¹ Eliot, George, [Mary Ann Evans], Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (New York: Hurt's Home Library, 1930).Google Scholar This example was originally suggested to me by Peter Winch.

² For more examples, see Bok, Sissela, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), Chapter XV (220–241).Google Scholar

³ Dilman, İlham, ‘Our Knowledge of Other People’, in Dilman, İ., Love and Human Separateness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 117–136.Google Scholar

⁴ Dilman, , 133.Google Scholar

⁵ Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans by Ellington, James W.. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985).Google Scholar

⁶ Kant, , 455–463.Google Scholar

⁷ This is not to suggest that a commitment that in some respects is similar cannot come about in other ways.

⁸ Winch, Peter, ‘The Universalizability of Moral Judgments’, in Winch, P., Ethics and Action (London: Routledge, 1972), 151–170.Google Scholar

⁹ Gaita, Raimond, ‘The Personal in Ethics’, in Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars, Phillips, D. Z. and Winch, P. (eds) (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 124–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ For a discussion of a similar point, see Winch, , Ethics and Action, 169.Google Scholar

¹¹ See Gaita, , 134–135.Google Scholar

¹² Gaita, , 129.Google Scholar

¹³ Dostoyevski, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment (London: Penguin Classics, 1956).Google Scholar

¹⁴ The discussion of Gaita (especially pp. 132–133) is the starting-point of much of what follows.

¹⁵ Dogmatism about the proper use of the verb ‘to want’ could lead one to deny this. However, the same point could be made even then, just of course not in the same words.

¹⁶ Plato, : Crito. The Dialogues of Plato, Trans Jowett, B.. Volume I (Oxford University Press, 1964), 371–384Google Scholar—Plato: Apology. In the same volume, 341–366. This point about Socrates's death was made by Winch, Peter in Simone Weil: The Just Balance. (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 158–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Winch, , Simone Weil: The Just Balance, 158.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See Erikson, Erik Homburger, Young Man Luther. A Study of Psycho-analysis and History (New York: Norton, 1962).Google Scholar

¹⁹ I realize how extremely difficult it is even to try to classify people in this way. This is partly due to our lack of information about their biographies; but it also has to do with what kind of thing we are prepared to accept as a real answer to a problem of life. A person that crosses my mind is Hitler. For all we know, his Nazism was a result of a persistent search for a world view (see Erikson, 105–110). Still, perhaps many of us feel uncomfortable about calling an answer like his genuine. This is not, I think, because we would think Hitler did not honestly believe in his own doctrine; it is rather because it is not what many of us would like to call an answer. We would rather see it as an evasion and a misconstrual of real problems.

²⁰ I am grateful to Lars Hertzberg and Peter Winch for reading and discussing several drafts of my paper, and for many helpful comments and suggestions.