Abstract

This chapter describes just one of the many attributes that a worthwhile life can have, one which connects both with the experience of the satisfyingness of life and with the dilemma‐managing strategies. Several of the dilemma‐managing strategies link choices to the overall pattern of the decision‐maker's life. All of these strategies resolve dilemmas by relating the incomparable desires that produce them to more nearly comparable preferences for kinds of lives. These strategies could be crudely summarized as: take the option which will give him/her the better life. Or rather, they could be summarized this way if one accepts that lives are good when they conform to plans. In the chapter, the author argues that the sense of the satisfyingness of one's life need not come from any plan or pattern to it. In all of his examples, life has been organized by its connection with a single object of concern.