable people. This is true even where these activities are not required by what you feel you ought to do for your daughter. We would have serious questions about the depth of your love for your daughter if you did not have such priorities, if you did not do some things for her simply because you find them delightful. Indeed, such priorities are a part of a loving parent's humanity and integrity. If this is true, then in some contexts you would have, as a function of hav-

ing parental love for your child, the normative belief that you ought to do y for the sake of some respectable person or persons were it not for the delightfulness of doing x for your child, even where you do not view doing x for your child as an obligation. This is a new kind of normative belief, one as yet unanalyzed in terms of the priorities problem. If such beliefs are rational for us, then our conceptual scheme will reflect the fact that for us the deontic and the nondeontic, the aesthetic and the moral, are symmetrical in their regulative functions. Later, I will isolate the kinds of deliberative contexts in which such norms are rational and those in which they are irrational. For now it is enough to suggest that this kind of norm is a component in a loving parent's dispositions and that this is compatible with simple respect for others. Also, since all personal love includes the interests in the welfare of loved ones and in being their benefactor and in taking delight in loving activities, the analysis extends to all forms of loving relationships.

Of course, if your dispositional set includes both personal love for your child and respect for others, there are contexts in which you will believe that others' interests take priority over your nondeontic interest in the delightful activities of benefiting your child. You will believe in some contexts that it would be wrong for you to do x for the sake of your child, despite its delightfulness, because you will believe that you have an obligation to do y for other respectable people. This, of course, shows the regulative influence of impartial respect on the place of the goods of activity in our lives. Later, in addressing the priorities problem, I will isolate the deliberative contexts in which these thoughts emerge and show how the Aristotelian view accommodates them.

4.

Thus far the concern has been with the loved one as an extrinsic though independent beneficiary of the lover's activities. The loved one is an extrinsic beneficiary when the benefit is simply the result of the activity. Think of a baby benefiting from having its diaper changed. There are, however, other activities in which the loved one is intended as an intrinsic yet independent beneficiary. In these cases, the loved one is an intrinsic beneficiary because the activity itself is of intrinsic value to her. In both cases, however, she is an independent beneficiary in the sense that she is not an agent in the activities themselves.

Activities having an intrinsic independent beneficiary I call activities of recognition. I am not sure whether to say that such activities are a type of contribution activity or a separate category. The most important point is

that the good of the activity is not entirely independent of the activity itself, yet the loved one is not an agent in the activity. I have in mind the lover's activities that express the importance of the loved one to the lover.

Some ways of expressing the importance of the loved one to the lover involve expressions of affection, but these are usually shared activities. Thus solitary activities of recognition involve either unilateral expressions of affection or some other expression of importance of the loved one to the lover. Sometimes these expressions involve "honoring" the loved one. Thus there are two types of unilateral activities of recognition: unilateral activities of affection and unilateral honoring activities.

We can summarize the distinctions regarding personally benevolent solitary activities as follows:

I. Unilateral activities with extrinsic beneficiaries

II. Unilateral activities of affection with intrinsic beneficiaries

III. Unilateral honoring activities with intrinsic beneficiaries

An example of a unilateral activity of affection might be one involving friendship, say, giving a gift to a friend. Your friend is not a participant in the activity but an intrinsic beneficiary of it. The giving expresses the affection, for the object that is the gift would not have the same meaning apart from the giving. Of course, some gifts have extrinsic benefits, but many of them either do not or they have dual benefits. Perhaps your gift to your friend involves the activity of preparing her favorite meal. In fact, it seems that the giving of gifts in some form—though not necessarily of material goods—is most certainly an essential element in human flourishing. The reason I say this is that it allows humans to express their graciousness to those they love. A gift well given is one that not only expresses love and thoughtfulness for what is given but also expresses grace in how it is given. Part of the way, then, in which gift giving appears within the loving agent's deliberative field as good is in terms of it graciousness, clearly an aesthetic category. Could a life totally without opportunities for graciousness to loved ones and delightfulness in it possibly be the best life for a communal being to live? The answer seems obvious to anyone not in the throes of a highly individualistic conception of the human good. Yet what might not be so obvious is that some level of the goods of unilateral activities of affection is necessary for the survival of human integrity.

One misleading argument for the categorical value of such activities is that if social beings are never the intrinsic beneficiaries of such activities, they will lose their sense of self-worth. The problem with such an argu-

ment is not its premises but its conclusion. The fact that such benefits are essential to the survival of a sense of self-worth does not show that the activities are the sorts of goods in question. What we are evaluating here is not whether your solitary activity of engaging in x is an intrinsic, extrinsic, or dual benefit to your friend. Rather, it is whether your engaging in doing x as an element in your way of life is a categorical good for you as a nondeontic activity. If the loss to you of never engaging in x for a friend is explained entirely in terms of her interests, then the activity is not the relevant sort. Nor are activities the absence of which from your life would result in your having a sense of guilt but no sense of personal loss. The reason in each case is that the activities must be intrinsic goods for you and they must be nondeontic activities.

Relative, then, to the class of agents of integrity in the thick sense, we can conclude that all such persons intrinsically value such activities of recognition. All such agents would unmistakenly find these activities an intrinsic part of the life most worth living. The issue here, though, concerns not that of human flourishing but that of human survival in the relevant sense. The question then is this: Could all such loving beings survive the complete loss of such activities in their lives with their integrity intact? Or could at least some of them survive by taking a categorically consoling interest in some other human good?

It does not seem plausible that there is any impartial interest that in itself could console for a complete loss of such goods in a person's life. Think what it would be like to sacrifice permanently any gracious communication of your affection to your children, your parents, your spouse or romantic lover, your friends, or your neighbors on the grounds of simple respect, sympathy, or esteem for others. It is difficult to see how such a sacrifice could be anything other than the sacrifice of one's life and one's reasons for living. As such, it would be the sacrifice of oneself as an ongoing agent, and this might occur only were there no way to be both a loving person and a person with self-respect. Our previous discussion of the role of the goods of love as nondeliberative goods is relevant here. The goods of love, where they exist, simply impose a deliberative limit on the concept of personal sacrifice in the name of impartial concerns. The goods of personally benevolent activities of the sort involving graciousness are another example of this. But what I am arguing here is that some threshold level of these goods is necessary in the lives of most for survival of the basic elements of integrity in the thin sense. I am not arguing that all conflicts between such goods and impartial concerns must give priority to these activities. Beyond a

threshold level, these goods are nondeliberative goods in relationship to impartial concerns. It is in this sense that these activities are categorical goods for at least most of us.

More plausible as a consoling factor for the complete loss of unilateral activities of affection are shared activities of affection. Perhaps some persons could survive and even flourish without engaging in these unilateral activities, as long as there was some abundance of shared activities in their lives.

Although we should not underestimate the value of unilateral expressions of affection, let us suppose that they can be significantly consoled for by shared expressions of affection. But what if the only consoling interest sufficient to console for the loss of these solitary goods is the interest in personally shared goods? The same structural points regarding the place of agent-centered goods of activity in relationship to impartial concerns remain intact. My major concern here is to show that agent-centered goods of activity limit the demands of impartiality in the integrity of a normal human agent. Therefore, a concession to the relative categorical value of solitary activities to shared activities of the sort in question would not undermine the core of my analysis.

Yet there is reason to think that the unilateral aspect of these activities is more crucial than the previous paragraph suggests. The intrinsic benefits of such activities serve to convey not only that the loved one is important to the lover but also, because these activities are unilateral, that the loved one is important as a separate and numerically distinct person. Moreover, the interest in expressing this is to be found internal to the phenomenon of personal love itself. Thus such activities not only confer benefits on the loved one but are the objects of an intrinsic interest of the lover. To love another includes the interest in expressing not only how important the other is to oneself but also, quite simply, how important she is period.

A similar analysis applies to activities of recognition that "honor" loved ones. This is true, despite the fact that it is often difficult to draw a hard line between expressions of affection and honoring expressions in personal relationships. To honor a person is to hold that person in esteem, to value that person in some significant degree beyond the point of mere respect. It takes little to express toleration, but it takes greater attention to detail to honor a loved one. In the former case, one needs only to avoid actions that show contempt. But in the latter, there must be overt behavioral manifestation of the lover's recognition of the loved one's esteem-conferring qualities. In cases of peer love, honoring activities are no less important in the lover's

love for the loved one than are the activities of affection. Thus unilateral honoring activities are no less important in the integrity of a loving person than are unilateral activities of affection.

Still an argument can be made that as unilateral activities there is a somewhat larger role for personal honoring activities than for activities of affection. The argument concerns the desire to confer the benefit of the lover's expression of the loved one's importance as a separate and numerically distinct person. E-qualities, like R-qualities, are in themselves the objects of impartial attitudes, as we have seen. But, for reasons already given, personal affection is not transferable across persons of similar qualities in the way that esteem is. Thus unilateral honoring activities serve to point out more specifically what it is about the loved one that makes the person worthy of honor as a separate and distinct person. These qualities are independent of the relationship to the lover, and conferring the benefit of such recognition on the loved one is as intrinsic to friendship as is the conferring of affection to romantic love. And in the case of both affection and honor, graciousness is central to the value of the activities from the agent's point of view.

Therefore, whether as welfare activities or as activities of recognition, personally benevolent solitary activities play a crucial and irreplaceable role in integrity on the thick conception. But what of impartially benevolent solitary activities?

5.

It is of first importance to understand the sense in which these solitary activities are impartial and the sense in which they are not. They are not impartial in the sense that agent-neutral activities are. The reason for this is that the agent is dispositionally sensitive to beliefs regarding the identity of the agent of the activity. That is, if you engage in an activity of this sort, you are sensitive to the fact that it is you and not someone else doing it, but you are dispositionally indifferent to beliefs regarding the identity of the independent beneficiary of the activity, as long as the beneficiary falls under a certain description. It is in this latter sense that these activities are impartial. Some persons, for example, take delight in helping other persons who are in need apart from any thought that such assistance is obligatory. Mother Teresa seemed to be an excellent case in point. Crucial to her disposition toward those she served was the belief that they were needy. The belief that a person was significantly needy seemed sufficient to evoke her

dedication, subject only to the limitations of time and energy. Yet Mother Teresa's attitude seemed to be that it was not only important that the needy receive help but that it was she who played a large role in helping them.

When such activities are truly impartial, personal affection plays no role in their value to the agent. My point here is not that Mother Teresa had no personal affection for those she helped. Rather, it is that insofar as she appreciated persons as in need of help and she valued her activities in this regard, personal affection was an external factor. To the extent that personal affection was not an external factor, her welfare activities on behalf of the needy were personally rather than impartially benevolent. This is because personal affection for another brings with it sensitivity to the identity of the object of affection. Thus unilateral activities of affection are not among impartially benevolent activities. We are left, then, with impartially benevolent welfare activities and impartial honoring activities of the unilateral sort.

For many people impartial welfare activities are a part of their profession or life's work, which they value intrinsically. Dedicated social workers, teachers, lawyers, physicians, and the like are all persons who find intrinsic value in helping others who are in some sense needy. There are, of course, those who enter these professions merely for the external rewards associated with them. This is especially true of those professions that carry with them access to great wealth or prestige. But these are not persons who are dedicated professionals or who are dedicated to their work, for to be dedicated in this context is to be dedicated to persons in need. A dedicated social worker is dedicated to those with welfare needs; a dedicated teacher, to students with a need to learn; a dedicated lawyer, to clients in need of legal remedy; and a dedicated physician, to those in need of medical attention. Yet in a very important sense, to be dedicated in this context is to be dedicated to helping with the needs of strangers.

That there are those who are dedicated to the needs of strangers in a way that renders their activities a ground project suitably called their life's work is certain. That there are those who could not find life worth living without such work is also certain. Thus there are those for whom the loss of their work as a ground project would be inconsolable. Also, it is doubtful that most of these people feel that their taking on such a project as their life's work is obligatory, though some of them might. Those who do not, see their activities as not only beneficial to the needy but also as intrinsically rewarding work that is not obligatory, which raises the issue of the role of the aesthetic in an account of these goods. When these nondeontic

activities have categorical value to an agent, can their value be adequately understood in nonaesthetic terms? I will argue that they cannot.

It should not be overlooked in this regard that these activities are not agent-neutral activities. Rather, they are agent-centered goods that are not, for these persons, replaceable by impartial concerns as consoling interests, should these goods be lost to them. In fact, some of these agents simply could not survive in a world free of needy people. What does this say about the kind of value at stake for these agents?

One kind of person who might seem to fit the description is the person who excessively "needs to be needed." For some, being needed is at the center of their lives because they have a fragile sense of self. Often, such people are very possessive of those under their care, for without these needy dependents these people have no secure sense of their place in the world. In this sense, these people are more dependent on those in need than the needy are on them. Clearly, when the value of activities involving others is accounted for in this way, neither aesthetic nor moral value seems to be the most prominent.

There are others, however, for whom activities of the sort in question seem to be categorical without this kind of pathological dimension. Instead of being pathological in this sense, the vulnerability to the loss of these activities in their lives seems to reflect a curious blend of what we think are healthy values. On the one hand are the values of respect and sympathy for others, and on the other is finding working with people interesting, fascinating; and captivating, even challenging. To reduce the value of these activities to the social values of respect and sympathy is to distort them, as is to reduce their value to the fascination they bring to the agent.

