The central task of ethics is to ask: what is it for a human life to go well? The answer, I believe, is that living well means meeting the challenge set by three things: your capacities, the circumstances into which you were born, and the projects you yourself decide are important. Making a life, my friend the philosopher and legal scholar Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is "a performance that demands skill," and "is the most comprehensive and important challenge we face." But because each of us comes equipped with different talents and is born into different circumstances, and because people choose their own projects, each of us faces his or her own challenge, one that is, in the end, unique. So there is no sensible answer to the question of whether one person meets her challenge better than another...there is no comparative measure, no single scale of human worth. As a result, a system of selection for jobs and educational opportunities cannot be designed by considering who is most worthy of those opportunities, because,..., there isn't a single scale of merit on which to rank them. Indeed, because each of us faces a distinct challenge, what matters in the end is not how we rank against others at all. We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best. Each of us...has his own measure...to have a character is to be a "person whose desires and impulses are his own-are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture...'" And if you have a character, if you have your own measure, the most important stands you have to meet are distinctively yours.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind, pp. 177-8
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