Here I examine the relation between freedom and value, both in the sense of a person’s own values and the inherent value of liberty itself. I then show the relation between liberty, so conceived, and democratic institutions and practices.

To understand why a narrative conception of identity offers a robust basis for understanding the nature and ethical significance of the role of personal bioinformation in self-characterisation, it is necessary first to establish what such a conception involves. This chapter reaches beyond metaphors of storytelling to review the key features of several prominent philosophical theories of narrative identity – exemplified by the approach by Marya Schechtman. According to these theories, our practical identities are constituted by our first-person accounts of who we are. Our self-narratives comprise multifaceted, diachronic characterisations of who we are as whole individuals, agents, and moral beings. We do not simply ‘have’ our identity narratives. We construct and interpret them, and they play a key role in supporting valuable experiential, evaluative aspects of a practically engaged and flourishing life. Our self-narratives are only capable of fulfilling these practical roles to the extent that they provide relatively intelligible and integrated accounts of our characteristics and experiences – in our own eyes and also in the eyes of those around us. This is, therefore, a crucially normative conception of identity, according to which the attainment of a coherent, inhabitable practical identity is an achievement, albeit a provisional and ever-evolving one.

Virtue is agreed to be a technê – or at least very like one – by Socrates, Plato, the Stoics and Aristotle (who is deeply ambivalent about the technê model). But in what ways is technê a useful model for virtue? Barney argues that technê has two important dimensions. First, technê provides a small-scale, well-understood model for the general, unspecialized practical rationality that would constitute virtue. Relevant features of a technê so understood include perceptual, rational and deliberative capacities, and a disinterested orientation to an end. Second, a technê is a practical identity: a social role the adoption of which provides a deliberative standpoint. Adopting a practical identity involves accepting its normative authority: we undertake to be a good doctor, mother, etc. Understanding technê´s normative authority as a practical identity (rather than as knowledge) solves several standard puzzles about virtue as technê. Moreover, the model can be defended against some common objections if virtue is taken as a kind of ‘super-technê’, with the human good as its end and, accordingly, some special features: it directs all the other technai, its adoption as a practical identity is non-optional for a rational human being, and its reasons for action are non-defeasible.