A certain (mistaken) way of reading Nietzsche derides any notion of "service to humanity." Students sometimes take this tack, espousing the belief that most of humanity is simply contemptible and unworthy of being helped or "served." Failure to recognize this is, on their view, a failure of both judgment and character. Of course, if they are right that strangers are worthy only of contempt, then it does seem rather perverse of people to dedicate their life's work to them. But surely it would be odd that only members of one's communal circle were minimally respectable or estimable in a way that allows sympathy for their needs. These beliefs about the R-qualities and E-qualities of strangers that smother sympathetic response are often just false. The failure to see that they are false is brought about by the absence of the dispositions of respect and esteem in the first place. Since a communal being does have these dispositions and is capable

of recognizing the R-qualities and E-qualities of others, the false beliefs are probably not attributable to communal commitments. Rather, they are likely attributable to dispositions that are antithetical not only to impartial sympathy but to communal love as well. After all, it is one thing to be indifferent to strangers about whom one knows nothing; it is another to be averse to helping them because they are held in contempt. To do the latter, one has to know something about them and that something must reveal that they are beneath sympathy. But to be unsympathetic in general to the plight of strangers and to find burdensome all activities intended to benefit them is decidedly not required by empirical evidence. This is especially true of a communal being who is a person of integrity. For this is someone who realizes the importance of being considered a separate and distinct person whose sense of self-worth should be considered on the evidence of character. So it is easy enough to see why a respectful and sympathetic person would take an interest in activities that benefit respectable but needy people.

It is, however, one thing to take an interest in these activities and to pursue them and quite another to find the activities interesting, fascinating, captivating, and intrinsically challenging. For most people who have these activities as a central part of their life's work, this aesthetic dimension is almost always a central part of their value. Were it utterly dull and uninteresting to do this work, it is entirely implausible that the activities could play the role they do within the person's psychology. To be sure, finding it fascinating and interesting to help others is to care about others, but there is an aesthetic dimension to this caring that is lost if we are not careful to pay attention to the fact that these are nondeontic activities. Overly moralized conceptual schemes ride roughshod over these phenomenological distinctions. That they do leads to distortions of practical reason, as we will see. For now, we need to note the difference between taking delight in the fact that the needy have their needs met and taking delight in the activities of meeting these needs. Though delight of the second sort expresses respect and sympathy for others, it also reveals another dimension of value, one that is aesthetic. It says something about the kind of aesthetic experience for which people of a certain character have the capacity.

It is easy enough to see that the activity involved in solving a mathematical problem could have an aesthetic dimension independent of its payoff. In fact, those who are incapable of finding mathematics alluring in this sense tend to dread math. But mathematicians—those whose life's work is very much centered on doing math—tend to be those people who experience the aesthetic allure of mathematics. Not only do they find it interest-

ing and fascinating; they are captivated by it. I am claiming that the same thing is true of many of those who make working with the needy the center of their life's work. Thus a full understanding of the value of such work includes both a social and an aesthetic dimension. For people of this sort, their capacity for boredom is underwritten both by their impartial social capacities and by their aesthetic capacities for finding their social work interesting, fascinating, and captivating.

Of course, not all people organize their lives around these kinds of work activities, but the structural significance of a general lack of aesthetic delight in unilateral welfare activities for strangers is gauged by what is both present and absent in the lives of those who are characterized as lacking it. In a world like ours, much of life is spent dealing with strangers. If it were largely spent with contemptible strangers, this would itself be a serious threat to a healthy integration of personality. Of course, this does not mean that one can fabricate beliefs about the character of others in order to survive. But it does mean that those with integrity are disposed to maintain some hope for the intrinsic value in others, rather than to extinguish it by some general belief about strangers. On the other hand, a general resentment of strangers reveals a disposition aversive to the elements of integrity in others. To be filled with such resentment is an evil to be avoided, and if of sufficient magnitude it can be a categorical evil. So much then for what will be present for the person who has a general attitude of contempt toward strangers to a degree to smother all sympathy for them.

Absent will be a sense of graciousness toward strangers. This is a great loss measured by the resentment that rushes to fill the void. Not all of us feel the call to dedicate our work to the needs of strangers. But it is hard to imagine someone with communal sensibilities who would not also find the complete loss of graciousness to strangers affective of his or her identifying thoughts. Indeed, it seems more plausible that the resentment is a response to a loss than that the value of graciousness is the remedy for resentment. If this is true, then impartial welfare activities of the sort in question are intrinsic human goods structurally crucial to the integrity of any fully developed social being. This is true because severe resentment of strangers is not only a form of alienation from others but also a form of self-alienation for a social being.

Nowhere is this alienation more evident than where impartial honoring activities are viewed with resentment. When a person resents rather than takes delight, both aesthetic and moral, in the legitimate accomplishments of others, there is deep self-alienation as well as alienation from others. A person of integrity in the thick sense is not given to such resentment. The

reason is not that the person of integrity is indifferent to the E-qualities of strangers. Rather, it is because the person of integrity in the thick sense is very sensitive to such qualities and takes delight in them. It is only the person with a strong sense of self coupled with a positive disposition toward others who can experience such delight. Those burdened with resentment in these matters lack a very important human good, perhaps one that cannot be replaced by any other. To lack the capacity for graciousness in this regard, then, is to lack a capacity that not only wards off resentment but boredom as well.

6.

We have seen, I believe, that solitary activities of various sorts have distinct places in the psychological structure of the agent of integrity in the thick sense. This is true across the spectrum of these activities, from individual to personally benevolent to impartially benevolent ones, all of which have aesthetic dimensions crucial to their value. What we have not seen is the solution to the integration and the priorities problems regarding these goods. After I address the issue of the general features of shared activities and their categorical value, I will turn to these problems of integration.

It is time now to turn to the topic of shared activities.

17—
Shared Activities

Two people share an activity just in case their doing it together is an intrinsic good for both of them. Thus, insofar as two people share an activity, neither is an independent beneficiary of the activity. Rather, to the extent to which engaging in such activities is a good for a person, the value of the activity is dependent on its value for another person, and vice versa. Here, then, is a kind of good such that it is impossible to specify its value to one person independent of its value to another person. We can refer to the participants as the mutual intrinsic beneficiaries of such activities.

To pursue a mutual intrinsic good is to pursue one's own good, which is identical to pursuing the good of another. I hope to show how predominant such goods are to human agency and to the survival of human integrity. I will suggest that the threshold level of such goods in the life of most people must be quite high to maintain the elements of integrity and reasons for living. If I am right, life, for most humans, is worth living only if the greater part of their activities is shared. Also, if I am right, some level of mutuality is more important to most people than their individual autonomy. For if finding one's own good in the good of another is crucial to having a sense of self, then there is no sense of self worth retaining that has an entirely autonomous identity. Moreover, I hope to show that there is an important aesthetic dimension to these mutual intrinsic goods.

1.

Divisions among shared activities can be made in terms of partners and beneficiaries. Shared activities always include partners who are mutual intrinsic beneficiaries, but the relationship between the partners can be either personal or impersonal. Personally shared activities are those activities in

which the partners are personally related, and impersonally shared activities are those in which they are not. Think of the difference between sharing a game of bridge with friends versus sharing a game of bridge with a group of strangers who are merely bridge enthusiasts.

As to beneficiaries, there are activities that involve independent beneficiaries and those that do not. Those that do not involve independent beneficiaries are exclusive shared activities. They are exclusive because their value as shared activities excludes the value of any intended benefit to anyone other than the participants in the activities themselves. Other activities involve independent beneficiaries. They are benevolent shared activities because their value as shared activities includes the value of intended benefits to others who are not participants in the activities themselves. In this regard, think of the distinction between the normal value of kissing and the normal value to loving parents of jointly planning their child's surprise birthday party.

Still a third important division is among benevolent shared activities in which the independent beneficiary is specially related to at least one of the mutual beneficiaries and those in which this is not the case. The independent beneficiaries of the first group are intimate and those of the second are nonintimate beneficiaries.

Finally, there are shared activities that include an instrumental benefit to the mutual beneficiaries and those that do not. That this is true is so obvious that it hardly needs discussing. I mention it here only to remind the reader that the presence of instrumental concerns does not in itself vitiate the intrinsic value of a good. Having given due notice, then, I will not in what follows give any great attention to the fact of this distinction.

Though the set of distinctions here is complex, I hope to show that it provides us with a body of data for an understanding of practical reason in human agents that is much richer than one that ignores these distinctions. To compromise on the complexity of the phenomenological data here is to compromise the depth of our understanding of practical reason in human beings. I include the following chart to assist the reader in tracking the relevant phenomena.

I. Personally shared activities

A. Exclusively shared activities (mutual intrinsic beneficiaries without independent beneficiaries, e.g., playing tennis with a friend who loves the game)

B. Shared benevolent activities (mutual intrinsic as well as independent beneficiaries)

1. Intimate independent beneficiaries (e.g., parents planning a birthday party for their child together)

2. Nonintimate independent beneficiaries (e.g., husband and wife participating in building houses for Habitat for Humanity)

II. Impersonally shared activities

A. Exclusively shared activities (mutual intrinsic beneficiaries without independent beneficiaries, e.g., playing tennis with a stranger who loves the game)

B. Shared benevolent activities (mutual intrinsic as well as independent beneficiaries)

1. Intimate independent beneficiaries (e.g., parent and a teacher working together to educate the parent's child)

2. Nonintimate independent beneficiaries (e.g., building houses for Habitat for Humanity with like-minded strangers)

With these divisions in place, the discussion that follows focuses first on personally shared activities and then on those that are impersonally shared. I begin in each case with an analysis of exclusive shared activities, followed by an analysis of shared activities that have intimate independent beneficiaries. I close with an analysis of shared activities that have nonintimate independent beneficiaries. Since the concern is with an analysis of the relationship between the agent-centered goods of an agent's life and the agent's impartial concerns, I discuss only a representative sample of these activities sufficient for the purposes of the present inquiry.

2.

Probably the most representative of exclusive, personally shared activities are those that express affection. They differ from affectionate solitary activities in which the loved one benefits from but does not participate in the activity. The gift received, the compliment accepted, the affection requited—all are benefits of the actions of others. With exclusive shared activities of affection, the loved one is a participant in the activity in just the same way as the lover, for the loved one is also a lover in these activities. Accordingly, lover and loved one are mutual intrinsic beneficiaries, and the activities are exclusive because they do not include intended benefits to those not involved in the activities themselves.

Perhaps the clearest example involves the sexual activities of romantic lovers. A distortion of Victorian mores was that female participation in

sexual activity, as love activity, was something done for the male lover. As such, the activity from the perspective of the female lover was at most a solitary expression of affection intended for the benefit of the male lover as an independent beneficiary. Not only was this distorting in the sense that the female lover was excluded from the intrinsic beneficiaries of the physical pleasure involved in sexual activities, but also both lovers were deprived of the good of a shared activity. A further distortion is to think that the major flaw with this view was that it cut off access to an important human good to women, namely, the physical pleasure of sex, although this was clearly one of its flaws. To assume this is to assume that the most important benefit of sexual activity is physical pleasure as an individual good. But surely this is false, at least regarding romantic lovers . The central value of sexual activity for romantic lovers regarding physical pleasure is that they share the pleasure.

The Victorian view fosters a Don Juan view of romance in which the female lover is a sexual conquest for the sake of the male lover. Criticisms of this view that focus only on how it restricts access to the physical pleasure of sex to women merely revises the male romantic lover; it does nothing to transform him. He now sees himself as an independent benefactor, arrogantly, or humbly, or (worst of all) altruistically providing a good long missing from the lives of women. The woman, however, has been transformed from a passive servant to an effusive female counterpart to the male Don Juan of the revised view. This, I take it, is an adolescent interpretation of the sexual revolution prevalent in erotic magazines.

But surely in assessing the history of sexuality, it is difficult not to view the legacy of the Don Juan lover with either extreme sadness or utter contempt. The sadness is for those restricted by views of romance in which sexual activity as what amounts to a kind of solitary activity. They have lost the good of shared sexual pleasure. The contempt is for the Don Juan lover as willing to sacrifice the goods of shared activity for an individual hedonic good. I suspect that historically a great many psychological ills involving self-contempt have had more than a little of their source in highly individualistic views of sexual activity.

Another distorting view of the good of sexual activity as an expression of affection is a conception of sexuality requiring lovers to justify their engaging in sex as a benevolent rather than as an exclusive shared activity or as also having some instrumental benefit to the lovers. Think of the chilling effects on one's romantic dispositions on being told by one's lover while in the middle of having sex, "This is really good for our health, otherwise

we shouldn't be doing it." Or, "This is really pleasant, but it wouldn't be right if we weren't trying for a baby." The value of sex is by no means to be found in the value of physical exercise. And though sexual activity for procreation can be very romantic and affectionate, it is neither when accompanied with the necessity of this sense of justification.

