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And there is the scientific image of us-in-the-world elaborated by neuroscience, one in which I am a brain consisting of a hundred-billion neurons, connected by a hundred-trillion synapses, and this brain itself hasn’t a clue as to what’s going on among those synapses. How can this be reconciled with the manifest image of me as me, pursuing my life, remembering it and planning for it, singularly committed to its persistence and flourishing? How can the neuron-level view be reconciled with the manifest truth that at some level our brains undeniably think about things? Where’s the aboutness to be found among those neurons and synapses? And is the scientific image even coherent if we can’t assert that we think about that scientific image, and that in thinking about it, we are thinking about the world?

here the work of increasing our moral coherence is particularly important.

Every increase in our moral coherence—recognizing the rights of the enslaved, the colonialized, the impoverished, the imprisoned, women, children, LGBTs, the handicapped ...—is simultaneously an expansion of those to whom we are prepared to offer reasons accounting for our behavior. The reasons by which we make our behavior coherent to ourselves changes together with our view of who has reasons coming to them.

Anyone should be a candidate for friend status, but few will be admitted to the elite club. Why few? Because favorites (friends) can be created only by spending time together, sharing experiences, and immersing themselves in each other's lives—and time, sadly, is a finite resource.

The little prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic feels heartbroken when he realizes that his beloved rose is just a common flower—intrinsically equal with all other roses. But then he comes to understand that she is special because he loves her and "because she is my rose." The wise fox enlightens the little prince: "It is the time you have spent on your rose that makes your rose so important." Favoritism and fairness are deeply irreconcilable, and until we figure out how to square that circle, I'm sticking with my favorites.