¹ Williams, John, Stoner (New York: New York Review of Books, 1965), 274–75 and 277Google Scholar, respectively.

² See Carey, Benedict, “This is Your Life (and How You Tell It),” The New York Times, May 22, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/health/psychology/22narr.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0Google Scholar. See also Velleman, J. David, “From Self Psychology to Moral Philosophy,” in Self to Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 224–52Google Scholar.

³ See Carey, “This is Your Life (and How You Tell It)”: “Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list … and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedents.” See also Bruner, Jerome, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 54, no. 1 (1987): 11–32Google Scholar.

⁴ It would, that is to say, suggest that what many philosophers have thought about agency, the self, and autonomy, and so forth is actually realized in human beings, and thus, for example, that our concept of agency is not of barely possible agents. For enlightening discussion of the bearing in this way of empirical psychology on the philosophy of action, see Velleman, “From Self Psychology to Moral Philosophy.”

⁵ Of course, some would question the psychological findings. They would deny that they think about themselves or their lives in narrative terms, that they are “authorial agents,” that they taken any concern with how their lives cohere considered as a whole. They would insist that the only self of which they are aware and in which they take any interest is the self they are now, and that their only concern with respect to their own lives is for the here and now. See Strawson, Galen, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio (new series) 17, no. 4 (2004): 428–52Google Scholar. Strawson makes claims about himself along these lines. I have had other philosophers, in conversation, similarly deny that they think about their own lives in narrative terms. Those who would question the psychological findings might also question philosophical appeals to narrative, and so question the picture of the agent as author, of her life as her autobiographical output, and of a valuable life for her as one that has any particular relation to narrative. See, again, Strawson, whose challenges to narrativity have a bearing on at least some of the uses to which philosophers have attempted to put the notion of narrative.

⁶ See, e.g., MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Dennett, Daniel, “The Reality of Selves,” in Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 412–30Google Scholar, and “The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity,” in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. Kessel, Frank S., Cole, Pamela M., and Johnson, Dale L. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1992), 103–15Google Scholar; Schechtman, Marya, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett, “Speaking for Ourselves,” in Dennett, Daniel C., Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 31–55Google Scholar; and Velleman, , “The Self as Narrator,” in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, ed. Christman, John and Anderson, Joel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 56–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Goldie, Peter, The Emotions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)Google Scholar, for an appeal to narrative structure to understand the nature of the emotions. Alasdair MacIntyre may have been the first contemporary philosopher to claim, as he puts it, that man is “essentially a story-telling animal.” See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 216.

⁷ See, e.g., MacIntyre, “After Virtue” and Velleman, J. David, “Well-Being and Time,” reprinted in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), fromPacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991): 48–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I prefer the expression “personal good” to terms like “welfare” and “well-being” because it captures our interest in the good of persons or beings with the capacity for autonomy. See Rosati, Connie S., “Personal Good,” in Horgan, Terry and Timmons, Mark, Metaethics After Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107–32, 108–9Google Scholar. In what follows, though, I use these expressions interchangeably.

⁸ Perhaps the most developed version of this picture of agency can be found in Velleman, “The Self as Narrator,” but earlier versions of it appear in MacIntyre, After Virtue, and Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁹ Although some appeals to narrative to account for personal good may pre-date the psychological research, insofar as that research is sound, the appeals become further explicable. If there is a connection between our narrative nature and personal good, then there is likely also a connection between both and our achievement of lives that are meaningful and that realize perfectionist and aesthetic values.

¹⁰ What I call the “narrativity thesis” should not be confused with a thesis of the same name criticized in Strawson, “Against Narrativity.”

¹¹ See MacIntyre, After Virtue, e.g., 218–19.

¹² See Velleman, “Well-Being and Time.” See also McMahan, Jeff, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. From here on, I will mostly talk in terms of parts of a life. The kind of unity we are after cannot be a matter of temporal segments of a life themselves standing in certain relations, but of the relations among actions, undertakings, and so on that occur at different times in a life.

¹³ I will, for about the first half of this essay, continue to talk in terms of narrative relations holding among parts of a life or between events in a life. But as I explain later, strictly speaking, narrative relations do not hold between events themselves but between those events as represented in a narrative.