That shared activities of this sort (though not necessarily in their romantic exemplification) are categorical goods for many is evidenced by further considerations regarding the level of intimacy crucial to avoiding the debilitating effects of loneliness and isolation mentioned in an earlier chapter. Solitary activities of affection have an entirely different place in human agency than those of shared activities. Both involve intimacy, but the latter in a different way than the former. For the intimacy is shared in the activities themselves in the latter where it is not in the former. Also, solitary activities, as we have seen, put an emphasis on the separateness of the beloved to a degree not found in shared activities. Solitary activities of affection are widespread categorical goods because they uniquely afford the agent the opportunity to express the graciousness of love to the loved one as a separate and distinct person. Exclusive shared activities of affection are widespread categorical goods because they uniquely afford the agent the opportunity to share the loved one intimately through the very activities themselves. The crucial point is that intimacy is achieved in shared activities by virtue of the fact that the lovers share themselves in the activities. Thus the good of shared activities is not reducible to some threshold level of solitary goods of affection, for the former includes a greater level of intimacy. Perhaps, then, it is true that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But where the love has never achieved the intimacy of shared mutual affection it is not good enough. For the life of unrequited affection is one kind of hell, just as the life confined to reciprocal but solitary expressions of affection is one kind of unrequited affection. Furthermore, a life that does not include at least the hope of requited affection is difficult if not impossible to survive for anyone for whom romantic love is a categorical good.

That these activities are marked by their delightfulness few would deny, but it might not be clear that this delight has any aesthetic dimension. A little reflection, however, reveals that these activities, when truly shared, are among the most aesthetically charged activities humans engage in. Among the kinds of activities that are most successful in preventing boredom are shared sexual activities, and among the activities that are most devastating to romantic relations are boring sexual activities. It is impor-

tant, then, not only that shared activities express affection but also that they be delightful in the aesthetic sense, that is, that they be interesting, fascinating, and captivating. Indeed, it seems to be a sign that your romantic love for another has died when the activities shared with her lose their aesthetic appeal, when they are marked with tedium. This fact, I believe, shows that our loving capacities and our aesthetic capacities not only underwrite each other in important ways but also jointly underwrite our capacity for boredom. If this is true, then it is a phenomenological fact about these activities that they sometimes appear within our deliberative field not only as goods of love but as aesthetic goods as well. When they do, it is a distortion of their value to construe them in deontic terms.

This point is even more obvious as it applies to friendship. The longterm relationships of friendship require not only respect, esteem, and love between the friends but shared activities as well. Friends take delight in doing things together, and similar aesthetic sensibilities are crucial for this. Perhaps more than anything else, the common love of the same kinds of activities binds people together in friendship. If two people have no common tastes in the kinds of activities they can share, it is impossible for them to be friends over time. Try to imagine what it would be like to maintain the feelings of friendship without some substantial common aesthetic tastes with the other person. You like the opera and hate polkas; he likes polkas and hates the opera. You like the ballet and hate football; he likes football and hates the ballet. You love poetry and philosophy, and he is bored by them. In short, everything you find interesting, fascinating, captivating, and aesthetically delightful, he finds tedious and boring. Friendship would be out of the question, even if you shared a common moral character and had equal esteem for each other. That there could be substantial differences between you over some tastes and still be close friends is beyond doubt, but there must also be substantially shared tastes as well. Overly moralized views of friendship that place the sole emphasis on moral character, then, are to be rejected. Friendship in the central case is not a bonding of mere feeling alone. Nor is it a bonding of feeling plus moral character. It is rather a bonding of feeling, character, and taste, a bonding of emotion, moral sentiment, and aesthetic taste. This fact about friendship is often overlooked, and it is one that is crucial to the normative thoughts of friendship. For friendship to endure, friends must share to a substantial degree a way of life. How could this be possible in terms of moral character alone?

The same question, of course, applies to neighborly love. To think that communities can be bonded together in any substantive way through a system of rights that ensure diversity without a fairly significant set of shared

tastes is implausible, to say the least. A normative conceptual scheme limited to the concerns of respect alone virtually ignores the concept of community, not only because it leaves out love but also because it leaves out taste. Just as there is no friendship without shared tastes, there is no community without shared tastes. A group of people who do not share some of the same capacities that underwrite the capacity for boredom will never be a community. Why? Because they will find each other's presence excruciatingly tedious. We need a conceptual scheme that brings this thought to bear on political philosophy. If the political question is taken to be what is the best life we can live, then we will conceptualize the goods of that life as including shared aesthetic tastes as much as anything else. To my mind, much of the problem with much political philosophy is that it is overly moralized. Thinking about the good in a way that includes the aesthetic good goes a long way in remedying this.

Whether, then, it is love between friends, family, or neighbors, exclusive shared activities are in the very fabric of all varieties of personal love, as is the aesthetic dimension of these activities. Sufficient argument has already been given for thinking that personal love in at least some of its varieties is a categorical good for most of us. Moreover, even if personal love is not a universal categorical human good, its loss is still not consolable in impartial terms. All this testifies to the inadequacies of a view of human agency that imposes some lexical ordering of priorities across deliberative contexts for human concerns. For the loving person who is also a respectful person will sometimes find that these activities must be secondary to impartial concerns. Later we will see how this plays out regarding the integration and priorities problems.

A similar analysis also applies to exclusive personally shared activities other than those of affection, especially to creative work and play activities, as well as the honoring activities of this sort. But I cannot discuss these here, although a thorough analysis of these activities would, I believe, serve to strengthen the view I am trying to defend. What I must do now, however, is turn to an analysis of benevolent personally shared activities.

3.

Among the most representative examples of personally shared activities with intimate independent beneficiaries are parenting activities, activities shared by parents who love each other, who have a mutual shared interest in parenting, and who love their child. That the parents love each other makes these activities personal rather than impersonal; that the parents are

mutual intrinsic beneficiaries makes them shared activities; and that the parents have personal love for their child makes the child an intimate beneficiary who is independent to the extent to which he or she is not a participant in the activities themselves.

Shared procreational interests are sometimes—in fact, quite often— among the interests of romantic lovers who care for each other in ways that naturally lead them to want to share sexual activity for purposes of procreation. In such cases, sexual activity is not only shared affection through physical pleasure, it is shared affection through procreational activity. Later this intimacy is achieved through the shared interest in parenthood, the interest in caring for another together. Through caring for another with whom they are intimately connected and for whom they are personally responsible, they achieve a kind of intimacy, the intimacy of shared concern and responsibility for another, not found in exclusive shared activities. Viewed in this way, shared parenting activities of this sort include the elements of activities of affection and arguably are among the most intimate of such activities. For many, the progression from the intimacy of exclusive shared activities to that of benevolent shared activities is both natural and psychologically necessary for their development as persons. It is as natural and necessary a progression for them as the move for lovers from solitary activities of affection to the intimacy of those exclusively shared between them. That is, moving from loving each other to loving their children together is as natural for them as moving from a compliment to an embrace.

That such activities are common categorical goods seems undeniable. Consider what might happen to couples who lose the opportunity to share parenting activities. One way in which this might happen is through the death of the child. On some such occasions, parents might not only feel grief regarding the child; they might also experience a loss of intimacy with each other , a loss not necessarily due to mutual fault finding but to a loss of the opportunity to engage in an activity that was central to their affection for each other.^[1]

Another way in which this might happen is when children move out on their own. Sexual activity might not remain the primary medium for sharing affection throughout a couple's relationship, especially if the relationship spans a significant part of their lives. Caring for their children together is often a primary constituent of sharing their affection for each other. Thus when children move out on their own, there is often a need for a period of

[1] . See Ronald Knapp, Beyond Endurance: When a Child Dies (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 142–47.

adjustment. This might be the result of the fact that sexual activity is not as central as at an earlier stage and because parenting activities cannot now function as primary mediums of sharing affection. The struggle that follows need not be a sign that the couple stayed together only for the children. Instead, it might be a sign that a significant good has been lost to them. In this case, it is the loss of a good that brings with it in these contexts the threat of alienation from one's loved one who is valued categorically.^[2]

In other contexts, alienation of the parents from each other brings with it the loss of the good of such activities. How could one become a parent with someone, in part to share such intimacy, and experience the loss of these goods without it affecting one's identifying thoughts? Imagine the devastating results on your identifying thoughts on discovering betrayal in this regard by your perceived lover. Imagine that your perceived lover really had no shared parental feelings at all but merely feigned them for purposes of sexual manipulation. That such a discovery could be permanently devastating for some is undeniable, especially for those we admire for the intensity of their capacities for parenting relationships. Accompanying the devastation is often a loss of self-respect for having been susceptible to such manipulation, leaving a sense of isolation and loneliness due to the loss of anticipated or imagined intimacy. In any event, the loss of these goods where once present is not one for which agents can find consolation in their impartial interests.

None of these observations, of course, show that parenting activities are universal categorical goods. They are not. For not everyone, not even every member of a romantic couple, wants to be a parent. Yet we must remember that parenting activities involve nurturing activities, and, to some extent, all forms of personal love include a nurturing interest in a loved one. Therefore, any communal unit that includes more than two members will include potential intimate independent beneficiaries. Two friends caring for a third is certainly among the most intimate of the activities of friendship. This is not only true in cases of caring for the needs of the mutual friend, it is also true for shared honoring activities regarding the friend. Nor, of course, could sense be made of neighborly love without the disposition to take delight in sharing these activities with some of one's neighbors regard- .

[2] . I am not familiar with scientific studies on this particular point, but there are studies that address loneliness in old age and in marriage where couples have lost common projects. See Letitia Anne Peplau et al., "Being Old and Living Alone," in Loneliness; A Sourcebook of Current Theory, Research and Therapy , ed. Letitia Anne Peplau and Daniel Perlman, 327–47.

ing other neighbors who stand in need of help or deserve special recognition. Thus to the extent to which personal love includes these elements and is a categorical good, so are these activities.

As to the aesthetic dimension of these activities, analogous things can be said here that were said about solitary parenting activities in the previous chapter. Suppose you take both loving and aesthetic delight in some nurturing activities regarding your child. This might show that you love your child, but it would not show that you love your spouse. And though you might love your spouse and not love your children, it seems quite unlikely that you could love your spouse and your children and find it utterly tedious to share nurturing activities regarding the child whom you both love. It is difficult, then, to see how the fact that you would not find some level of these shared activities interesting, fascinating, or captivating as irrelevant to the kind of relationship you have either with your spouse or your children, or both. Nor does it seem that there is anything to prevent a similar analysis from extending to other forms of personal love and the benevolent shared activities associated with them. If this is true, then these goods of activity often appear within our deliberative field as both goods of love and aesthetic goods. And when they do, they appear as nondeontic goods. It is the task of practical reason to integrate them into a meaningful life as the kind of goods they are, not as distorted deontic activities.

4.

The final kind of personally shared activity involves shared activities with nonintimate independent beneficiaries. Here the case that such activities are universally categorical is implausible, although they are increasingly common in our society.

Perhaps the most representative are work activities of this sort. Imagine a couple, both of whom are physicians, operating a clinic for the benefit of the financially disadvantaged. Both have an impartial concern for the health of the disadvantaged, and each intrinsically values the activities as nondeontic activities. But what they value most is that they share the work. The work provides the basis of their sharing their lives together, and they find their intimacy most in sharing these activities. This is not difficult to imagine. History is full of such cases, involving not only physicians but also teachers, social workers, missionaries, scientists, and the like.

Often sustained intimacy for a long-term relationship between two people is not possible, not because they do not love each other but because their commitments to their work prevent it. Of course, sometimes this re-

flects misplaced priorities, but this is not always true. Sometimes people who love each other have categorical commitments to different kinds of work that are both noble and admirable. In these cases, the demands of work often prevent them from sharing affection and sustaining intimacy. In other cases, people who love each other have categorical commitments to the same kind of work, yet circumstances prevent them from sharing the work. Given the importance of their work and its demands in these contexts, sustained intimacy is often simply impossible. The result in either case is always a sacrifice of something central to their identifying thoughts. This is true, that is, when those involved truly love each other and have categorical commitments to their work. Sometimes the sacrifice is simply so incomprehensible to those involved from the perspective of their deliberations that psychological collapse of one form or another is the inevitable response.

The solution for these people, of course, is to be smiled on by fate so that they can share work to which they have a common commitment. For these individuals, however rare or common they might be, this is the only solution that will preserve their continuing as agents with comprehensible identifying thoughts. It is the only solution because it is the only option that will allow them both to have the intimacy necessary for their survival and the activity that provides meaning to their lives in terms of aesthetically meaningful activity. Moreover, some of those driven to psychological collapse because of such commitments and bad fate are among the most admirable of persons. What we would change regarding these individuals is not their commitments but their external circumstances. In recognizing this, we are recognizing that for most a minimally meaningful life must include not only loving dimensions but aesthetic dimensions as well.

I conclude, then, that all three types of personally shared activities are often of categorical value to human agents. When they are, it is not rational for an agent to give lexical priority across deliberative contexts to impartial norms. Furthermore, since a substantial degree of intimacy is basic to psychological survival, there must be a high threshold of such goods in the lives of most to preserve the basic elements of integrity and reasons for living.

5.

Impersonally shared activities are those shared between persons, A and B, say, who are not specially related. Here it is important to keep two phenomena distinct. The first is the nature of A's dispositional sensitivity to

beliefs regarding B's identity. The second is A's sensitivity to B's attitude toward the shared good, in this case, A and B's sharing an activity. In the first case, A is dispositionally indifferent to beliefs regarding B's identity. What is important to A is that B has a certain attitude toward and level of competence at engaging in the activity in question. Anyone with the appropriate attitude toward and level of competence at engaging in that activity is the focus of A's concern. In the second case, the appropriate attitude is that B desires to share the activity as an intrinsic good with someone also wishing to share the activity as an intrinsic good. Thus impersonally shared activities also involve mutual intrinsic beneficiaries.

