Teaching Philosophy, 17:1, March 1994 17

Values, Naturalism, and

Teaching the Nature of Values

JONATHAN JACOBS

Colgate University

ln te aching ethics it is difficult to settle on a sen se of j ust what is the aim

of working with the students. I s it mainly t o help them learn certain
doctrines, or explore possibilities, or examine crucial episodes i n a his­
tory of theorizing on the subj ect, or examine ethics as an example of
philosophical reflection in general, or something else? These each pull in
different directions so it would be a bit facile to answer "aU of the
above. " Moore, for example, says that ethics i s an inquiry into what good
is; Aristot1e s ays a n inquiry into virtue is u ndertaken "in order to become
good , " ( 1 1 03b 27 in Nicomachean Ethics). So, there's even a fundamental
divide oyer whether ethics is primarily theoretical or practical.
A t the same tíme that these sorts of concerns exercise the instructor, it
is important to h ave a sense of some of the prevailing assumptions and
antecedent conceptions of the students. They too bring to the course not
only ethical views but some notions (often implicit and not aU near the
surface) of what ethics i s for and about. Students often have a tendency
to regard texts and the ories as obj ects, obj ects they need to become
familiar with and become able to describe. This is unfortunate because
ethical theories and arguments are at some point, however remote, rele­
vant to practice and action in a way that many other kinds of theories and
arguments are not. I f they are looked at as obj ects they a t least are
obj ects with which engagement should change the people en gaging with
them, with respect to self-un derstanding, or conceptions of what i s worth
doing and why. They are about values, and values relevant to decision,
action, and j udgment.
This paper will explore some of the assumptions about the relation of
facts and values that 1 have found to be common among students, and it
will do s o in terms of what Kant, in the Foundations ofthe Metaphysics of
Moral:: caUs the " two standpoints. " Students' antecedent notions about
facts and values powerfully shape their conceptions of ethical the orizing.
They consequently shape their reception and assimilation of what is
discussed i n ethics courses. This is worth taking up both as a matter of

©Teaching Philosophy, 1994. AI\ rights reserved. 0145-5788/93/1701-0017$1.00

18 JONATHAN JACOBS

philosophical psychology and as a matter relevant to pedagogical

method.
Kant's doctrine of the two standpoints is, 1 believe, an instructive entry
into these matters. It provides a framework for discussion that has some
real powers of illumination. My own views (on ethics and other subjects)
are actually quite unKantian, as will become clear along the way. But
the doctrine is a good focal point for formulating issues about facts,
values, and education in values. The impetus for these reflections is my
experience teaching ethics; but their point extends throughout education
generally.
The doctrine of the two standpoints presented in the third section of
the Foundations is a particularly vivid recognition of the fact that human
beings are not only both practical reasoners and theoretical reasoners,
but also appropriate objects of both practical reason and theoretical
reason. Practical and theoretical reason are not two different kinds of
rationality, they are different employments of rationality; and this notion
that there is one, unified reason that is the capacity for both under­
standing and guiding action will be important in the present discussion.
What the doctrine captures and expresses is that it is non-optional for us
to regard and understand human beings in terms of two quite different
sets of categories and idioms. One involves recognizing humans as ap­
propriate objects of naturalistic science. We have a complex physio­
chemical, and also psychological constitution which is to be described
and explained in terms of causal laws and naturalistic conditions and
processes. And this strategy of explanation can be effectively extended
beyond the natural sciences into the social sciences. Without entering
into some of the central debates in the philosophy of social science, 1
think it is reasonable to say that there are causal generalizations con­
cerning social phenomena arrived at by basically naturalistic methods,
even if we dispute the degree to which they are basic or explanatory. At
least it makes sense to try to tell such stories even if only to fill out the
account of circumstances and the setting in which practical reason is
exercised. At the same time, we are purposive, responsible, self-deter­
mining actors in and authors of a social, cultural world in which the
vocabulary of good reasons, judgments of worth, and moral regard and
response not only make sense but are indispensable. So, one of these
ways of our understanding actions involves regarding them as events in
the world, the world of facts. The other regards them as in a world of
value, in some ways a quite distinct and different world.
Kant sought to establish the consistency of these two standpoints by
grounding the practical standpoint in the idea of freedom as the presup­
position of practical reason and locating that freedom out of this world in
the noumenal personality. Thus, the idiom of practical reason does not
refer to the same order as the idiom of theoretical reason and does not
 TEACHING THE NATURE OF VALUES 19

conflict with it. We can abandon neither standpoint, nor need we (nor can
we) settle for what he took to be the "wretched subterfuge" of compati­
bilism.1
Kant's doctrine is in part motivated by his sense of urgency about
naturalism and determinism driving morality out of the world. The activ­
ity of practical reason and the mechanism of a causal order could not, he
thought, be reconciled in a single conception of the world on a single set
of presuppositions or conditions. His division of fact and value led to the
strong objectification of the latter, rather than to the subjectivication of
it that the division is often used to ground.

