dramatic narrative we do not know what will happen next. The kind of unpredictability for which I argued in Chapter 8 of After Virtue is required by the narrative structure of human life, and the empirical generalizations and explorations which social scientists discover provide a kind of understanding of human life which is perfectly compatible with that structure. This unpredictability coexists with a second crucial characteristic of all lived narratives, a certain teleological character. We live
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