Yet A's being a mutual beneficiary with B does not mean that A is intimately related to B as in shared activities of the personal sort. Imagine a person who desires a good game of chess. In one case, the desire might find satisfaction in playing against a computer. But this would not be a shared activity, however valuable the activity might be to the person. In another case, the desire might find satisfaction only if the activity is shared with a particular cherished individual. This would be a shared activity of the personal sort. Finally, the desire might be for sharing a good game of chess with anyone with a similar attitude toward playing partners and with similar skills as the agent. It is the last for which playing chess is an impersonally shared activity.

As one final preliminary comment, it is also important that these activities are impersonal only in a limited sense. The agent, in desiring a good game of chess, is clearly sensitive to the identity of who is to share the game with the prospective partner, namely, the agent. In this sense, these activities are clearly personal goods. It is only in terms of the relationship to the partners that these activities are impersonal.

One might argue that these activities are rarely, if ever, of categorical value to an agent. Their loss, it seems, is almost completely consolable in terms of personally shared activities. This is because personally shared activities include some value intrinsic to the activity itself, plus the value of sharing this value intimately with a loved one. For instance, playing chess with a friend has the value of sharing a good game of chess with someone who loves chess, but it has the value of friendly intimacy as well. Similarly, one can share the pleasure of sexual activity either with a loved one or with anyone who desires to share that activity merely for mutual sexual satisfaction. But one might argue that personally shared activity includes everything the corresponding impersonal activity does and more. Thus, on this argument, nothing essential to anyone's psychology requires impersonally shared activities.

Initially, this argument presents a plausible line of thought. Reflection reveals, however, that it overlooks an important possibility. There might be an essential place in the lives of normal, minimally healthy agents for activities that are neither individual goods nor intimately shared with loved ones yet they can be intimately shared with those the agent does not love. What is needed, on the one hand, is a way of specifying the kind of activity shared between agents—for example, play activity, sexual activity, or work activity. On the other hand, distinctions are needed regarding whether the activity is shared intimately or, if so, whether the intimacy is personal. If A shared a game of chess with B, we would not assume that it was played with any intimacy, even if they enjoyed the game. That the game involved intimacy, then, would need pointing out as a special feature of the situation. But if A and B shared sexual activity, the normal assumption is that the activity involved some level of intimacy. Yet it would not necessarily involve the intimacy of personally shared activities. The issue then is this: Are there kinds of shared activities that for many healthy human beings require either a lack of intimacy or the lack of the kind of intimacy found in personal love? If there are, a related issue is this: Is there a threshold level of such goods that is essential to the elements of integrity for many of us, and what, if anything, is the aesthetic dimension of such goods?

First consider exclusive shared activities.

6.

It is not an altogether unreliable thought that impersonality might be a desired feature of shared sexual activity in some contexts and at some stages of sexual development. An adolescent who thinks that no sexual activity is to be enjoyed with another outside love is bound to put enormous strains on the relationships he or she enters. The thought that one should trust any physical lover should not be confused with the thought that one should love any physical lover. Moreover, the importance of shared physical pleasure comes long before the importance of adopting a long-term relationship with another. Of course, one does tend to trust those one loves, but trust can certainly come independent of love. The sad thing is that an adolescent can easily conclude that trust plus physical attraction comes to personal love. It does not. What cannot be denied is that, especially for a normal adolescent, sex is fascinating, and it is fascinating before it is love. Recognizing the difference between the fascination of sex as one kind of good and sex as an expression of love as another is therefore crucial to emotional development. And part of that development involves finding ways of enjoying the

former without confusing it with the latter, which, of course, need not include intercourse.

The sexual fantasies of most adults probably reveal a desire at some level for activities of the sort in question, that is, for impersonally shared exclusive activities of sexual play.^[3] The function of such fantasizing to our identifying thoughts is probably much greater than we might admit in polite company. It might be a real human need for some threshold level of shared sexual activity unaccompanied by the intimacy of personal love. This threshold might be achieved for many through fantasy rather than actual contact with others. Certainly the history of the priesthood suggests that celibacy and the lack of shared sexual activity are ideals of integrity impossible for most people to maintain with psychological health. Perhaps this is reason for thinking that such ideals are undesirable as well. The history of marriage in contexts that required strict premarital chastity is also revealing. It suggests that there is a human good of some significant importance to be found in shared sexual activity not tightly connected with the intimacy of love. It is, after all, true that many people who have extramarital affairs do so not as a result of a loss of love for the spouse or out of love for the extramarital lover. Quite often, such persons feel driven to such affairs against their ideals of themselves.^[4] Perhaps this means that we do not yet understand just how important the lack of intimacy of a certain kind is to human development regarding some shared activities. That nature would have designed us to be fascinated with sex in these ways should come as no surprise.

In this regard, it would not be surprising to discover a relationship between the desire for adventure in general and testosterone. That the Con- .

[3] Donald Symons argues that the desire for sexual variety is adaptive in the evolutionary sense for males in a way and to a degree that it is not for females. This could show itself in differences in the kinds of fantasies that recur among females and among males. Apparently, variety of sexual partners is more prominent among males than females. Symons also suggests that the "Coolidge Effect" (male rearousal by a new female) present among the males in many mammal species extends to humans to a significant degree. If this is true, then impersonal sexual activities of this sort might be more important to men than to women. Whether this is true or not I do not know, but the issue should be settled by patient and nonideological inquiry rather than by a priori "moral" principles of either a feminist or a patriarchal sort. See Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 206–52.

[4] . Symons reports studies that show significant numbers of people, especially men, who do not see their "affairs" as resulting from dissatisfaction with their marriages. See Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality , 226–46.

nection should sometimes display itself specifically in the desire for sexual adventure would be equally unsurprising. Though sexual adventure does not require the notion of conquest (contrary to some stereotypical understandings of impersonal sex), it does require exploring the unknown. For some, this adventure of discovery might not be possible with a loved one due to familiarity. Of course, that sexual adventure is less frequent does not mean that sexual affection is less abundant. Nor does it mean that adventure is more important than affection. Still, to ignore the need for sexual adventure is to flirt with deep self-deception. Perhaps in no other area of human concern has there been more of a tendency to overly moralize the conception of a human good as in the case of sexual fantasy.

Yet, be this as it may, there are life contexts in which the opportunity for exclusive shared activities is limited, solely or significantly, to those to whom one is not specially related. These may be sexual or nonsexual contexts. In these life contexts, the importance of these impersonal goods becomes far more central to the identifying thoughts of a human agent. Think, for example, of the history of sexual activity of soldiers in wartime with members of the indigenous population in a foreign land. Some such activity is of the personal sort, but surely much is not. But it would be more than a little naive to think that all the portion that is not personal is relatively meaningless and manipulative sex. Thus even if exclusive shared activities that are impersonal are not widespread, they may still be categorical goods in some important life contexts. For it is absurd to think that there are any impartial concerns that could provide the intimacy these goods provide, even if this is not the highest form of intimacy.

Perhaps the most important contexts in which impersonally shared activities are categorical are those in which individuals are moving from the relationship of strangers sharing nothing to some form of personal relationship. For such transitions, the goods of impersonally shared activities are indispensable. That they can be transitional goods should be no reason for thinking that when they are they are merely instrumental. Consider sharing an activity—playing tennis, say—with another person. Suppose it is someone you know only as someone with a strong interest in playing a good game of tennis. This is just the sort of thing that often leads subsequently to one's identity beliefs regarding another to function in one's own identifying thoughts. It is the necessity of such transitions in human life that gives these goods their greatest claim to being both categorical and extremely widespread. Imagine a context in which you are not specially related to anyone. Perhaps you have recently changed locations, say, from

graduate school to a teaching job someplace where you do not personally know anyone. Unless you are to live the most impoverished life, you will need to make the transition from impersonal to personal relationships with some of the people in your new location. But imagine how difficult it would be to make the transition if you found all the activities available to you with others in your new environment utterly tedious. Suppose that despite your efforts at connecting with others through shared activities you simply cannot find, say, bowling, frog gigging, and endlessly listening to oldies but goodies the least bit interesting. By what psychological mechanism are you to move to more intimate relations? It would seem that without some shared tastes, whatever emotional intimacy you might achieve would be, at best, the psychological equivalent of a one-night stand. Viewed in this way, it is easy to see that impersonal goods of this sort, goods that are both nondeontic and aesthetic, are categorical goods for most of us in their transition function.

7.

But what of benevolent shared activities of the impersonal sort? Are there activities of this sort in which there is a significant place for a lack of intimacy of the personal sort between the mutual beneficiaries? And if so, how important are such activities to the integrity of a human agent?

It is difficult to think of many clear and pure cases of a shared activity that has an intimate independent beneficiary where the mutual beneficiaries are not specially related. One possibility is where the mutual beneficiaries are both specially related to the intimate beneficiary but are not specially related to each other. Another is where only one of the mutual beneficiaries is specially related to the intimate beneficiary. The latter case would be impure in the sense that the mutual beneficiaries would not be sharing the same kind of activity. For the independent beneficiary would not be intimately related to one of the mutual beneficiaries, and this would mark a difference in kind in the activity for this person. An example might be thought to be where A is the parent of C, where B is the teacher of C, and where A and B share the activities of educating the child. Or another is where B is a child psychiatrist and A and B share the activities of bringing a disturbed child to mental health. Often these activities are not truly shared in the sense intended here but are solitary activities from the points of view of A and B. Yet this need not be true. Where it is not, these activities can be central to the lives of the professionals who have a role in these activities as well as to the lives of the nonprofessionals. This is true even if

the activities do not have the same kind of value to the nonprofessionals as to the professionals.

Of greater importance no doubt to most people are the activities we share with those who love the ones we love. These are the activities of the first sort referred to above. Yet it is not always possible or best that we try to love all the persons who love the ones we love. That it is important that we like, even if we do not love, some of these people and enjoy sharing with them activities independently benefiting our loved ones should be clear. It should be clear from reflecting on the alienation we would experience on attempting to share our lives with our loved ones but not liking any of the persons they love. In any complex social environment, the alienation that would result from the absence of personal delight of this sort would be intolerable. It is also difficult to see how A and B could love C and not have a strong desire to share at least some threshold level of activities of the sort in question. What must be imagined is a case in which A loves C but is either dispositionally aversive or indifferent to shared activities with some of the people whom C loves. In the latter case, it is difficult to make sense of A's truly loving C. Such indifference to something so important to a loved one is simply incompatible with loving dispositions. In the former case, it is hard to imagine that A would not experience the lack of people with whom to share these activities as anything other than extremely alienating. Or if the aversion is due to jealousy, it is hard to see how the alienation could be anything other than an integrity-distorting emotion.

The value of such activities is not that they are the means to the end of smooth relations with one's loved ones. Rather, they are a part of, not a means to, a relationship with ones loved ones, an essential part in any complex social context. In such contexts, they may very well be categorical goods, losses of which might be inconsolable in anything other than personal terms.

8

Finally, we must consider impersonally shared activities that have nonintimate independent beneficiaries. Perhaps the most representative are work activities. I am not convinced that there are any forms of shared work in which it is important that the workers do not share any form of personal intimacy. At least, this seems true where the work shared is intrinsically meaningful to the workers. One would think that neighborly love among the community of workers could only enhance the meaning of such activity. Still it might be important in some life contexts that soldiers, for

instance, do not become too intimately connected with each other. The reason might be that psychological survival in battle requires a kind of distancing from others. This may be especially true of military leaders. But it is difficult to make out the view that such activities are intrinsically valued nondeontic activities. With shared work activities of intrinsic value as nondeontic activities, it hardly seems plausible that neighborly love could threaten their worth to the agent. If the intimacy of neighborly love is a threat, it seems best to describe the value as the value of solitary activity. Thus an argument that such activities are categorical goods that serve a unique role in human agency is not forthcoming, at least on the grounds that these activities require a unique distance from any form of personal intimacy.

Nonetheless, there are two points regarding the relationships between these activities and intimacy worth noting. The first concedes that the intimacy of neighborly love may not be a threat to the value of shared activities of the sort in question. Yet it observes that the intimacy of other forms of personal love might very well be such a threat, especially for certain individuals. It may be very important—even psychologically vital— to the mental health of a particular physician that the physician not experience romantic love for someone in the medical profession. To do so might threaten both the relationship and the value of the person's work to that person. The reason for this is that the work becomes too pervasive in the person's life and as such is not intrinsically valuable to that person. Here the kind of personal intimacy is such that it threatens to make too pervasive what is already pervasive to the threshold level. No doubt there are many professional philosophers who are grateful that they are romantically loved by nonphilosophers for this very reason.

The second point is that we cannot always expect to feel even neighborly love for those with whom we share work activities of the sort in question. In such contexts, it is nonetheless important that we can participate without being forced into thinking of these activities as solitary activities. Again the reason for this is the debilitating effects of alienation. One prevalent form of alienation in the modern workplace is to be forced into a position of engaging in an activity that one finds intrinsically rewarding but one's fellow workers do not. Imagine, for example, what life would be like to be employed as a philosopher who loved philosophical dialogue but one's colleagues all wished they had gone into another profession. Love of the local philosophical community is the best replacement for this state of affairs. But even where this is not possible, mutual love of the activity itself will go a long way in terms of consolation, especially where there are other good

things present in a philosopher's life. I cannot see that this is any different regarding nonphilosophers who are dedicated to their work.

