ABSTRACT
Incompleteness is a vague idea, yet clear enough for our purposes. It has two senses. First, it is an idea about the structure of personality. A person is a compound of influences acting on him; his identity in his own right, though he has a substrate of separate identity on which the influences act, is problematical. If one ought to be self-interested, respect the lives of others, and reject liberalism, he must be able to do it and succeed in living. Institutions and laws, the economic system, society’s adherence to specific cultural values and other such outside physical circumstances are not part of the individual as such, but rather comprise the background against which he acts. It must be admitted that people who are utterly incapable of purposive activity are helpless in the liberal sense, for example comatose patients and temporarily unconscious persons. But the helplessness claims are not made only about them.