¹⁴ The idea that a good life must have form goes back a long way, with philosophers predictably differing in their ideas about the requisite form or shape that makes a life good, or better, for the person living it. William Frankena locates the idea in Plato, Whitehead and others. See Frankena, W. K., Ethics, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), 92Google Scholar. For attempts to understand the shape of a good life specifically in terms of narrative, see MacIntyre, After Virtue; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Chappell, T. D. J., Understanding Human Goods: A Theory of Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Velleman, “Well-Being and Time”; McMahan, The Ethics of Killing; Brännmark, Johan, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” Philosophical Papers 32 (2003): 321–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Goldie, Peter, “One's Remembered Past: Narrative Thinking, Emotion, and the External Perspective,” Philosophical Papers 3 (2003): 301–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Velleman addresses the views of Michael Slote, who explores what Fred Feldman has dubbed the “shape of a life phenomenon” in Slote, Michael, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Feldman offers a response to the “shape of a life phenomenon,” insofar as it figures as an objection to hedonism, in Feldman, Fred, Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 6Google Scholar. According to Feldman, Franz Brentano was also alert to the basic phenomenon. He cites Chisholm, Roderick M., Brentano and Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 71Google Scholar, quoting Brentano. See also Lemos, Noah, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For varying criticisms of appeals to narrative in understanding a life, see Mink, Louis O., “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension,” New Literary History 1 (1970): 557–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” and Sartre, Jean Paul, Le Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938; 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See Velleman, “Well-Being and Time.” That problem can be posed without presupposing any particular view about the nature of personal good or welfare. Of course, what one counts as an acceptable solution to the problem, and whether one thinks the problem genuine at all, will depend on one's preferred theory of personal good or welfare. At the same time, what theory one prefers may be altered by reflection on the (apparent) problem; one might come to reject any theory that fails to treat the problem as genuine or that offers what seems too superficial a solution. But see Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” 326, comparing his position with that of Velleman, and denying that “there are such things as self-contained momentary instances of well-being.” As a consequences of this difference, Brännmark and Velleman part company on the question of whether there can be retroactive welfare effects.

¹⁶ Obviously a life can also go well considered as a whole, while falling short at many particular moments.

¹⁷ See also Velleman, “Well-Being and Time”; and see Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” 322 (“we lead lives, and the lives we lead form narratively structured wholes in a way that the lives of animals do not”).

¹⁸ Some of these ideas about the good of animals figure in Peter Singer's seminal work on animal rights. See Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1975)Google Scholar. Of course, the claims in the text are contingent. A fuller understanding of the lives of different species of animal might well lead us to understand the good of at least some animals as far more complex. For more recent discussion, see DeGrazia, David, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 196–97. But see Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 81–84, arguing that the welfare even of lower animals is not additive, and see n. 5, observing more generally that lives without any real narrative structure, such as those of people who are “maintained, from birth to death, in a state of semiconsciousness and inactivity” might be ones in which the welfare value of the life is determined by its momentary welfare value.

¹⁹ For related ideas, see Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 78–79: “… a person himself has both a synchronic and a diachronic identity. The perspectives from which synchronic interests are assessed, unlike the financial perspective, are not optional points of view that a person may or may not adopt from time to time. They are perspectives that a person necessarily inhabits as he proceeds through life, perspectives that are partly definitive of who he is. An essential and significant feature of persons is that they are creatures who naturally live their lives from the successive viewpoints of individual moments, as well as from a comprehensive, diachronic point of view.”

²⁰ See Velleman, “Well-Being and Time” and Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” for different, though not unrelated, ways of explicating the problem. The problem of how parts of a life must be related in order for a life as a whole to be good for the person living it, and more generally, of how the relations among parts of a life affect the welfare value of that life, has been thought by some to bear on related questions about when it is better or worse to die. See McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, chap. 2.

²¹ Velleman makes the same point I have just made in the text, emphasizing that when he says that the place of a particular event in a person's life story alters its meaning and in this way contributes to her life's value, he does not mean to “equate a valuable life with a meaningful one.” See Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 63, n. 18.

²² See, e.g., Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” 337, for something like the latter view.

²³ See Wolf, Susan, “Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life,” Social Philosophy & Policy 14: 207–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Meaning in Life and Why it Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

²⁴ I explain how being good and being good for a person are distinct properties in Rosati, Connie S., “Objectivism and Relational Good,” Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (2008): 314–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ See ibid.

²⁶ I do not mean this as an analysis of personal good. For the beginnings of an analysis of what is it for something to be good for a person, see Rosati, “Personal Good.” As far as I am aware, the first person to articulate explicitly the idea that goodness for a person is a kind of relational value involving a fit between a person and various activities, undertakings, and so on, is Peter Railton. See Railton, Peter, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 163–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Railton, Peter, “Facts and Values,” Philosophical Topics 14 (1986): 5–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But the basic idea goes back at least as far as John Stuart Mill, where it underlies his argument in favor of freedom for individuals to engage in “experiments in living.” See Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 54Google Scholar. See also Velleman, J. David, “A Right of Self-Termination?” Ethics 109 (1999): 606–20CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and “Well-Being and Time.” For more recent adoption of the view that good-for value is relational value involving suitability for an individual, see Kraut, Richard, What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For related discussion, see also Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni, “Analysing Personal Value,” Journal of Ethics 11, no. 1 (2007): 405–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ As I understand it, the normativity of personal good—the reason-giving force of facts about what is good for a person—derives from the value of the person. See Rosati, “Personal Good” and “Objectivism and Relational Good.” See also Anderson, Elizabeth, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Velleman, “A Right of Self-Termination”; and Darwall, , Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ See Velleman, “Well-Being and Time.”

