| Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. 3 |
| True and False Hope | p. 11 |
| What May I Hope? | p. 11 |
| The Socratic Ideal | p. 12 |
| Internal and External Goods | p. 14 |
| The Goods of Good Lives | p. 16 |
| Some Misunderstandings | p. 19 |
| The Essential Conditions of Life | p. 21 |
| False Hope and the Vulnerability of Good Lives | p. 27 |
| The Tragic View of Life | p. 31 |
| The Moral Importance of Tragedy | p. 31 |
| Tragic Situations | p. 34 |
| Tragic Situations and the Essential Conditions of Life | p. 37 |
| One Response to Tragic Situations | p. 39 |
| The Tension Tragedy Reveals | p. 43 |
| Evil, Desert, and Character-Morality | p. 45 |
| The Wide and Narrow Senses of "Evil" | p. 45 |
| The Primary and Derivative Senses of "Evil" | p. 47 |
| The Moral Relevance of Evil | p. 49 |
| Simple Evil and Character-Morality | p. 50 |
| Character-Morality and Desert | p. 55 |
| The Minimum Content of Character-Morality | p. 64 |
| Unchosen Evil | p. 66 |
| Tragic Situations and Unchosen Evil | p. 66 |
| The Nature of Choice | p. 67 |
| Insufficiency | p. 71 |
| Expediency | p. 75 |
| Malevolence | p. 79 |
| Unchosen Evil and the Lack of Control | p. 83 |
| Morality beyond Choice | p. 84 |
| The Moral Reaction to Unchosen Evil | p. 84 |
| The Soft Reaction | p. 85 |
| The First Assumption of Choice-Morality: Ought Implies Can | p. 89 |
| Choice-Morality versus Character-Morality | p. 93 |
| The Principle Demoted | p. 99 |
| The Growing Content of Character-Morality | p. 103 |
| Human Worth and Moral Merit | p. 106 |
| Choice and Human Worth | p. 106 |
| The Second Assumption of Choice-Morality: Moral Egalitarianism | p. 108 |
| Selves and Their Qualities | p. 110 |
| The Ground of Desert | p. 115 |
| The Potentialities of Human Nature | p. 117 |
| Moral Inequality | p. 121 |
| Good and Evil in Human Nature | p. 124 |
| Evil as Corruption | p. 124 |
| The Third Assumption of Choice-Morality: The Basic Goodness of Human Nature | p. 128 |
| Evil and Choice | p. 131 |
| The Failure of Kant's Argument | p. 136 |
| The Rejection of Choice-Morality and the Soft Reaction | p. 140 |
| The Mixed View of Human Nature | p. 142 |
| Character-Morality: Taking Stock | p. 146 |
| Character-Morality and the Essential Conditions of Life | p. 146 |
| The Ideal of Character-Morality | p. 149 |
| Nine Theses of Character-Morality | p. 154 |
| Two Aspects of Character-Morality | p. 157 |
| The State of the Argument | p. 161 |
| The Institutional Dimension of Character-Morality | p. 163 |
| What Kind of Institution Should Character-Morality Be? | p. 163 |
| The Knowledge of Prohibitions | p. 166 |
| The Justification of Deep Prohibitions | p. 172 |
| The Motivation to Conform to Deep Prohibitions | p. 179 |
| The Personal Dimension of Character-Morality: The Possibility of Control | p. 182 |
| Understanding and Hope | p. 182 |
| Pragmatism | p. 190 |
| Irony | p. 192 |
| Romanticism | p. 196 |
| From Understanding toward Control | p. 200 |
| The Personal Dimension of Character-Morality: The Reflective Temper | p. 202 |
| The Reflective Temper and the Flawed Responses | p. 202 |
| Reflection and Increased Control | p. 205 |
| The Motivation to Increase Control | p. 213 |
| Increased Control and Emotional Reactions | p. 216 |
| The Reflective Temper: An Overview | p. 221 |
| Character-Morality and Our Sensibility | p. 223 |
| Character-Morality as a Response to the Secular Problem of Evil | p. 223 |
| Character-Morality and Changes in Our Sensibility | p. 226 |
| Rights and Moral Merit | p. 228 |
| Psychologizing and Facing Evil | p. 230 |
| Relativism and the Objectivity of Evil | p. 233 |
| The True Center of Character-Morality | p. 236 |
| Works Cited | p. 239 |
| Index | p. 247 |
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