In today's world, then, any realistic assessment of the importance of these goods will assign them an important, even categorical, role to play in a nonalienating form of life for many agents. They may not be universal categorical goods, but they are nonetheless goods that are inconsolable in terms of impartial norms for any agent for whom they are categorical. This, of course, does not mean that their value precludes significant impartial commitment to others by the agent for whom these activities have categorical value. For the agent of integrity will have such concerns. We will see how this is true when we address the priorities problem.

9.

The independent goods of activity—whether of the individual, solitary, or shared variety—are extremely important to the identifying thoughts of many of us, especially to the agent of integrity in the thick sense. To this degree these activities are categorical goods and hold a unique place in human integrity; they represent the indispensable place of the aesthetic in our lives. Our deliberative field, if we are agents of integrity in the thick sense, will include not only goods of respect and goods of love but the aesthetic goods of activity as well. Thus any view of human agency that denies them this place for large portions of humanity is unacceptable. One such view is one that requires a lexical ordering of these goods across deliberative contexts where they are never the overriding consideration in competition with impartial norms. This brings us to the priorities problem to which we must now turn.

18—
Normative Thoughts and the Goods of Activity

The integration problem as it relates to the thick conception of integrity is now at its peak level of complexity. All the major goods associated with that conception are before us to be integrated into one conception of agency. The final task, then, is to address the priorities problem as it relates to the goods of activity and the other goods—the goods of respect and esteem and the various goods of personal love. That task, however, is far too complex to address here in anything like a complete way. Consequently, I will address only two kinds of general problems: the first is a problem regarding the concept of permissibility and its place in the normative life, and the second is a problem about the concept of excellence. I will frame both problems within the context of Marcia Baron's recent work on Kant and will argue for another way of seeing things, a way, I believe, that is both closer to Aristotle and to the phenomenology of our reflective experience. In the context of this discussion, I will address issues involving the priorities problem.

1.

One thing to keep in mind is that the goods of activity as we are considering them do not generate thoughts of obligation, but they must be integrated with goods that do. The central question, then, is this: What is the relationship between an agent's deontic beliefs and the goods that generate them and the goods of activity? My primary purpose in this section is to argue against one answer to this question. I will call it the standard view, of which I take Baron's view to be an instance.

The standard view has it that there are three basic deontic categories under which an agent's doing x might be classified. Doing x might be obligatory, merely permissible (but not obligatory), or wrong. The second cate-

gory, on this way of thinking, is the part of life that is left open apart from one's obligations. The idea is somewhat like a certain version of the work ethic: Play comes only after all the work has been done; similarly, anything that is merely permissible comes only after one has dispatched all of one's obligations. This way of thinking tends to see morality as a kind of side constraint on an agent's pursuit of his or her own good, or, in the case of Kantian internalism, a constraint on the other, nonmoral goods of one's life.

Whether the constraints of morality are minimal or substantial is one of the issues debated among advocates of the standard view. Some of those who think that morality does not take up most of the space in a person's life believe that within the category of the merely permissible is a subcategory of actions that are supererogatory, a class of actions that are not obligatory—not required by duty—but are due special moral praise. Baron is concerned to argue that supererogatory acts "do not form an ethically useful or theoretically interesting kind."^[1] On her view, then, the category of acts that are merely permissible does not include a subclass of acts that are supererogatory. What remains are the categories of the obligatory, the wrong, and the merely permissible. Since the merely permissible is that set of acts available to an agent once the demands of morality are met, her view is a clear instance of the standard view.

Baron rejects the category of the supererogatory because she believes that once we understand the role of imperfect duties in Kant's conception of morality we will have no philosophical motive for endorsing the notion of supererogation. There are two very important features of imperfect duties to which Baron calls our attention. The first is that imperfect duties allow for latitude in what is actually required of an agent in a way that imperfect duties do not. The second feature is that imperfect duties require us to take two things as obligatory ends, namely, our own perfection, on the one hand, and the happiness of others, on the other. It is the combination of these features that, on her view, leads to the rejection of supererogation. My interest in her argument is not so much about her rejection of supererogation as it is about how her argument is revealing of her own conceptual scheme and how she understands the general category of the merely permissible.

For our purposes, we can see Baron as trying to carve out a position between two Kantian extremes, a sternly rigorous view that does not allow for the merely permissible at all and a promiscuously latitudinarian view

[1] . Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 26.

that reflects a minimalist morality. The sternly rigorous view might have it that we always stand either under a perfect duty or under an imperfect duty. If we stand under an imperfect duty, we have either a duty to perfect ourselves, which can take the form of a duty either to develop our moral character or to develop our natural talents, or a duty regarding the happiness of others. On this view, we can neglect some of these duties only if it is impossible to fulfill them all, with the understanding that we can never neglect a perfect duty. The promiscuously latitudinarian view would be one that construed the burdens of perfect duties minimally and allowed latitude not only in what we are required to do in regard to the obligatory ends of self-perfection and the happiness of others but also in how much we do in these regards. Given that the promiscuously latitudinarian view imposes minimal requirements in terms of both perfect and imperfect duties, there seems to be a good bit of space for the merely permissible, within which there is room for the supererogatory.

Baron's considered view is closer to the stern rigorist view than the promiscuous latitudinarian one. According to Baron, the duty to perfect ourselves morally is a stronger duty than the duty either to develop our talents or to be concerned with the happiness of others. To be sure, these duties can often be fulfilled within a single act or kind of activity: Playing chess with a friend can be conducive to a greater understanding of others and hence develop our character, but it can also hone our skills and talents and promote the happiness of others (the friend). But when all three cannot be done, the duty to develop our character is second in importance only to perfect duties, the duty to respect others. In fact, after perfect duties, according to Baron, we have the duty to do as much as is possible to develop our character. This means, though Baron does not note it, that if developing our talents or promoting the happiness of others conflicts in some contexts with perfecting our character, then it is not permissible for us, in those contexts, to either develop our talents or promote the happiness of others.

With this understanding of Baron in mind, we can raise the issue of just how much moral latitude there is in a person's life regarding the imperfect duty to perfect oneself morally and the merely permissible. And it does not seem that there would be much room at all, certainly no room for the notion of supererogation. The merely permissible seems to be limited, if we use Baron's own examples, to choices between whether or not to eat fish or poultry, or drink wine or beer with a meal, or, perhaps, to choices regarding the nature of one's attire. If the demands of perfect duties and the imperfect duty to perfect oneself morally do not take up most of one's life—

which, I believe, would require some rather inflated views about how close one already is to moral perfection—there will certainly be little room left for the merely permissible once the duties to develop our talents and promote the happiness of others have exhausted their claims, even where the latter claims are construed modestly. The problem Baron has for allowing very much in the way of the merely permissible is this: Any conduct that flows from the commitment to the obligatory ends of perfecting our character, developing our talents, and promoting the happiness of others has moral worth; thus no conduct flowing from the commitment to these obligatory ends could be merely permissible without being supererogatory. Since she denies that such conduct is supererogatory, she has to deny that any of it is merely permissible. And it is for these reasons that merely permissible acts or conduct has to be construed as involving fairly trivial decisions. As a representative of the standard view, then, Baron leaves some place for the merely permissible, but once the demands of morality have made their claims on us that room is small indeed, hardly enough to accommodate the furnishings of supererogation. None of the kinds of acts that fall in the category of the merely permissible seem likely candidates for special moral praise. But I will argue shortly that not only is supererogation left out of her conceptual scheme, but her scheme will not accommodate the nondeontic goods of activity to the threshold level that they plausibly have as categorical goods for most human agents. Moreover, I will argue that to the degree to which she allows the goods of activity within an agent's life she distorts how they appear within an agent's deliberative field by trying to press them too tightly into the category of obligation, even where the concept of obligation is understood in terms of wide imperfect duties.

Not surprisingly, I find the standard view, including Baron's version of it, distorted. But before turning to a more positive account, consider an opposite approach to the relationship between the merely permissible and the obligatory. The view I have in mind is one that has it that the categories of the obligatory and the wrong are those areas where the category of the permissible leaves off. On this view, we might say that work begins only after all the play is finished. For want of a better term, call this the standard denial view. It too, I think, is distorted, but it does serve to bring back onto the scene an aspect of life relegated to obscurity on most contemporary schemes, especially Baron's. An agent's most central reasons for living are seldom best expressed in deontic terms or as afterthoughts. If this is true, then some categorical norms do not generate thoughts of obligation. From

this perspective, then, the obligatory is the point where the permissible leaves off.

The distorting feature of both views is that they misconstrue the nature of the integration problem as faced by the agent. They assume in opposite ways that there are two separate integration problems that can be solved independently and then a third that is solved by the function of an asymmetrical regulative norm of practical reason. The standard view assumes some complex solution to the integration problem regarding the goods that generate deontic activities and a separate complex solution to the integration problem regarding the goods of activity and then requires that when there are conflicts the former goods always have priority over the latter regardless of the deliberative context. Somewhat more concretely: The priorities of respect, esteem, and persona] love are worked out without reference to the goods of activity; the priorities among the goods of activity are worked out without reference to the goods of respect, esteem, and love; and then it is required that the obligations of the one always take priority over the interests in the other regardless of the deliberative context. The standard denial view, on the other hand, reverses the priorities. Like the standard view, it assumes separate and independent solutions to the integration problems regarding deontic and nondeontic goods. But then it requires that the latter goods always take priority over the former regardless of the deliberative context. Both assume asymmetrical regulative norms: the standard view usually employing an asymmetrical impartial norm; and the standard denial view, asymmetrical partial norms. My criticism of both views is that neither could possibly present a solution to the problem the agent actually faces. Consider first the distorting factor in the standard denial view, the view that is implausible on its face. This view is incompatible with the commitments of both simple respect and any form of personal love. For it entails that there are some things that are permissible from the point of view of an agent of integrity in the thick sense no matter what the consequences to those worthy of simple respect or to loved ones. Favoring one's work no matter what the consequences to strangers or to friends might be an example. It is enough to refute this view that we have shown that in catastrophic contexts an agent either suffers some form of agent breakdown or has reasons for dying. This is true both for simple respect and for personal love in its variety. It is no less true for the goods of activity. We might find a way of thinking that Gauguin was a loving husband and father under some descriptions of what he was willing to allow his wife and children to suffer for his artistic projects. But we will have abandoned any

way at all of making sense of the concept of love as applied to him if we say that he was willing to pursue his art regardless of the possible consequences to his family. For either a respectful or a loving agent, there is no activity, absolutely no activity, that is always permissible regardless of the deliberative context. Kissing my wife, finishing this paragraph, attending a graduation ceremony, changing a diaper, registering to vote, donating a kidney— all these and any other activity might take the time crucial to preventing a catastrophe.

The distorting factor, then, of the standard denial view is that it construes the concept of permissibility in a way that fails to recognize something essential about the nature of the integration problem. The integration problem must be understood to recognize the categorical aversions embedded within the commitments of any respectful and loving agent. Therefore, there cannot be an independent solution to the integration problem among the various goods of activity, as is assumed by the standard denial view.

It does not follow from this, however, that the priorities of respect and love can be set independent of considerations of the goods of activity. This is the mistake of the standard view, and it is the source of its distortion.

If we were to say that the permissible is that aspect of life left over after thoughts of obligation and prohibition, we would miss the point—the very crucial point—that a sense of obligation is restricted by the fact that some things make life worth living and are valued accordingly. The facts about our capacity for boredom and the capacities that underwrite that capacity establish this. Human beings cannot long find life minimally meaningful if all its activities are utterly tedious. Reflections on the role of pain in practical reason and the prospects of an eternity of tedium are revealing.

Consider first the role of pain in practical reason. Peter Unger has given powerful arguments to the effect that reflections on pain are revealing regarding our concept of personal identity, and he thinks that his arguments support a physical rather than a memory (or some other psychological) criterion for personal identity over time.^[2] (Here I am not so much concerned about the personal identity debate as I am about the role of pain in practical reason.) Unger's argument can be understood in terms of a distinction between a person's core psychology and a person's distinctive psychology. A person's core psychology is composed of those capacities that make a distinctive psychology possible. A person's distinctive psychology, for ex-

[2] . See Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness, and Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

ample, might be composed of memories of actual events and episodes in his or her life, along with particular tastes and dispositions. A core psychology is composed of those capacities that make it possible for one to have particular memories, tastes, and commitments. Without the core capacity for having memories, I could not have the particular memory of my daughters' births; without the core capacity for making commitments, I could not have the particular commitments of respect and love that I have; and without the core capacity for boredom and the capacities that underwrite that capacity, I could not have the specific capacity for being fascinated by philosophical inquiry.