²⁹ Ibid., 58.

³⁰ Ibid. And see Bigelow, John, Campbell, John, and Pargetter, Robert, “Death and Well-Being,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1990): 119–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning”; Chappell, Understanding Human Goods. Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life, chap. 6, also cites Lewis, C. I., An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, (1946; New York: Open Court, 2007), 503Google Scholar, as endorsing the general anti-additivity idea, quoting a passage from Lewis that mirrors G. E. Moore's basic claim about value and organic unities. See Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica, ed. Baldwin, T. (1903; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), sect. 18Google Scholar. Moore himself, of course, was not writing about welfare value or the value of lives but, rather, about the nonadditivity of intrinsic value.

³¹ Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 69. Velleman notes at 69, n. 29, that Michael Stocker has observed that “the value of a life is what Moore would have called an ‘organic whole.’ ” See Stocker, Michael, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 300–302, and 323Google Scholar. But Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” 324, suggests that even a holistic view of the value of lives that treated them as something like organic unities might still allow that the value of lives is additive. Discussing Moore's picture, he remarks, “Moore's view is that the value of the parts are the same as they would be in any other context, it is just that certain combinations of things give rise to additional values that must be included when we compute the sums that we are interested in. Moore thus preserves the stability of value that is needed for a substantive form of additivity.” In my view, the ideas that the value of lives is holistic, that it is in the nature of an organic unity, and that it is nonadditive are in fact distinct.

³² Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life, chap. 6.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ This last suggestion, I believe, raises rather serious theoretical difficulties, because the modification of adjusting for desert does not seem to be motivated from within hedonism itself and does not flow from the intuition that explains the attraction of hedonism, namely, that there must be “something in it” for the agent if an experience is to contribute to her welfare. Feldman otherwise attempts to explain away the preference for the Uphill life, even when the momentary value of the lives is equal, on the grounds that it must illicitly suppose that the Uphill life in fact contains more pleasure, or must confuse the pleasure the observer takes in contemplating the Uphill versus Downhill paths—its extrinsic or “inherent value”—for the greater intrinsic welfare value of the Uphill life itself, or must confuse the possibly greater value for the world of the excellence or beauty of the Uphill life for the life's greater welfare value.

³⁵ I am doubtful about efforts to settle either way the question of whether the value of a life is additive, whether one treats additivity as requiring that units can be added up in determining the value of a life or merely as requiring that when a life has finally been lived, its value can be decomposed into the value of discrete parts. See Velleman (2000) for arguments against additivity by either composition or decomposition.

³⁶ See, e.g., Scholes, Robert and Kellogg, Robert, ed., The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Lewin, Jane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Stanzel, Frank K., A Theory of Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Martin, Wallace, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Bruner, Jerome, “Life as Narrative” and Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Eakin, Paul John, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar and Eakin, Paul John, ed., How Our Lives Become Stories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Neisser, Ulric and Fivush, Robyn, eds., The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olney, James, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Velleman, J. David, “Narrative Explanation,” Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Goldie, Peter, “One's Remembered Past: Narrative Thinking, Emotion, and the External Perspective,” Philosophical Papers 3 (2003): 301–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ See Velleman, “Narrative Explanation.”

³⁹ For excellent discussion of causal connection and a variety of other issues about the nature of narrative, see ibid. As Velleman observes, some narratives may depend critically on connections between events that are not to be understood as causal.

⁴⁰ Goldie, “One's Remembered Past: Narrative Thinking, Emotion, and the External Perspective.”

⁴¹ Ibid., 305.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Griswold, Charles L., Forgiveness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ The notion of meaning or significance invoked in characterizing narrative should not be confused with the notion of meaningfulness involved in our assessments of lives as meaningful or not. Although a variety of views exists as to what makes a life meaningful, common talk often appeals to ideas such as living a life with a bigger purpose, connecting to something larger than oneself, having a positive and lasting impact on the world, and so on. The notion of meaning considered here concerns intelligibility.

⁴⁵ Griswold, Forgiveness, 99.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 100.

⁴⁷ Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 58.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 63.

