 These varying interpretations of what it is to choose for a child as an adult would, and their attendant difficulties, display the problems of construing the best interests of a child in terms of the hypothetically adult choices the child would make. The problems are in the last analysis due to the following basic fact. In the cases of adults paternalistically choosing for other adults, and where the paternalism is warranted by a temporary failure of reason, we can have a determinate sense of how the adult would have chosen in the absence of the failure. If she had known that the bridge was unsafe she would have chosen not to cross it. If she was not persuaded by the influence of the drug to think she could fly she would not have decided to jump off the tall building. And so on.