Connie Rosati

Stephen Darwall has recently suggested that theories which identify a person's good with her own ranking of concerns do not properly delimit the ‘scope’ of welfare, making self‐sacrifice conceptually impossible. But whether a theory of welfare makes self‐sacrifice impossible depends on what self‐sacrifice is. I offer an alternative analysis to Overvold's, explaining why self‐interest and self‐sacrifice need not be opposed, and so why the problems of delimiting the scope of welfare and of allowing for self‐sacrifice are distinct. If my analysis is correct, desire theories may allow for self‐sacrifice however they delimit the scope of welfare.

In his book, The Solace: Finding Value in Death through Gratitude for Life, Joshua Glasgow recounts his thoughts as he tried to prepare for a conversation about death with his dying mother, whom he hoped to comfort. After rejecting certain possible sources of solace, he argues that our passing away itself has value, which it derives from the meaningfulness of our lives as a whole, and this value can provide the comfort we may seek. I raise a number of difficulties for and questions about Glasgow’s claims, ultimately concluding that even if our passing away had some value, recognizing thiswould add nothing to the solace we may derive from reflecting on the value of our lives themselves.

In the past fifteen years, ethical theory construction has come under attack from a number of directions. I aim to provide a deeper foundation for these critiques by examining recent efforts to define "good" as a part of theory construction in ethics. I argue that the reforming definitions of "good" offered by John Rawls, Richard Brandt, and most recently, Peter Railton, deprive us of the ability to raise the questions that we as human agents want to be able to raise about what to desire. More generally, determinate accounts of the good are contrary to a kind of deliberation that is essential to being a person. To be a person, I contend, is to be an inventor of possible selves, a creature who engages in self-invention. Our capacity for self-invention involve deliberation that enables us to make of ourselves persons for whom different things are good. Self-invention is thus a process that involves invention of our good. Determinate accounts of the good, by fixing what is to be our good, are at odds with our capacity for self-invention. Questions about a person's good, I argue, are not separable from her questions about what sort of person to be. And decisionmaking about a person's good is an open-ended, creative process in which she simultaneously constructs her identity and her good