1
What 1 want to do here is suggest a manner in which something like the
two standpoints is retained, but without detaching fact from value. The
point of this is to characterize what 1 take to be the sort of understanding
of value that should be the result of sound education. The main claim is
that neither the standpoint of practical reason nor the standpoint of
theoretical reason is primary, or properly subordinates the other, and
that while values are not objects in the world to be detected and de­
scribed by theoretical reason, neither are they constructions of practical
reason independent of factual understanding. That is, a sound apprecia­
tion of the two standpoints reveals that facts have normative signifi­
cance; and responsible, endorsable conceptions of value and norms of
action need to be grounded in factual knowledge. Education, then,
should have as one of its aims (if not its primary aim) not the teaching of
values but rather the development of informed rational responsibility so
that students recognize the significance of factual understanding to the
articulation and realization of values. 1f values were objects or properties
there then might be a strategy for instructing people in the use of a
method of theoretical reason to detect them. But while sound ethical
thought does involve understanding, values are not items that theoretical
reason can be trained to find.
Students are often inclined (either on their own or by curricular de­
mands) to prefer an education biased to a kind of understanding shaped
by just one standpoint and to regard it as privileged, or even complete.
They often concentrate their studies either in the methods and contents
of the natural sciences (or naturalistic social sciences) or in humanistic
disciplines focused on social issues, literature, and the cultural, aesthetic,
and interpretive activities of human beings. This is a bit of an overstate­
ment, and it is something that university curricula often try to overcome,
but it is true that many students are educated either basically in the
sciences and its methods, or non-sciences and theirs. A bias toward sci­
ence, for example, can encourage students to think that rigorous, empiri­
cally-informed thought is peculiar to it, and that it is not appropriate to
20 JONATHAN JACOBS

normative matters. They may even come to believe that there is no such
thing as normative thought, and that only attitudes and feelings (or
convention) can guide on questions of value. Training in the sciences
(which often still have a kind of crude positivist ideology for students)
can lead to students becoming emotivists or relativists about values.
At the same time, students not educated in scientific thinking often
believe that normative matters are to be addressed by the subjectivity or
relativity of personal or cultural perspectives in order to sequester them
from the threat of scientism. What is lacking in both cases is an apprecia­
tion of the role of practical reason and factual understanding in norma­
tive thought. In a quite unKantian way, many who want to preserve a
non-scientistic standpoint believe that in order to do so it cannot be
structured and oriented by the authority of rationality, because they
believe that objective rationality belongs primarily or exclusively to
science. For example, with respect to such matters as the environment,
students (and many others) are too often satisfied to address them in
terms of attitudes, thinking that detailed information is a distraction and
that evaluative stances stand on their own, so to speak, and do not need
compelling evidential support. This is a common phenomenon with re­
spect to issues with technical and technological dimensions the complex­
ity of which spurs people to precipitous conclusions rather than patient
inquiry. We need to remind ourselves that judgments of value are not just
for something (policies of action) but also refer to something (a world of
facts and situations of which we are part) and that in order to be properly
prescriptive the y need to be properly informed.
Lack of education in empirical and methodologically rigorous disci­
plines is a serious loss not only because so many students are ignorant of
facts relevant to normative issues but because they fail to develop inter­
est in and competence in naturalistic understanding, and its general
significance. One area in which this is especially clear is a tendency (on
the part of many, but not a11) to exaggerate their own autonomy. For
many, it hardly occurs to them that there is a story for why they are the
sorts of people they are and why the y do what they do and want what
they want. I am not endorsing any sort of determinism here, sociobiologi­
cal, psychological or otherwise. I am just pointing to the fact that so many
people's self-understanding and conceptions of others are impoverished
with respect to the sorts of broadly naturalistic and causal considerations
that at least partially account for character and action and relations
between people. Will, imagination, and sensibility are not autonomous of
nature and society, but either through encouragement of subjective self­
affirmation as a strategy of living or through ignorance of or contempt
for naturalistic understanding many students simply do not know how to
take evidential and causal considerations seriously as part of an under­
standing of human tife and action, including their own characters and
 TEACHING THE NATURE OF VALUES 21

