Impossible Choices

This paper was written for, and (in part) presented at, a symposium at McKenna College in which Mr. Calabresi took part. The paper begins with a discussion of a number of ambiguities in the treatment of choice in Calabresi and Bobbit's Tragic Choices and then proceeds to develop in two different, but I think complementary, directions. On the one hand, I use their shifts of position as an occasion, or opportunity, to work out what seems to me a more realistic account of how decision-makers choose among the alternatives they encounter. On the other hand, I suggest that the shifts of position that are visible at the surface of the argument are traceable to deeper tensions among the unstated, and perhaps not fully recognized, metaphysical presuppositions on which the argument rests.