ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 we saw that egoism, defined as getting what you want, is not an adequate conception of the best sort of life for a human being. Its strength is supposed to be that it locates the motive for the good life in subjective desire and not in any abstract conception of ‘the good’; but try as we might, we cannot avoid questions about the relative value of the various desires that human beings have. In other words, we cannot avoid asking what we ought to want, and it is this question that a desire based egoism fails to answer.