choices. So, even without having heard of anything like the two stand­
points or without having explicit, articulate views about a fact-value
distinction, many students represent in their own thinking a sharp divi­
sion between facts and values.
There is a different form of error concerning facts and values, one 1
have found especially in my experience in teaching business ethics
courses. Trained in economics and ambitious for careers in business,
many students find it virtually counter-intuitive and very difficult to
believe that there might be considerations of moral rationality that over­
ride considerations of economic rationality. Part of this has to do with
students' almost instinctual identification with management and their
not thinking of themselves as consumers, employees, and members of a
civil society generally. So, they see the issues almost exclusively from the
point of view of the firm (usually the view of large firms, not small
businesses or entrepreneurial enterprises). As far as many of them are
concerned, corporations are strictly economic entities; they intend to
manage them; and law and society should have as their main function the
provision of conditions that enable firms to flourish.
Given the model of economic rationality and given the role of self­
interest in economic theorizing it is foreign to many students that there
are questions of value to be formulated and addressed in any other
manner. This is one kind of scientism that is at odds with the standpoint
that there are human needs and interests that are not ego-centered and
that these needs and interests generate reasons that it is reasonable to
require anyone to recognize and take seriously in thought and action.2
The point here is that students sometimes regard morality as having an
essentially policing function rather than taking moral considerations as
part of rational self-determination. Thus, the very idea of rationally
shareable, endorsable and assessable ends, interests and requirements is
foreign to them. With their commitment to economic science as a theo­
retical model and its applied versions in finance, marketing and so on,
many students believe that there just is not any other employment of
rationality relevant to choice and action and judgment. One of the iro­
nies of this is that while students often suspect ethical theorizing of being
idealistic and unresponsive to the way the world is, they tend to be
unbothered by the fact that the assumptions of economic theory are
highly idealized and simplified and are no more descriptive of actual
conditions and behavior than ethical theory.
The case of economics is a particularly apt one because while it is not a
physical science or natural science it involves not only a sophisticated
theory of behavior but also a version of rationality for the guidance of
action. Law-like relations between economic variables and an interpre­
tation of human ends in terms of preferences yields a "scientific" account
not only of the phenomena but also of what the principles of behavior
22 JONATHAN JACOBS

should be. In this sense, human beings are not only obj ects of scientific
inquiry, but are also motivated by their grasp of that science. The theory
of economic rationality is not just explanatory but also motivational as a
form of practical rationality. In this way, economic rationality applies a
theoretical model to practice in a way that turns matters of practical
reasoning into something like engineering problems.3
As an interim conclusion, my suggestion is that the bias toward either
naturalism or subjectivism and perspectivism is unhelpful or positively
harmful with respect to educating students to think soundly about ques­
tions of value, indeed, even to recognize and formulate them. Training in
naturalistic thinking alone does not succeed in enabling students to do
this, and neither does an emphasis on perspective or even courses ori­
ented around issues and attitudes. Too often those amount to little more
than a forum for expressing opinions or endorsing ideology.
What then should we aim at with respect to encouraging sound think­
ing about values? A primary task is cultivating the development and
elaboration of the two standpoints in each individual. That is, we should
educate people to enable them to understand the naturalistic bases and
content of human issues and to have some sense of what, at least .in
general outline, is involved in scientific engagement with the world and
ourselves. At the same time, we should educate people to recognize and
appreciate the distinctive powers and products of self-determination,
imagination, and normative commitment and j udgment. We are natural
beings, but purposive ones, experiencing openness with respect to ends
and required to fashion our lives, norms and institutions. We lead norma­
tively significant natural lives, and we articulate self-conceptions and
relations with others but cannot articulate sound ones in detachment
from an aspiration to know our own nature and its natural and social
context and history. What we can become and what it is worth being like
depend in large measure upon a natural constitution and setting which
we did not make.
The two standpoints are in a closer relation than the consistency that
Kant sought for them. They complement each other, and there is, or
ought to be constant traffic back and forth between them. One product
of this traffic is education in values. This is not so much a matter of
teaching values, of inculcating them by instruction. Being educated in
values is largely a matter of developing an informed habit of attention to
certain sorts of dimensions of facts, situations, and actions. This is actually
an unKantian point since it is in defiance of a sharp distinction between
a realm of facts and a realm of values. There are objective considerations
of value, but they are fact-based considerations. That is, for agents, for
practical reasoners, natural and social facts are normativeiy significant.
Their significance depends upon us, but not by way of stipulation or
proj ection. Well-ordered practical reason is a kind of understanding and
 TEACHING THE NATURE OF VALUES 23