Now suppose that we have an account of some plausible set of basic core capacities, a set that anyone must have to be recognizable as a person. Surely among this set of core capacities would be the capacity for pain, the capacity for memory, and the capacities tor forming and pursuing ground projects. On a psychological criterion, personal identity is based on one's distinctive psychology, one's connectedness through memory and other psychological continuities. On this view, if you strip away all my distinctive psychological continuities and the physical bases for them, you destroy me, only my body (the rest of it) remains. Hence no distinctive psychological continuity, no personal identity over time. Unger, however, would have us consider whether we can project thoughts of ourselves into the future without our distinctive psychologies. If we can, then our distinctive psychologies are not essential to our personal identities. That we can do this, Unger claims, is revealed by what he calls the Avoidance of Future Great Pain Test. Imagine being faced with a choice in which you can only avoid the most excruciating pain imaginable by having the physical bases for your distinctive psychology surgically removed. All your distinctive memories and along with them all the distinctive psychological attachments you have will be removed. Remaining will be the core capacities, including the capacity to form new distinctive memories and commitments, and their physical bases. If it is possible for you to imagine the intensity and duration of the prospective pain giving you a reason for having the surgery, then you are projecting thoughts of yourself into the future without your distinctive psychology. And this is possible. Indeed, one of the uglier facts about practical reason is that the avoidance of pain at some point can eclipse all our other commitments. Not to recognize this is to take refuge in fantasy. At some point in your sojourn in the fiery lake of eternal hell you would gladly consent to the surgery and a completely new start. The anticipation of pain, then, is very central to our psychology and plays a major role in practical

reason for the simple reason that all or us have some threshold level of tolerance for pain below which we have a categorical aversion to any way of life that contains it.

Now to consider the pain of tedium. In Problems of the Self , Bernard Williams, in a piece called "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality," argues that the fact that we eventually die is a good thing.^[3] It is a good thing, according to Williams, because there is no description of immortality that would make eternal life worthwhile. Why? Because no matter what you might do in eternity it would eventually become so tedious as to make life unbearable. So the argument looks something like this:

1. If life's activities become tedious to a certain degree, they and the life they constitute will become unbearable.

2. In eternity every kind of activity would eventually become tedious to that degree.

3. Therefore, eternal life would be unbearably tedious no matter what activities it might include.

Of course, one might (mistakenly, I believe) attempt to deny the truth of the second premise, but what seems undeniable is the first premise. If this is true and if Unger is right, then one kind of pain that could make it rational to sacrifice one's distinctive psychology would be the pain of tedium. Actually, if the second premise is also true and Unger is right, then a rather startling conclusion would follow. Imagine that if I were to snap my fingers you would live forever; that is, the snapping of my fingers would have the consequence of making you immortal. If the above argument is sound and if Unger is right, then it would be rational for you to end your life before I could snap my fingers. Moreover, this seems to follow no matter how well your life is now going. As startling as this conclusion is, it is one that we will have to accept if we accept the soundness of the arguments of both Williams and Unger. I believe they are both sound, but one need not agree with the first premise of Williams's argument to get the result that if life were utterly tedious it would be unbearable.

The significance of this is that life has to be minimally interesting to be worth living, but "being interesting" is an aesthetic category, not a

[3] . See Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 82–100.

moral one. If this is true, then for creatures like us a significant place within our conceptual scheme must be given to activities that we find interesting, fascinating, captivating, and the like. I can see only three responses Baron might make that have any initial plausibility. First, she might maintain that the threshold level of nondeontic activities necessary to ward off tedium can be contained within the category of the merely permissible as she conceives it. Second, she might maintain that the deontic activities involved in imperfect duties themselves provide enough in the way of interesting, fascinating, captivating activities to go beyond any threshold of aesthetic goods needed to relieve tedium. And third, she might say that the combination of the activities allowed within her conception of the merely permissible and the aesthetic dimension of deontic activities would more than suffice to prevent devastating tedium.

Now consider each of these in turn. The first, I believe, is easily discharged. If the aesthetic appeal of life's activities is put at a significant threshold level, then the area left on Baron's account for the merely permissible will not suffice to account for the place of these goods in a plausibly meaningful life for most anyone. And surely the threshold must be quite high. If the only activities you could find interesting were choices between items on your meal menu or what apparel to wear for the day, then you would either spend a lot more time doing these things or you would find life unbearable. Though one might object that this is not a very generous reading of the place of the merely permissible in Baron's scheme, I would simply ask the objector to think of how generous we would have to be to Baron, consistent with what she says about imperfect duties, in order to make plausible that she could account for the goods of activity in this way. Refection, I believe, will surely lead us to consider the other alternatives.

The second alternative recognizes that the merely permissible is inadequate to account for the role the aesthetic plays in a minimally meaningful life. In fact, the second alternative seems to be motivated by the thought that the merely permissible is woefully inadequate to accommodate the goods of activity and that the bulk of what is interesting, fascinating, or captivating for a moral agent is to be found in morality itself. Baron suggests this herself:

Moral excellence on Kant's view is not monotonic; perhaps an assumption that it is monotonic motivates the views that a moral requirement that we become more virtuous would be excessive. Finally, on Kant's view, the practice of living morally, of striving to improve oneself . . . is not just a burden to be endured because of the results of people acting morally; rather, it is meaningful in itself and expressive of one's

moral agency. This view may not be shared by Kant's critics and seems not to be held by supererogationists.^[4]

The passage strongly suggests that those disagreeing with Baron's view are lacking in taste : Were we (those of us with a different view) more moral we would find the moral life more interesting, fascinating, and captivating.

How plausible is this? We should first note that the rhetorical value of the above passage from Baron loses its homiletic effect when we note the difference between the commitment to improving our character and the commitment to doing as much as possible to improve our character. That a life with a commitment to improving one's character would not necessarily be monotonic seems perfectly clear. What seems equally clear is that a life with a commitment to improving one's character as much as possible would be monotonic, not to mention narcissistic, and perhaps the former because of the latter. I do not see that the commitment to improving one's character as much as possible is more important to a good person than either developing one's talents or the happiness of others. Perhaps I am more committed to improving my character than I am to the happiness of others, but I am not more committed to improving my character as much as possible than I am to the happiness of others. If this is a flaw, it is not one that I intend to correct. Nor do I believe that the value of my rational agency is such that it places my self-improvement on such an exalted plane. At any rate, I do not think that the activities of moral self-improvement, though perhaps interesting, are in themselves minimally interesting enough to make life worth living for a person of even average intelligence. Moreover, it is difficult for me to understand anyone for whom they would be sufficiently interesting to carry a life as being anything other than morally narcissistic.

But Baron has other concepts at her disposal. She does not have to put all the weight on the activities of moral self-improvement; she can also point to the activities of bringing happiness to others and to the activities of developing our talents. These surely will include enough for any person to find life meaningful. Indeed, if we bring these activities under the rubric of morality we will find most of what makes life interesting, fascinating, and captivating. However, as plausible as this might sound, there are deep problems with it.^[5]

The major problem has to do with the possibility of motivationally over-

[4] . Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology , 107.

[5] . Just how plausible it is must be considered, however, in the light of Baron's view that we have the imperfect duty to do as much as possible to improve our char acter.

determined actions. Baron's view is that there are no motivationally overdetermined actions that have moral worth, and this limits rather severely her access to the above line of thought. To find an activity interesting is to be drawn to doing it for itself. The same can be said of finding something fascinating, captivating, and the like. In short, the aesthetic goods of activity are what they are in virtue of the kind of motivational pull they have. Without this motivational pull, activities of work, of play, of routine, and of creative contribution and achievement are not aesthetic goods of activity. In order for the second alternative to work, the goods of activity would have to be both deontic and aesthetic, which would require that they would have to be motivationally overdetermined. And herein lies Baron's problem.

Baron presents an insightful and interestingly new way of seeing Kant's concern with moral worth. According to Baron, Kant was not nearly as concerned with the moral worth of individual actions as he has been taken to be. Rather, he was concerned with the moral worth of patterns of conduct that reveal character. Only the sense of duty can confer moral worth on individual actions, which is why the moral worth of individual actions cannot be motivationally overdetermined. Perfect duties and the sense of duty associated with them can generate individual deontic acts that have moral worth. Because of the latitude involved in imperfect duties and the role they allow for inclination, the individual actions that satisfy these duties are motivationally overdetermined, and hence, as individual acts, lack moral worth. But viewed not as individual actions but as elements within a pattern of conduct, they reveal a commitment to the obligatory ends of morality and hence have moral worth as deontic conduct, not as deontic acts. Since these duties constitute a great deal of the moral life, Kant's conceptual scheme reveals a greater concern with the sense of duty as a regulative norm than as a determinate norm.

Even nondeontic activities can be seen as having moral worth on Baron's view, not when viewed as individual actions but as patterns of conduct regulated by the sense of duty to have obligatory ends. Even the merely permissible act of having beer rather than wine with my meal has moral worth as a pattern of conduct, if I would be willing to forgo the beer for the wine should duty require it in the context. But deontic acts, involving narrow duties, have moral worth only if the sense of duty is the determinate rather than the regulative motive. Deontic acts cannot be, on her view, motivationally overdetermined: Either the sense of duty is the determinate motive, in which case the action has moral worth, or some nonmoral motive is determinate, in which case the action has no moral worth. Hence if we

are to incorporate the development of our talents and the promotion of the happiness of others into morality it cannot be as deontic acts but as deontic conduct. Baron, then, could have us view some individual activities and their worth to us as nondeontic activities, but at the same time she could have us view these same activities more widely as patterns of conduct and hence as deontic conduct. So where is the problem?

The problem is that the aesthetic allure of these activities must be epiphenomenal on her view where they cannot be, namely, at the point of our commitment to them. On Baron's view, any particular engagement in an aesthetic activity can have as its determinate motive an inclination of an aesthetic sort. This allows the inclination a role that is not epiphenomenal but motivationally active in the agent's behavior. But, as an individual act influenced by aesthetic motivation the activity can have no moral worth. It is only when viewed as a pattern of conduct that moral worth can be assigned to such an activity. The behavior can count as moral conduct, however, only if the commitment to obligatory ends is motivated only by the sense of duty, and for this to be true, the aesthetic allure of these activities has to be epiphenomenal to our commitment to incorporating them into our conduct in the first place. In fact, insofar as we think of these activities as conduct that fulfills our duties, we must be willing to do them no matter how dull they might be. Otherwise, our commitment to the obligatory ends of morality is not from the sense of duty. Thus the kind of counterfactual that Kant requires as a test for whether an individual act has moral worth applies to whether a pattern of conduct has moral worth, namely, even where inclination is present it must be the case that the agent would have acted or made the commitment anyway (even against contrary inclination). Baron is therefore forced by the second alternative and her rejection of the moral overdetermination of actions to treat the fact that these activities are interesting, fascinating, and captivating to the agent as the result of these activities, not as providing the agent with any motivational pull for being committed to them as patterns of conduct that fulfill the commitment to the obligatory ends of morality. In short, she is forced to treat the aesthetic dimension of these activities as epiphenomenal to our commitment to them.

The grain of truth in Baron's view is that we do respect persons for pursuing what is interesting, fascinating, and captivating to them only if they show sensitivity in their pursuits to respect and sympathy for others and love for their loved ones. But, as I will show, the Aristotelian scheme can not only accommodate these thoughts; it also requires them. Morever, the

Aristotelian scheme is not committed to the motivational inefficacy of the aesthetic dimensions of the kinds of activity we are concerned to accommodate. The real problem with Baron's view, if she takes either the second or third alternative above by assimilating the value of the goods of activity to the value of deontic conduct, is that she forfeits an essential feature of the goods in question. It is essential to the goods of activity that they appear as ends of a certain sort within the agent's deliberative field, namely, goods that are interesting, fascinating, captivating, and the like. Unless they do, the agent is left in a state of boredom and is without a reason for being committed to the activities as the kind of activities we take them to be. Thus it is essential to the capacities that underwrite the capacity for boredom that they are not motivationally inert or epiphenomenal. The attempt to find something interesting as a means to relieving boredom is futile, if as a matter of fact there are no activities available to us that have the right kind of motivational pull. Nor is it anything but futile to attempt to find something interesting as a means to fulfilling our duties, even if we believe that we have a duty to develop our talents. It is crucial, then, to these activities having a place in our commitments that they appear within our deliberative field as interesting, fascinating, captivating, and the like, and that as such they have their motivational pull. The psychological results of engaging in these activities is possible only when we see them as activities to be pursued for their own sakes. They allure us with the kind of appearance they make as ends within our deliberative field, and it is crucial to this allure that thoughts about relieving boredom, pleasing God, fulfilling our duties are motivationally inert as determinate motives, though they can be present as regulative motives. Just as we cannot relieve our boredom by thinking of what we are doing as means to relieving our boredom, we cannot relieve our boredom by thinking of what we are doing as the fulfillment of duty. The only way to relieve boredom is to lose oneself in some intrinsically meaningful activity, that is, by becoming interested in the doing of something for its own sake and becoming fascinated, captivated, even lost in that activity. This cannot happen as long as the aesthetic dimensions of activities are motivationally inert. Thus it cannot be true that one is engaged in an activity of the sort in question and the aesthetic dimensions of that activity be epiphenomenal. Nor can it be true that we can be committed to them for the activities they are for indirect reasons and bypass their motivational pull in a way that renders epiphenomenal their aesthetic allure. For this reason, Baron cannot accommodate the goods of activity by assimilating them or some substantial portion of them to morality as deontic goods by

taking either the second or third alternative above. By trying to force the value of these activities into the category of the deontic, even under the category of wide imperfect duties, she distorts the facts about their phenomenology and has to deny the more plausible naturalistic explanation for why these goods appear within our deliberative field in the first place and give us a basis for our commitments. When we find it interesting and captivating to spend time with others or to engage in the activities that develop our talents, we are moved by our sentiments and tastes, not a sense of obligation. The need to deny this seems motivated more by an almost obsessive sense of responsibility and an exclusive emphasis on the value of rational agency than anything required by an adequate phenomenology of value.^[6]

If we are, then, to make a place for these goods in a way that is consistent with their phenomenology, we will have to reject Baron's version of the standard view. Might there be some other version of the standard view that will do the desired work? I do not think so, because any view that does so will have to make rather unrealistic claims about the place of these goods in our lives. They will have to deny that they operate as restrictions on what can be required of us from the moral or any other point of view. For this reason, it is time to consider how the Aristotelian view would accommodate these goods in a way that allows them to have their regulative effect on the other norms of a person's life without generating a sense of obligation. To see this, we need to consider the priorities problem.

