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A society's system of values is sustained by the allegiance of its inhabitants. A pervasive sense of disenchantment is the most serious problem for the cultural dimension of values as it exists in contemporary Western societies. Many religiously committed thinkers argue that our present disenchantment is the result of the widespread rejection of religious belief and the secularization of Western life. This chapter provides a secular alternative to the religious view and argues that the cultural dimension of our system of values has ample resources for coping with such disenchantment as there is. The alternatives center on exemplars that exemplify inspiring ideals of a large variety of conceptions of well‐being. The nature and identity of exemplars is discussed and explained.

The system of values of the agent's society forms the external standard for judging the relative importance of the agent's commitments. There are three dimensions of value: universally human, cultural that vary with societies and times; and personal that vary with individuals. Each dimension has a standard for judging the adequacy of the relevant values. Human values are adequate if they satisfy basic needs; cultural values are adequate if they provide a system of values that sustains the allegiance of the inhabitants of a society; and personal values are adequate if the conceptions of well‐being formed out of them enable individuals to live satisfying lives. These values conflict and our well‐being requires some way of settling their conflicts, but there is no universal principle for settling the conflicts; it can only be done by attending to the concrete features of particular conflicts. These features vary with circumstances and values.

The imperfection of justice is an unavoidable problem in our evaluative framework. We often do not get what we deserve and get what we do not deserve. The reason for this is that the contingencies of scarcity, incorrigibility, and conflicts make the proportional distribution of rewards and punishment, benefits and burdens unavoidably imperfect. We must find a way of living with the imperfections of justice. We can try to approximate perfect justice, but our efforts to do so are subject to the very contingencies with which we are trying to cope. The search for an ideal of theory of justice that would avoid allow us to avoid these problems is doomed to fail. Reason requires accepting imperfect justice and trying to make it less imperfect. The conflict between how we think life should be and how life is cannot be eliminated.

An unavoidable problem in our evaluative framework is the conflict between the ideal of a simple life in which we live as we think we should and the need to understand that the complexities of life are caused by inescapable conflicts between modes of evaluations and the resulting problems and conflicts discussed in the preceding chapters. The dangers of innocence are considered by reflecting on Sophocles’ Deianera who was innocent through and through and, as a result, grievously harmed both those she loved and herself. Ideal theories continue to pursue the impossible goal of a simple and innocent life free of problems and conflicts, believing in the basic human disposition toward reason and the good. Such a life is impossible, given our nature, evaluative framework, modes of evaluation. The aim of the book has been to show that for us ideal theories are impossible and problems and conflicts are inescapable.

Character traits, including virtues and vices, are standardly treated as a distinct kind of psychological attribute, distinct from other psychological attributes such as forms of mental health and illness and natural abilities and inabilities. This chapter challenges the standard view, arguing that various ways of trying to distinguish character traits, natural abilities/inabilities, and aspects of mental health and illness as being distinct psychological kinds fail to correspond to our shared practices of psychological classification. The chapter then proceeds to introduce and defend a conception of traits that concern modes of evaluation, rather than psychological kinds. According to this proposal, questions about how to classify a psychological attribute depend on the suitability of various modes of evaluation including moral, medical, and natural ability modes, which differ in content, normative implications, and conditions of application.

Human wisdom guides how we cope with perennial problems by relying on an unstable compound of often conflicting evaluations prompted by our personal history and the various social modes of evaluations prevalent in the context in which we live. For this we need to rely on considered judgments that weigh the relative importance of these conflicting evaluations. This is difficult because both personal and social evaluations change in response to changing conditions. And because making a considered judgment to override one of our own evaluations in favor of another requires violating one of our own s commitments. It makes matters even more difficult that no matter how well considered our judgments are, they may be mistaken and may themselves change in response to the changing internal and external conditions of our life. Human wisdom nevertheless enables us to make more reliable considered judgments by adhering to basic assumptions, cultivating reflective understanding, and growing in depth. These are the subjects of the following chapters.

This is an introduction that sets out the problems, the aim, and the approach of the book. The problem is that most of us are more or less dissatisfied with how we live and want to make it better than it is. We are uncertain about how to make it better because we are committed to conflicting economic, legal, moral, personal, political, religious, and other modes of evaluation of the available possibilities of life. The aim is to find a fit between our personal attitude to how we think we should live and the evaluative framework of our society that limits how we can live. The approach is to compare what we take to be our possibilities with possibilities as they are conceived in different anthropological, historical, and literary contexts. In that way we can deepen our understanding and enrich the possibilities of life we might pursue.

The widely held assumption in our evaluative framework is that the reasonable way of making difficult choices between valued and conflicting possibilities of life is to make a personal commitment to living in a particular way and then act accordingly. In the Hindu and Balinese evaluative frameworks there is limited scope for conflicting possibilities, difficult choices, and personal commitments. How individuals should live is decided by the roles into which they are born or by the burden of their inheritance. Comparing these evaluative frameworks with ours allows us to understand that our problems involved in having to make personal commitments, difficult choices, and cope with conflicts are the unavoidable by-products of our evaluative framework. We may come to understand that the burdens we carry in our evaluative framework are the price we have to pay for living as we do.

Hypocrisy is to pretend to have some belief, emotion, or desire that makes us appear better than we are. It is generally condemned in our evaluative framework, but it is actually a widely practiced unavoidable part of life. Authenticity is to express in action how we genuinely are. There are strong reasons both for and against both hypocrisy and authenticity. These reasons often conflict and which reasons are stronger depends on the context in which the conflict occurs. The case of Schmidt, an authentic and unhypocritical executioner, shows that there were strong reasons why he should have been hypocritical and inauthentic. Charles Taylor’s defense of authenticity is discussed and criticized. Hypocritical claims in our evaluative framework about the basic value of life are examined. There can be no formula that would always show when hypocrisy and authenticity are or are not reasonable.