its objects are natural and social facts. Values are not an additional kind
of thing in the world but neither are they properly creations or comtruc­
tions unregulated and unguided by knowledge of the world. The plausi­
bility and assessability of valuations depends upon their being grounded
in factual considerations about human nature and social life. Facts are
normatively significant for practical reasoners because practical reason­
ers naturally make judgments of worth, articulate conceptions of good,
and structure choice. The suggestion here is that we should retain the
centrality of reason in thinking about values, but not in the distinctively
Kantian manner according to which it is cut off from thinking about the
world.
Perhaps then education in values is not something altogether distinct
from education in facts, though as a curricular matter this is what often
happens. And that is tolerable as long as the result of education is an
understanding that facts and values are not detached, and neither of
them subordinates or explains away the other. The knowledge of our­
selves necessary tor a sound conception of the values to be acknowl­
edged and realized in our lives requires the employment of this dual
capacity for reason. A scientific mind not only need not be value-free, it
is a mind suited to achieving an informed and defensible conception of
values shaped by the norms of rationality. And a mind trained in non­
scientific, non-naturalistic understanding is a mind suited to being able
to judge factual matters with a sensibility and imagination crucial to
seeing what the facts count for and why.
One common error about morality is the notion that it concerns a
distinctive set of issues, usually including such things as abortion, truth­
telling, killing, theft, and some others. The reason this is a mistake is that
it is a way of restricting ethical thought to certain action-types or situ­
ations. But ethical thought is not restricted in that way. It is not only
about sex, theft, and honesty. Just about any kind of human under­
standing, purpose, or situation can have ethically significant dimensions.
And the issues that are plainly identifiable as moral issues are so not
because of some feature which labels or discloses them, or because of
subjective perspective but because of how they figure in the lives of
practical reasoners. This claim is of course Aristotelian in spirit in that it
takes ethics to be concerned with sound practical reasoning and judg­
ment generally rather than with arriving at decisions about what to do
given certain fixed rules or principles. To recognize this is to recognize
the undetachability of facts and values and the unity of practical and
theoretical reason. Educated, critical thought about values involves as­
piring to understanding as a resource for normative judgment and for
action. It involves engagement with both standpoints in a unified life of
reason. Kant was right to give reason a central place in practice, purpose
and normative judgment in order to preserve their integrity from subjec-
24 JONATHAN JACOBS

tivist or naturalist assimilation . B ut their eharaeter and signifieanee need

not and should not be taken to subsist independently of the natural order
whieh provides the enabHng eonditions and limitations for the employ­
ment of practical reason.

II

In the remainder of the discussion I will say something about the rele­
vance of this view to the development of positions on value.
The question of whether virtue is learned, or acquired by habituation
or otherwise achieved is an ancient one, and there is a good deal to be
said for one of the ancient answers to it. Aristotle's answer includes the
claim that virtue is acquired by habit. He argues for this on the grounds
that characteristics and policies of choice and response are formed be­
fore a person is rationally mature, and that right "starting points" need to
b e supplied by habit in order for the individual to h ave the resource of
well-ordered dispositions needed as a basis for ref1ective understanding
of virtue. Nonetheless, h e argues that people are responsible for their
characters because their aetions are voluntary and thus the charac­
teristics their aetions establish are voluntary.4 This does sound problem­
atic, if not straightforwardly inconsistent; but I think it is true, and it is the
basis for a version of what might be ealled a developmental compatibi­
lism more interesting than standard attempts to reconcile freedom of the
will with eausal necessity.
It seems correet to say that a person becomes rationally ref1ective and
capable of self-determination guided by valuations one can understand
and criticize at a time in their lives when their characteristic dispositions
and propensities are to a large degree already formed. Still, the actions
leading to the formation of them , and the actions consequent upon them
are (many of them, anyway) voluntary, and the capacity to reason is a
capacity to make adj ustments in a character which is not yet fully fixed
and without any plasticity. An adolescent or young adult has a character,
but also has reason, and they can employ attention, knowledge, and
imagination in fashioning their own actions, polieies, and characteristics.
One can not change a characteristic just by decision or volition, but
reasoned decision and volition can be employed in undertaking to do so.
Knowledge of the world and practical self-consciousness are resources in
addition to habit and they can be employed to resist or redirect the
inertia of the latter. Indeed, that one does so employ them can be taught
as a habit onee one is no longer very young. And one of the most gratify­
ing aspects of teaching is seeing students begin to genuinely come to
terms with the faet that many things they have taken for granted or
accepted as norms are complex and uncertain, and need to be rethought
in ways that alter their eonceptions of themselves and others and also
 TEACHING THE NATURE OF VALUES 25

