1. See William Styron, Sophie's Choice (New York: Random House, 1976).

2. It is not clear that Kant's own theory yields that conclusion, but that is not the point here.

3. Groundwork, 65-66.

4. The suspicions of incoherence are along two lines, at least: one involving the coherence of noumenal selves and noumenal causality and the other involving motives without desires or sentiments. For discussion, see essays by Terence Irwin, "Morality and Personality: Kant and Green," Allen W. Wood, continue

''Kant's Compatibilism," and Jonathan Bennett, "Kant's Theory of Freedom," in Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Nicholas Rescher, "Noumenal Causality," in Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Humanities Press, 1972), 462-470.

5. One very radical thing about Kant's view is that he separates acting on principle from acting on sentiments. But even where we construe respect and sympathy as sentiments, we have seen that they do not have the structure to give us reasons for living. This point applies even more to principles. Principles cannot give us reasons for living. At most they can give us reasons for living one way rather than another. Moreover, the difficulty about living on principle applies on two major readings of Kant's notion of acting on principle. Consider the first view that we have a perfect duty not to commit suicide. On this view, the specific act of committing suicide is prohibited by the categorical imperative, and acting in accordance with this imperative has moral worth only when so acting is driven by the sense of duty as its primary motive. If we imagine someone whose life has lost its meaning, the requirement of acting on principle in this case becomes the requirement of living on principle. Now consider the more plausible view that acting on principle does not require a sense of duty as a primary motive but as a secondary motive, the motive to regulate one's life by the categorical imperative. The problem with this view for the person whose life has lost its meaning is that there seems nothing left to regulate. If such a person is to find reasons for living, it would seem that those reasons will have to be for the sake of principles alone. But it seems incoherent that one should find reasons for living in principles that are supposed to have as their function the regulation of one's reasons for living. See both Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment, and Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, for defenses of the regulative role of principle in the moral life.

6. See Cicero, De Amicitia, XVI, 59-60.

7. I thank Keith Butler for bringing my attention to this last point.

8. For a discussion of Kant's reaction to romanticism, see Baron's Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, especially the last chapter, "Sympathy and Coldness in Kant's Ethics," pp. 194-229.

9. Speaking of Seneca and Kant, Marcia Baron says, "Both find something self-indulgent and self-serving in intense sadness for another. Seneca: 'Do you wish to know the reason for lamentations and excessive weeping? It is because we seek the proofs of our bereavement in our tears, and do not give way to sorrow, but merely parade it. . . . There is an element of self-seeking even in our sorrow' (Epistle LXIII, p. 431). Without pointedly suggesting that the sorrow is feigned, Kant suspects that many people content themselves with feeling sad for another. Priding themselves on their noble and intense feelings, they do nothing to help" ( Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, 223-224). Later, she suggests that Kant's view is that care for another should make us vulnerable to sadness but only to the degree to which it aids us in discerning our duties to others and to the degree to which we can turn off the sadness when duty calls. Viewed in the light of Sophie's life, I cannot see that the above comments by both Seneca and Kant are anything but the most pious sermonizing. It certainly is the case continue

that we should train our sentiments to handle the expected losses that come in the course of a reasonably fortunate life. It is quite another to train our sentiments to handle exceptional tragedy, regardless of the contingencies of bad luck. To do the latter requires that we weaken them beyond recognition. To ignore this difference and to charge those who revere the sentiments with romanticism is to run the risk of making one's theory appealing only to the sanctimonious. To describe Sophie's response to the loss of her parents, to the loss of her children, and to the loss of her lover as self-seeking and self-indulgent is, to put it bluntly, crass nonsense. Later, in chapter 6, I will consider the stress experienced by the children of former Nazis. To deny that they should have had a sense of shame that could have been turned off in the way that Kant suggests on discovering what their parents did is not to imagine them as self-indulgent and selfseeking; it is to imagine them as people with good qualities under extreme stress, stress they should not, if they were good people, be able to turn off and on as duty requires.

10. There is a view something like this expressed by Seneca in regard to friendship. See Epistle IX and Epistle LXIII. Both are found in Michael Pakaluk, ed., Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 117-128. As a Stoic, Seneca is worried about how friendship can be necessary to the good life and the good life be self-sufficient. Specifically, he is worried about grief. His advice, then, is not that one should not have friendships but that one should view friendship in such a way that grief is never the proper response to the loss of a friend. Supposedly, we are to extend this advice to all loving relationships. I cannot see that there is anything to recommend this view. As Annas points out in The Morality of Happiness, untroubledness is the final good for the Stoics. But they are committed to friendship being a part of the final good. These two factors combine to generate Seneca's implausible conception of friendship as being compatible with living an untroubled life. But neither friendship nor any other form of deep personal attachment is compatible with such a life. Moreover, friendship is worth more than its weight in trouble for those who are capable of it. I will come back to this in the chapter on Stoicism.