As I see it, or at least as saw it when I last read his article, Strawson’s claims do not have much direct bearing on the issue that most interests me (though I’ll be sure to reread the article when I am ready to revise the manuscript). First, regarding the psychological claim, I myself don’t contend that everyone understands his own life in narrative form, and I wouldn’t particularly want to take issue with Strawson’s self-report or conjectures about other people. I merely repeat a claim reported in an article without taking a position on it. My own misgivings about the psychological claim partly concern whether we have a clear enough understanding of what counts as thinking of one’s life in “narrative” terms. If the requirements for narrative thinking are fairly complex, involving, say, a complete whole-life story, then it is extremely doubtful that most people think of their lives in this way. If the requirements are pretty simple and easily met, then the claim that people think about their lives in story form begins to look trivial. Second, regarding Strawson’s normative claim, whether thinking of our lives in narrative form is bad for us depends on what it involves. I talk in terms of stories that are faithful to the facts. I do not mean to offer a brief on behalf of “self-deluding” stories, though I accept that most of us engage in a certain amount of self-deception and that self-deception may sometimes be a benefit. In any case, there is no incompatibility between my suggestion as to how our storytelling might have a welfare impact and the thought that “the proper response to bad circumstances is to try to change them.” On the contrary, internalizing a story that gives a person a sense of being the controlling authority over her own life might well be critical to her ability to undertake the needed changes.

In any case, my interest was not with defending the telling of personal narratives but rather with understanding how narrative could have any welfare impact at all. For reasons offered in the entry and the manuscript, it seems that on extant appeals to narrative, narrative does not itself contribute anything to personal good. I was interested in the question of whether there is any way to make out a connection between personal narratives and personal good that has narrative itself doing some distinctive work.

As for your more general sense that my position rests on subjectivist assumptions, I certainly don’t think that whether a person’s life is going well is importantly a matter of whether she’s satisfied with it. At least, that’s no part of my analysis of personal good. Just how the view I defend elsewhere is or is not subjectivist is not a matter I’ve given much thought, mostly because I have doubts about the clarity and importance of the distinction between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of personal good. It seems to me that any plausible subjectivism would and could allow that individuals can be pretty radically mistaken about how their lives are going. Informed-desire theories, for example, certainly allow this. You raise the problem of adaptive preferences, and I agree that any welfare theorist will want to have something to say about that problem, as well as about the limits of self-deception. But again, my point is not about delusive narratives, and so I can agree with you that adopting a story that seriously distorts the truth about one’s situation tends to be problematic; to put the point in my own terms, such a story wouldn’t give one a “fit” with one’s life. Again, my interest was in trying to see how narrative—how our storytelling—might itself make a welfare impact. I was neither advocating that we construct personal narratives nor arguing that they are in any way central to personal good.

There is much more to be said, of course, but I’ll leave it there for now. Thanks again.

More generally, your hunch seems to have a subjectivist assumption in the background: that whether someone’s life is going well is importantly a matter of whether she is satisfied with it, or perhaps better whether she can make sense of it. But objectivists – me, for example – are going to insist that someone can be radically wrong about how well her life is going. To pick an extreme example, consider the miserable fact that many victims of domestic abuse adjust their understanding of their own lives such that (they say) they want to be in that abusive relationship, it’s what they deserve, etc. That narrative seems both delusive and poisonous, and a less satisfying, less sense-making story could well be better for that person (not least because it would be true).