alter their own motivations. Qne can acquire new, more self-critical hab­
its of deliberation and judgment.
There are several kinds of significance in this, but one kind is that the
development of character and moral outlook and attitudes is itself a
naturalistic process in important ways. It is not deterministic or mechani­
cal, but it is a process involving action, feeling, and experience. It is
certainly not a purely intellectual process or a matter of acknowledgment
of an a priori law or set of principles. Aristotle was largely right to argue
that moral education is not a matter of teaching, if that means instruction
in theory. But neither is it a process of acquiring blind habits. It is a
process of acquiring habits that conform to what mature reason en­
dorses, and which makes possible that endorsement by the individual
who has those habits.
Qne habit that it is a good thing to help students to challenge in
themselves is the habit of thinking that one is free to the extent that one
can do or get what one wants. The range of options open to a person
certainly is relevant to freedom, but students often underestimate the
significance of thinking about and accounting for how they come to want
what they want. And because of this they do not recognize the texture
and variety of factors involved in self-determination. Here is a place
where there is a particularly important confluence of considerations of
naturalistic causality and rational self-mastery and purposiveness. For
example, one's choices and actions shape one's dispositions to choose
and to act. Even if one is not aware of the causal influence of their actions
on their character, it is real, and it is a serious error to pretend that what
one does makes no difference to what one is. We cannot disown our past
emotions, judgments and decisions in such a way that self-determination
frees us from the tendencies they establish. Aristotle may have over­
stated the extent to which character (whether good or bad) becomes
fixed and loses its plasticity. But he is surely right to have argued that one
develops a second nature which one cannot change by decision or an act
of will.5 And this is why it is so important that reason, which enables us to
direct our desires and passions, be cuItivated to a high degree of critical
attention and informed judgment, in order to guide self-determination
on the basis of knowledge of oneself and the world.
Qur freedom as persons is not to create morality by willing, whether it
is rationally structured (as Kant claimed), or free of any criteria, rational
or otherwise (as some existentialists have argued). Rather it is a matter
of being able to guide deliberation and action by understanding, under­
standing of what is good for beings constituted as we are, in a world like
this. To exercise this freedom responsibly requires knowledge (though
not formalized, theoretically articulate knowledge) and it also involves
acknowledging and taking seriously our capacities to be self-determin­
ing. Part of taking oneself or another morally seriously is recognizing
26 JONATHAN JACOBS