2.

Before I proceed, then, to the subject of excellence, I want to address the issue of whether there is anything to fear in the rejection of the standard view. This will allow me to say something very general about the solution to the priorities problem as we now face it. The issue is whether allowing the permissible to function as a restriction on the obligatory is a threat to substantial commitments of impartial obligation. For purposes of illustra-

[6] . This same kind of difficulty faces those like Herman, Sherman, and Wood who want to give an account of friendship and other loving relations within the framework of imperfect duties. The love in parental commitments, in the commitments of friendship, and in the commitments of neighborly love must be epiphenomenal in the agent's commitment to these obligatory ends. But surely this distorts how these commitments enter our lives and how our loved ones appear within our deliberative field.

tion, I remain with activities involving aesthetic appreciation as they might conflict with the interests of persons held in simple respect.

If what I have said thus far is correct, then the agent will have some threshold level of interest in goods of aesthetic activity that is categorical. This will limit but not exclude the emergence of deontic beliefs from other sources within the agent's life. But these other commitments, given that they are categorical, will limit but not exclude the place of aesthetic experience in the agent's life as well. Can we say anything about the boundaries of these limits? I believe we can.

By now, one limit should be clear. The agent of integrity in the thick sense will feel obligated to give priority to the interests of those held in simple respect when their interests are categorical and the interest in aesthetic activity is not at the categorical threshold level for the agent. This is because the reverse priorities would not make sufficient place within the agent's life for those he or she holds in simple respect: the criterion of selfsufficiency would be violated. A similar norm will emerge in contexts in which the frustration of the agent's aesthetic interests would be minor and the benefits to others in terms of their flourishing significant. No respectful agent employing the criterion of self-sufficiency would order his or her life on these priorities because they do no make sufficient place for the goods of respect. Finally, there are those catastrophic contexts in which even if the cost to the agent is categorical in terms of aesthetic experience the agent will clearly feel the obligation to make a categorical sacrifice. These contexts reveal that a respectful agent with a categorical interest in the goods of activity cannot see some lives that preserve the goods of activity but sacrifice the goods of respect as satisfying the criterion of finality. Such a life would not be worthy of choice from the agent's own point of view. In all these contexts, the obligatory limits the permissible. Without these priorities, we are unable to understand the agent as being a respectful person, and we can understand them perfectly clearly from the Aristotelian perspective.

But we are equally unable to understand the agent as having a categorical interest in the goods of aesthetic activity if we do not include a set of priorities according to which the permissible limits the obligatory. Some of these contexts are those in which the interests of others are noncategorical and the agent's interests in aesthetic activity have reached the categorical threshold. But surely this is not too much for the agent to expect. True, it reflects the expectation of others that they make important sacrifices for the sake of the agent's aesthetic interests. But this is no less than the agent

is willing to do for others. Here the thought that doing x is permissible for him not only leads to the thought that some things are obligatory for others but also leads to the thought that activities inconsistent with doing x are not obligatory for him. That others must make such a sacrifice does not make this sort of life with its priorities unworthy of choice, and the opposite set of priorities renders the way of life those priorities would structure neither self-sufficient nor final. So, once again, the Aristotelian view is confirmed.

Still other contexts are those in which the interests of others as well as the agent's are at the threshold level. In this regard, it may not be true as Faulkner said that "Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies."^[7] But from the viewpoint of most people's experience, some degree of beauty in one's life is worth some number of human casualties. To deny this, it seems, is to engage in hypocrisy of the worst sort. If one doubts this, simply reflect on the costs of one's books. I believe that Oxfam can guarantee the saving of many lives for donations less than the cost of paperback copies of The Limits of Morality, The Case for Animal Rights , and an offprint of "Famine, Affluence, and Morality."^[8] For the costs of producing these and other writings thousands of lives could be saved. Wherefore, then, the objection to a copy of Keats and the aesthetic activity of reading fine literature?^[9] Those who are apt to read a philosophy book are unlikely not to reason in a way that sets their priorities to ensure that life is full to a certain extent of intellectually interesting, fascinating, and captivating activities. To think that such a life does not cost others is extremely naive, to say the least. To choose such a life in the face of such costs is to endorse the priorities that structure it from the criterion of finality. And to reject the

[7] . See Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 619.

[8] . Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (Spring 1972): 229–43.

[9] . There is, of course, the possibility of the now-ubiquitous response of the indirect consequentialist here: The real justification for the permissibility of our book purchases is to be found in indirect appeals to utility or some other impersonal end. For this response to work, it must generalize to provide an account for the place of aesthetic considerations within the meaning of our lives. But if I am right that some threshold level of aesthetic concerns is a categorical value for us, the indirect deliberative route to the desired conclusion seems puzzling. From what set of values is one deliberating when one is deliberating about what one's categorical values are going to be?

way of life that would save the lives but would come at the cost of intellectual tedium is to say that the rejected way of life is not self-sufficient. What could better illustrate the fact that our conceptual scheme and our lives confirm that the obligatory is regulated by this aspect of the merely permissible and that the moral is regulated by the aesthetic, as well as being regulated by it. Here again the latitude we expect in the practical life is not consistent with a view of human dignity that is absolute, nonscalar, nonadditive, and immune to trade-offs. This should put to rest the prospects of accounting for these priorities in terms of imperfect duties on the substantive interpretation of the CI procedure and the Formula of Humanity.

Finally, not to be overlooked are those contexts in which the agent finds himself or herself facing a deliberative impasse suspended between stultifying choices. On the one hand is the most aesthetically dreary life and categorical benefits to more than a marginal number of respectable people. On the other hand is a life with at least a bearable level of aesthetic appreciation but with more than a marginal number of respectable people suffering a categorical loss. Here the numbers are not such that they resolve the issue from the point of view of the agent. Awareness of them neither allows the agent to proceed with the activity nor allows him to make the sacrifice.

It is difficult to conceive of someone so aesthetically dense as not to understand the possibility of such contexts after reflection. But it is of the nature of such contexts that normative thoughts—both about the obligatory and about the merely permissible—have found their limit. Instead, there is irresolvable normative confusion, and it is a terrible mistake to think that a person crushed by such a situation lacks significant respect and concern for others. No. Such a person is merely a creature with an aesthetic dimension at the core of life. For most of us in this regard, not only is a life devoid of personal love but with every other good thing one version of hell, but a life with every other good thing yet totally lacking beauty and aesthetic interest is another. These contexts reveal that the agent cannot make a choice because there is no way the agent can order his or her priorities in a way that structures a way of life that accommodates goods that are minimally self-sufficient to make a way of life worthy of choice.

These contexts, therefore, along with the others, serve to indicate the priorities of the agent of integrity regarding the goods of activity. Not only are these priorities dictated by the nature of the integration problem, but I cannot see anything to criticize in the agent who has them. For this reason, I cannot see anything to fear in the rejection of the standard view. Moreover, the Aristotelian view, with its emphasis on the criteria of finality and

self-sufficiency and the symmetrical feature of its regulative norms, accommodates these thoughts perfectly.

I turn now to the subject of excellence.

3.

It is one of the positive features of Baron's Kant that he insists on a commitment to excellence, something about which most of contemporary ethics is deplorably silent. Nevertheless, I will argue that Baron's scheme is inadequate to account for the commitment to excellence in an acceptable way.

Within Baron's interpretation of Kant's conceptual scheme, there are two basic ways of accounting for the commitment to excellence: one is indirectly a function of duties to others and the other is a direct function of our imperfect duty to improve ourselves, both of which are functions of our duty to respect rational nature in ourselves and others. I will argue that for the agent of integrity in the thick sense the commitment to excellence is not to be accounted for in these terms.

Certainly, one way in which thoughts of excellence enter the life of the agent of integrity is through the thought that the fates of others depend on one's competence, on one's doing what one does well. Mediocre efforts at doing well at those activities on which others depend indicate a lack of respect, esteem, sympathy, and love for others. They are contrary to the normative thoughts of such sentiments. Unimpassioned affection, tepid congratulations, and halfhearted or neglectful nurturing are all antithetical to the categorical commitments expressed in activities associated with personal love. Lukewarm devotion and inattention to competence are also incompatible with simple respect, esteem, and sympathy for others. Caring and wanting to make one's contributions in the contexts of such caring are simply unrecognizable apart from the commitment to excellence. Also, mediocre results, even when they are from conscientious efforts, are a source of tremendous disappointment to a caring person when those cared for are left wanting in important ways. That the agent of integrity is committed to excellence in this sense, then, is beyond dispute.

Moreover, it is true, as the Kantians claim, that a good person's culpable failure in excellence in the activities that serve the respect for others evokes a sense of self-reproach in such a person. This fact, however, does not confirm the Kantian view. For, as we have already seen, respect, love, and sympathy are symmetrical in their regulative functions; thus it is not simply respect for rational nature that is the foundational value for these

commitments. Hence respect for rational nature as an asymmetrical regulative norm is not the foundational value for the commitment to excellence in these regards. Still, it remains true that an important dimension of the commitment to excellence is to be accounted for in terms of our commitments to others.

What might not be so clear is that the agent of integrity is categorically committed to excellence in another sense. At least, it must not be clear if neglect of the topic is a sign of its not being thought sufficiently important to warrant discussion. What I have in mind is the commitment to doing well at activities that are not tightly connected with the fates of others, or at least, need not be.

Perhaps the best way to describe the kind of commitment I have in mind can be put in terms of a musician's concern regarding the performance of a piece of music. Imagine a quartet getting together to play for themselves. They have no concern to play for the public, only for themselves. Having played through the piece, they decide to play it again. One reason they could have for repeating the piece is that they simply enjoyed playing it the first time and would enjoy playing it again. But suppose this is not the case, what other reason might they have? Perhaps they think they did not play it well enough the first time; thus the insistence on playing it again. Any decent musician, or anyone with the slightest understanding of what drives a good musician, will understand this impulse to play it again. The origin of the impulse is not simply the dissatisfaction with the prior performance, though this is an element. Rather, there is a vision of how the piece could be played, and it is this that generates the dissatisfaction with the prior performance. It is the musician's vision of how things could be done that is the foundation for his or her commitment to excellence. A vision of how the piece could be played appears as intrinsically good within the agent's deliberative field, and it is this that grounds the commitment to it.

Now consider two interpretations of the musician's experience constructed from the Stoics and Kant. In De Finibus (bk. 3, vi, 22), there appears the following passage from Cicero:

It will be an error to infer that this [the Stoic] view implies two Ultimate Goods. For though if a man were to make it his purpose to take a true aim with a spear or arrow at some mark, his ultimate end, corresponding to the ultimate good as we pronounce it, would be to do all he could to aim straight: the man in this illustration would have to do everything to aim straight, and yet, although he did everything to attain his purpose, his "ultimate End," so to speak, would be what corresponded to what we call the Chief Good in the conduct of life,

whereas the actual hitting of the mark would be in our phrase "to be chosen" but not "to be desired."^[10]

If we apply this passage to the musician, the Stoic musician must be understood on the analogy with the Stoic archer: The role of the target is to provide an opportunity to aim straight. Only in this way is it chosen; otherwise, it is not to be desired. Similarly, the vision of how the music could be played merely provides a target, an opportunity to exercise and develop one's talents; otherwise, it too is an object not to be desired. On this view, then, the vision of how the piece could be played appears within the agent's deliberative field as an instrumental good, one that functions as a way of focusing on something else, namely, on one's talents.

A thought related to this view is found in Kant's view that the good will is good independent of its consequences. Kant argues that we can distinguish between the person who merely wishes for the right thing and the person who truly wills it, and he also argues that we can distinguish between the person who wills the right thing and achieves it and the person who wills the right thing but fails to achieve it. According to Kant, there is a clear moral difference between the person who truly wills the right thing and the person who merely wishes it, but there is no moral difference between the person who wills and achieves and the person who wills and fails, as long as both are truly willing. How do these thoughts apply to the imperfect duty to develop our talents and to our musician? If you are a Kantian musician, your musical ability appears within your deliberative field in a certain way: It appears there as one among possibly several ways of developing your talents and respecting the value of your rational agency. Suppose that within the latitude allowed by the imperfect duty to develop your talents, you decide to fulfill this duty by developing your musical talents as opposed to other talents you might have. You are now gathered with the other members of your quartet, finding yourself with the impulse to play the piece again. What reason might you have for doing this?

