The following example, even if somewhat artificial, may makethe contrast clearer. A doctor on his Saturday off, which he spendsgardening (his great love), gets an emergency call. He has no doubtabout its being unquestionably best to respond to this at the ex-pense of his gardening. But equally he has no doubt that he ranksunquestionably higher the world in which there wasn't the call andhe could have pursued his favorite activity undisturbed. In otherwords he would much prefer the whole thing hadn't arisen-in thesense that the emergency hadn't arisen in the first place (not in thesense that, for example, his phone happened to be out of order orearshot). What we have here are apparently two different perspec-tives of evaluation. It is quite consistent to maintain both that, giventhe situation that has arisen, it is best for one to x rather than y andthat one would really rather have y'd-in the sense that one wouldrather the given situation hadn't arisen and had left one "free"to y.9Again, something of this duality of concern comes out also in adistinction between regretting having done something and regret-ting having had to do something. In the former the focus of one'sregret is on one's behavior in a certain situation: through somedefect in one's values or through some culpable failure to bringthem correctly to bear, one failed to act as the good human would.Given a rerun, one would, one hopes, act differently. In the latter,however, the focus is rather on the occurrence of the situationitself, not on one's behavior in it. One may have no regrets aboutone's behavior-one did the right thing, would do it again. Whatone is sad, or pained, about is that the situation arose at all (for9The point of this example is extremely limited. Realistically therewould be further questions of whether the doctor actually was free togarden and wasn't rather obligated to go and doctor elsewhere, or whethergardening sufficiently merits the importance the doctor attaches to it.8ARISTOTLE AND THE IDEAL LIFEexample, one in which it was best to turn one's errant child in to thepolice). In that respect life has not gone as one would have wished.Now, to achieve the ideally circumstanced ideal is also to achievethe however circumstanced ideal. The latter consists in doing whatis best in such situations as come along, and the former is thatspecial case where the situations are the optimal ones for humanbeings. But to achieve the however circumstanced ideal is not forhuman beings, unlike Aristotle's god, necessarily to achieve theideally circumstanced ideal. For the range of circumstances andsituations that may arise for humans includes ones that are nonop-timal-ones that, rightly, we wish had not arisen-and it is this factthat opens up the gap between the two ideals. Different situationscall for different activities, or contributions, from us; and some-times these situations are inherently defective, bad, or tragic. It isnot that we cannot rise to the occasion, and do what has to be done.It is rather that the situation, so to speak, doesn't rise to us and ourgreatest potentialities. In a certain sense, it doesn't bring out thebest in us-though in another sense it may
duality
