A plan of life is a person’s long-term scheme of conduct and activities designed to permit, given reasonably favorable circumstances, the harmonious satisfaction of his interests, desires, and final ends. A rational plan of life encourages and secures the fulfillment of a person’s more permanent and general aims, influences the formation of subsequent interests and desires, allows the exercise of his abilities, and “allows him to flourish, so far as circumstances permit” (TJ 376).Happiness consists in the successful execution of a rational plan of life.

Rawls’s account of the rationality of plans of life articulates an ideal model that is central to both the justification of primary goods and the conception of stability in TJ. The account belongs to his conception of goodness as rationality. This ideal model is absent in later writings because it is neither compatible with, nor necessary for, a political conception of justice. Beginning in “Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good” he claims that goodness as rationality supposes that citizens have a rational plan of life “at least in an intuitive way,” but there is no characterization of plans and their rationality (CP 451).