Whatever reason it is it cannot be one that makes the extra practice supererogatory as a case of going beyond duty to develop your talents. Nor does it seem that the replaying can be merely permissible, since this occasion is one on which you can develop your talents. In some sense, then, it is a dutiful activity. It is a case of developing your talents as an expression of your respect for your rational nature. You enjoy the activity, but your

[10] . Cicero, Di Finibus (Cicero XVII) , trans. H. Hackman, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), 241.

enjoyment is epiphenomenal as a reason for playing. But why, from the point of view of respect for your rational nature, would you play the piece again? Perhaps your playing revealed such mediocrity that you have doubts that you had the target in view. So you play again, concentrating on the vision of how the piece could be played. But, again, you are disappointed. This time you have doubts that you truly willed to play the piece according to the way envisioned. That is, you had the target in view but failed to try hard enough to aim straight; your playing was somewhere between merely wishful playing and truly willful playing. So you play the piece again. On many different occasions and after many attempts, all of which come up clearly short of the vision, you conclude that you and your quartet can approximate the vision only so closely. You tell yourself that you have not failed as a result of merely wishing but of truly willing. In other words, you gave it your best shot, and this thought leaves your conscience clear regarding your dutiful commitment to excellence. The relationship between your sense of self and your pursuit of the vision can be described as the motive to engage in the activity in a way that afterward there cannot be any sense of self-reproach should mediocrity be the result.

There is a difference, though a small one, between the Stoic musician and you as a Kantian musician in your respective commitments to excellence. The Stoic musician is not disappointed at mediocrity when mediocre playing is the result of true effort. Excellent playing is the target, but it is chosen, not desired. Like the archer for whom the target is irrelevant after the release of the arrow, the actual quality of the music is irrelevant after the best effort has been made to play it well. To be sure, the best effort must have been given. Nevertheless, since the happy life is the life of virtue, mediocre music is nothing to the Stoic musician who has given his best effort to play according to the vision.^[11] The value of excellence, then, is in the effort, and it is in this that the agent finds his or her well-being. As a Kantian musician, however, you are allowed some degree of disappointment at the fact that the natural lottery prevented you and your quartet from playing in a way that matched the vision. I say some, but not a great deal, for as a Kantian musician you have other duties, especially to perfect your character as much as possible. Of course, if you never had any inclination to develop your talent in the first place, only the sense of duty to do so,

[11] . Lawrence Becker's contemporary version of Stoicism deserves a separate response, one that I cannot attempt here. See Lawrence C. Becker, A New Stoicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

there will be no disappointment at all, only the thought that you gave it your best shot.

Now how might an Aristotelian musician contrast with the Stoic and the Kantian in the commitment to excellence? First, it seems plausible that any acceptable view will insist, as does both the Stoic and the Kantian views, that it is important to one's sense of self-respect that one does the best one can, that one puts one's best effort forward. Moreover, what seems right about both views is that if mediocrity is the result of one's best efforts, then there is no room for blame. What reason is there for thinking, then, that there is anything missing from these accounts of the commitment to excellence?

That there is something missing from both accounts is revealed, I believe, in reflections on how important externals are to a caring agent. In this regard, let me draw a parallel between parental love and the commitment to excellence of the sort in question. We cannot, I believe, give a plausible account of a normative conception of love that renders the loving parent invulnerable to some degree of agent breakdown should tragedy befall his or her children. This is because loving a child involves a categorical interest, an interest in an external. As the Stoics knew all too well, it is the commitment to externals that renders one vulnerable to a troubled life. If it is an untroubled life you want, do not become a parent, for nothing generates anxiety as much as the concern over whether something bad is going to happen to your children. Now suppose something bad does happen to your children, and you have the thought analogous to the thought of the musician, "I wish I could raise my children all over again." What might motivate such a thought?

You might worry that you did not have a target the first time around, that you simply failed to give enough thought to what a good parent should try to provide for his or her children. Surely, sometimes this is the form of parental self-reproach. But assume that this is not the case, that though you had the right target in mind you simply did not put forth your best effort at being a good parent, that your parenting was somewhere between merely wishful parenting and truly willful parenting. This thought could certainly motivate the desire to raise your children all over again. But assume that neither of these motivates the desire to raise your children again, that you had the right target in view and that you made your most conscientious efforts at hitting it; yet the desire to raise your children again persists with some intensity. If we take the Stoic archer analogy seriously, a good outcome to your children of your best efforts to secure their well-

being will be chosen but not desired. Thus a bad outcome will not redound negatively on your happiness; it will leave you untroubled, in a state of ataraxia. Since acting virtuously is all that matters to happiness and you have acted virtuously in doing the best you can to secure a good outcome for your children, the bad outcome will not matter. But, of course, parental love in those we respect the most is not like this at all. Loving children in a way that involves the kind of commitment we respect renders a person extremely vulnerable to bad outcomes. Imagine someone telling bereaved parents that they had done their best to prevent tragedy coming to their children. In the absence of some indication by the parents that they thought the tragedy due to their negligence, such comments would be nothing short of inhumanely insensitive. Grief need not include self-blame, but its presence is natural to those sentiments connected to externals, as parental love most surely is. In this context, the desire to raise one's children all over again is simply a function of the desire to have better luck next time, a desire that expresses our vulnerability. Thus there is an essential connection between the commitment to excellence we expect in loving parents and a kind of vulnerability that is at the heart of a loving parent's psychology. Nowhere else is it more obvious that hitting the target means so much, even when missing is not something we see as our fault.

Something similar is true of the musician, or the poet, writer, scientist, athlete, or philosopher who is committed to excellence at his or her activities. To be committed to excellence at these activities is to be committed to the value of an external, and this fact is not captured either by the Stoic or the Kantian account. The Stoic account fails because it cannot account for the fact that missing the target no matter what the effort is a source of tremendous stress to the musician committed to excellence. The actual quality of one's music is part of the meaning of one's life at its core to a person for whom being a musician is a categorical commitment. Thus committing yourself to excellence at music is to render yourself vulnerable to bad outcomes. The only way to avoid this is to avoid the commitment to excellence at music. Nor will it be consoling that the bad outcome, the mediocrity of your music, is not due to lack of effort on your part. Failure in this regard might leave your moral integrity in place but utterly shatter you as a person. For this reason, the Kantian analysis of the commitment to excellence in terms of respect for your rational agency is woefully inadequate. No self-respecting musician, poet, athlete, or philosopher could find an epitaph that read "She gave it her best shot" anything other than patronizing.

It is also difficult to know in advance whether one is going to be good

enough at these activities to hit the target. In fact, it seems to me that those we esteem a great deal, perhaps the most, are those who take the chance of investing their lives in these activities when the odds are that they will not hit the target at which they aim. The odds against even the brightest graduate students going on to make a significant contribution to their fields is surely quite high. Do we encourage them, then, to aim only at respectability? If we do, have we encouraged a commitment to excellence? The truth is that the commitment to excellence has an ineliminably brutal element to it. This is not because of competition with others, but because there is a vision of how things could be done and one might simply fail in one's efforts to realize that vision. Do we think people have an obligation to take on such a commitment? I do not think so, yet among those we esteem most are people who are committed to excellence in just this way. Is their commitment to excellence supererogatory? Again, this seems to miss the value of excellence from the agent's point of view. Rather, the best way to describe such a commitment is in terms of the nonmoral regulating the moral, the aesthetic regulating the deontic.

On the Aristotelian model, the vision of how things could be done appears within our deliberative field as good. And against this vision we measure ourselves and invest a good bit of the meaning of our lives in approximating that vision. When we fall too far short of that vision, such failure diminishes the meaning of our lives from our own point of view. A life of mediocrity is neither self-sufficient nor final, even when one has given one's best efforts at avoiding it, for the person for whom the commitment to excellence is at the core of life. Of course, for the agent of integrity in the thick sense, the commitment to excellence is regulated by other commitments. The dedicated musician we admire must integrate the concern for excellent music into a life that expresses due concern for the other goods within the deliberative field. But this does not change the fact that just as these other commitments involve the commitment to externals and thus to devastating vulnerability, so does the commitment to excellence. Thus any attempt by the Kantian to relegate the commitment to excellence at these activities to a marginal place in life is doomed to distortion, which shows, I believe, that the commitment to excellence also regulates these other commitments. I cannot see, then, that the imperfect duty to develop our talents, and the role it has on Baron's view as an expression of our respect for our rational agency, captures the phenomenology of excellence in those whom we esteem most for their commitments. The complexities of the integration problem for the agent who is respectful and sympathetic to others, who

is personally loving as a parent, a friend, and a neighbor, and who is committed to excellence make it impossible for any regulative norm to function asymmetrically. The problem for such a norm is that it cannot order the agent's priorities in a way that makes life both self-sufficient and final in terms of the goods that appear within the agent's deliberative field.

4.

I want now to say why I think these points about excellence are both neglected and significant. Almost no one talks about excellence anymore, especially moral philosophers. True, there are commercial advertisements that bandy about some rhetoric in this regard, but no one takes it for anything other than manipulative discourse. The concept of excellence is increasingly less mentioned in faculty meetings. Discussions of the curriculum mention any number of things, some of which are very important in their own right. Most prominent these days are expansion issues involving diversity, and there is the increasing dominance of talk about student interest. But seldom mentioned is excellence. One might say that excellence is not a concern for the curriculum but a presupposition of it. But if this is true, why is the modern university more and more concerned with student interest as a source of demand for classes? Surely at the core of the university of the past was not only a commitment to being good at what was offered in the curriculum but also a judgment about a core of things that it is good to be good at. No longer. Now the contemporary university merely serves either the market demands of student interests^[12] or the demands of social justice as it sees them. Excellence at intrinsically valuable activities is less and less a part of its mission. Moral philosophers do nothing to alter this by neglecting the importance of a dedication to excellence in a life well lived.

There is certainly a danger to emphasizing excellence, and I am not thinking of the political dangers. The most fundamental is that having encouraged a categorical commitment one will facilitate emotional collapse in

[12] . Think here of how, at least in the United States, teaching performance is evaluated in universities. It is done almost exclusively by students, and their evaluations are given great weight. If ever there was a practice that encouraged excellence at personal politics and mediocrity in teaching, this is it. True, some will be excellent teachers despite the practice, but the institution of teaching will not itself be excellent. Indeed, it will be replaced by a form of entertainment, with teachers acting as celebrities and students becoming more and more passive in the pursuit of learning.

those who fail for lack of talent. While there are ways to minimize such results—careful and reasonable assessment of possibilities—there is no way to ensure that it will not happen. It will. But what is the option? Much of our sense of self is predicated on both our efforts and our abilities at achieving excellence. Even if we eliminated this aspect of the human good, there would still be the concern for excellence relating to the welfare of others. But I find it difficult to believe that the concern for excellence at nondeontic activities can be eliminated without severe harms to human life and character.

It seems that there are three major options. First, we can attempt to eliminate the danger just mentioned by denying that there is anything intrinsically important about excellence in these activities. That is, we can say that such excellence is unimportant. Having said this, though, we will have said that people should find their sense of self in other activities or in idleness. I must admit that if the reader does not find this ludicrous, then I have nothing else in the way of argument. Second, we can attempt to eliminate the danger by changing the name of mediocrity to excellence and hope that self-deception ensures the success of the project. But this comes not only at the cost of our integrity; it also brings the danger of a spreading disease: Once self-deception about nondeontic activities has set in, our sense of obligation will not long find immunity. This is too much to pay, and it is too great a danger. Finally, we can recognize that there is no fail-safe environment for humans, and that the earning of one's own self-esteem is, in part, measured in terms of these activities. There is no categorical good without the possibility of categorical loss. Take precautions and sin bravely, then, is the final and only option for the agent of integrity.

Failure to pursue excellence and to encourage it is a failure in courage, and no badly formulated egalitarian thesis can change this fact. The failure of modern universities is to be found largely in the lack of courage to demand excellence in things that are not externally or instrumentally justified. The hypocrisy is that it is done in the name of equality and humanity. When we have solved all our issues of justice, the danger of failure in the activities that mean most to us will remain. We must be mindful, however, that mediocrity then will be a failure in courage rather than in talent or resource. For our universities, this seems true by and large now.

It is, I believe, one of the tragedies of our time that the concept of excellence has become at best an afterthought in our conceptual scheme. Indeed, I believe it is a source of a great deal of self-alienation among modern persons, something we cannot long endure and remain agents of integrity. In adopting a way of thinking that attempts to eliminate the possibility of our

own failure, we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of our own success. Having done both, we are left to construct our sense of self-approval out of raw feelings. In adopting a sense of equality that runs scared of the possibility of the failure of others, we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of their success. And again, having done both, we are left to construct our social relations out of raw feelings. This cannot be done; the project fails, and so does the way of thinking that leads to the project. The lesson is that we cannot succeed with a thin, value-neutral conception of integrity. It must be thick. It must allow not only for the commitments of simple respect, esteem, and sympathy but also for those of friendship, familial and neighborly love, and to excellence at what one does, including intrinsically meaningful work. It must wed an agent's normative thoughts to a robust meaningful life. This is best achieved, I believe, in the Aristotelian conception of integrity I have tried to defend here.