⁴⁹ But, he says, “they cannot retroactively change the impact that it had on one's well-being at the time.” See Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 68. Velleman concludes that the value of a life is what he calls a “strongly irreducible second-order good,” where a second-order good is “a valuable state of affairs consisting in some fact about other goods” and its irreducibility requires that it “possess value over and above that of its component first-order goods …” (69–70).

⁵⁰ McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 178, and, more generally, 175–80.

⁵¹ Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” 337. In discussing the importance of narrative meaning to the value of our lives, Brännmark rejects Wolf's position of “regarding meaning and happiness simply as two components of the human good.” He insists that “Once we truly grant importance to such matters it does … seem more reasonable to understand meaning as something more pervasive, as something that modifies, or at least is potentially able to modify, the value contributed to our good by most of the things that make up our lives” (337).

⁵² For skeptical worries different from the one I shall consider, see Brännmark's brief discussion in “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” 321–22.

⁵³ See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), sects. 63–64Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Perhaps those who have emphasized the importance of narrativity, or the holding of narrative relations among events in or parts of a life, merely meant to call attention to the fact that the value of our lives requires the presence of goods the attainment of which requires sustained and successful effort over time. Or perhaps they meant their talk merely to be another way of expressing the need for the sort of structure in a life that others would express by talking in terms of a rational life plan. I assume, however, that if this were all they meant to say, they would have made that clear. But see Taylor, Sources of the Self, 47–51, who discusses the idea of our having a narrative understanding of our lives in relation to our need, as agents, to have an orientation toward the good. And see Chappell, Understanding Human Goods, 156: the narrative conception of the good “is a conception of the human goods that says that they are necessarily experienced within a rational plan of life.” Brännmark suggests that there may be different versions of the narrative approach and that Chappell's characterization is not “built into the very notion of such an approach.” See Brännmark, “Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning,” n. 12.

⁵⁵ What is more, whatever account we might give of the meaningfulness of lives, such a life would, ceteris paribus, also likely be a more meaningful life.

⁵⁶ A proponent of the narrativity thesis might contend that either way of understanding the skeptical challenge in fact presupposes or rests on the holding of narrative relations among parts of a life. But any such response can be effective only if we first have a plausible explanation of how narrative relations make a distinctive contribution to the value of a life for the person living it.

⁵⁷ Goldman, James, The Lion in Winter (New York: Penguin, 1964)Google Scholar. Thanks to Michael Moore for calling my attention to this passage.

⁵⁸ Velleman, “Well-Being and Time,” 66, maintains that “desire fulfillment per se is not what's valuable; what's valuable is living out a story of efforts rewarded rather than efforts wasted. Insofar as fulfillment of one's past desires is valuable, I am inclined to say, its value depends on that of life stories in which desires are eventually fulfilled.”

⁵⁹ Williams, Stoner, 3–4. The novel commences with the fact of Stoner's death, and Williams's description of how that fact registered in his world hints at much of what we will come to learn about Stoner's life: “Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

⁶⁰ Ibid., 4.

⁶¹ Ibid., 20.

⁶² Ibid., 113.

⁶³ Ibid., 215.

⁶⁴ Why do I keep saying “in effect”? Because I think we need to be careful not to exaggerate either how consciously or how deliberately we engage in storytelling about our lives. And it may be that some of us engage in little storytelling if any.

⁶⁵ See Rosati, “Personal Good.”

⁶⁶ See ibid.

⁶⁷ Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” 31.

⁶⁸ According to the New York Times article described earlier, among other findings, psychologists have observed that persons who are able to reinterpret painful episodes with greater compassion fare better. And some of the effects of psychotherapy, when it works, are attributed to the way in which it enables people who feel helpless to alter their self-stories so as to restore a sense of their own power. Assuming that the research on which these claims rest is reliable, the results would appear to square with my hypothesis. But my interest has, of course, been with exploring the philosophical question of how narrative might distinctively affect personal good. A point that I have not addressed in the text is how our storytelling and its effects on our welfare might be affected by the acquisition of new information, and thereby, the possibility of new self-understandings. More should be said on this score, but addressing the point is not critical to understanding the position I advance.

⁶⁹ For intriguing discussion of the idea that the peculiar understanding yielded by narrative generally is an understanding of how to feel, see Velleman, “Narrative Explanation.”

⁷⁰ These claims are consistent with the possibility that a person's life could be so unfortunate that there is no welfare-enhancing story for her to tell. They are also consistent with the possibility that some people need not tell themselves stories, and so get the benefit of storytelling, perhaps just by living successfully and well.

⁷¹ The idea that we must invent or build our good is one I have tried to develop in a number of earlier essays. See, e.g., Rosati, “Personal Good.”