 Communitarians can reply by casting doubt on the view that choice is intrinsically valuable, that a certain moral principle or communal attachment is more valuable simply because it has been chosen following deliberation among alternatives by an individual subject. If we have a highest-order interest in choosing our central projects and life-plans, regardless of what is chosen, it ought to follow that there is something fundamentally wrong with unchosen attachments and projects. But this view violates our actual self-understandings. We ordinarily think of ourselves, Michael Sandel says, “as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons or daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic”, (Sandel 1981, 179) social attachments that more often than not are involuntarily picked up during the course of our upbringing, rational choice having played no role whatsoever. I didn’t choose to love my mother and father, to care about the neighborhood in which I grew up, to have special feelings for the people of my country, and it is difficult to understand why anyone would think I have chosen these attachments, or that I ought to have done so. In fact, there may even be something distasteful about someone who questions the things he or she deeply cares about—certainly no marriage could survive too long if fundamental understandings regarding love and trust were constantly thrown open for discussion! Nor is it obvious that, say, someone who performs a good deed following prolonged calculation of pros and cons is morally superior than a Mother-Teresa type who unreflectively, spontaneously acts on behalf of other people’s interests.