both the limits and contents supplied by natural endowment and experi­
ence and recognizing persons' responsibility as voluntary agents acting
under conceptions of what is taken to be good, or worth doing or worth
being like. Particularly in contexts in which emotionally charged issues
such as sexuality, race and social j ustice are discussed students are too
quick to regard disagreement as indicative of a threat, as an assault on
what the y have conviction about. They often either ignore the social and
historical reasons for why people have the views they have, or they
stereotype others as robotically espousing views attributable to people
"like that." What is ignored or obscured are the shared anxieties and
concerns that, if handled in a more sober and informed manner yield a
common idiom for rational dispute that does not turn into a zero-sum
battle for self-respect. Everyone has a "story" but this does not render
impossible convergence on judgments of common human good. In un­
derstanding ourselves as agents and as initiators of normatively signifi­
cant activity, we do not understand ourselves as different kinds of beings
than when we understand ourselves as natural beings. Our natural con­
stitution is normatively significant, and in a way that centrally involves
reason. It involves it in its role in recognizing and articulating normative
significance; and it involves it in its role in structuring and guiding action,
and in understanding how oneself (and others) have come to have the
sorts of characteristics and commitments they have.
College-age people are of an age where they are confronting genuine
moral responsibilities and dilemmas and their characteristics are not yet
so firmly established that their own thinking and j udgment cannot revise
them. Many students are keenly interested in the notion that what they
are like is in large part a matter of factors that they have not controlled
or even been aware of, yet the possibilities for self-knowledge and exer­
cising responsibility for character are real. For some, the reality of this
responsibility seems a bit anxiety-producing; and for many the anxiety is
constructively translated into heightened seriousness about that respon­
sibility. Giving attention to this without melodrama is often an effective
way to assist students in overcoming the inclination to regard moral texts
and topics just as obj ects to study. It motivates them to appreciate the
character of practical reasoning as a genuine issue for them. They are
then better able to understand how causal influences make a difference
to w hat sorts of people they are and to what their judgments of worth are.
And they are also better able to understand that their own causality as
thinkers and agents has a role in this. This helps enlarge their sense of
what ethical thinking is about; to see that it is not primarily a matter of
reconstructing arguments, or fluency in a particular technical vocabulary
that philosophers use. Rather, it is about the world and how to live in it,
and it is a world which for practical reasoners is ethically significant.
The two standpoints that can be adopted toward human beings are not
 TEACHING THE NATURE OF VALUES 27

standpoints each taken toward different worlds that they inhabit. They
are emphases of aspects of a unity. And the basis for educated thinking
about values is to be skilled and informed about both aspects, in order
that their unity not be erroneously or mischievously undone.
Philosophical education has a distinctive eontribution to make to this.
First, it encourages a kind of general intellectual responsibility that is
unrestricted with respect to context. It helps students become more
skilled at recognizing assumptions and tracing-out implications, and in
this way gives a kind of vertical clarity and depth to thinking. In develop­
ing abilities to make distinctions, disambiguate and seek grounds of
justification it trains people to strive for more articulate coherence in
their thinking and impresses upon them the faet that the points in our
thinking where we stop often eome too soon. Additionally, philosophy
can edueate people in what are the most general features of naturalistie
thinking and explanation, and also the alternatives to it. It is in philoso­
phy that the outlines of and motivations for scientific rationality and
moral rationality are described and explored at the same time that the y
are not presented as finished products closed to questioning or reconsid­
eration.
The main value of ethical philosophy here is not in recruiting adher­
ents to one or another ethical theory or even in presenting the contours
and details of ethieal theory, though that is important. It is in cultivating
a concern to have and to give and to want good reasons and to recognize
that what are good reasons with respect to questions of value has to do
with a complex, textured understanding of human beings as beings who
need to think of themselves as natural, but also self-determining and
capable of ethical understanding.

Notes
This is a substantially revised version of a paper with the tit1e "Values, Education
and the Two Standpoints" presented at the 21st Conference on Value Inquiry at
Drew U niversity, Apri1 1 993.
1. Kant says
... a rational being must regard himself as intelligence ( and not from the
side of his lower powers ) , as belonging to the world of understanding
and not to that of the senses. Thus he has two standpoints from which he
can consider himself and recognize the laws of the employment of his
powers and consequently of aU his actions: first, as belonging to the
world of sense under laws of nature ( heteronomy ) , and, second, as
belonging to the intelIigible world under laws which, independent of
nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.
Fo undatians af the Metaphysics af Marals, ed. L. W. Beck, B obbs-Merrill,
Indian apolis, 1959, p. 7 1 .
28 JONATHAN JACOBS

Kant uses the expression "wretched subterfuge" in the Critique 01 Practical

Reason , p. 99. Also edited by Beck, Bobbs-Merrill, 1 956.
2 . This is an issue I discuss at some length in my Being True to the World: Moral
Realism and Practical Wisdom , Lang, New York, 1 990. I argue that not all inter­
ests of the self need be self-interests, and that it is possible to recognize consid­
erations of moral rationality that involve reference to facts about human needs
and interests that are not to be explained as preferences to be maximized.
Economic rationality is an important kind of rationality, but it is a "partial" kind,
the significance of which is to be weighed and located by other sorts of consid­
erations.
3. In large part this is because economic rationality is instrumental rationality
but does not involve criteria for ascertaining the merits of the preferences and
ends taken as data. See A. Sen, On Ethics and Economics, B asil B lackwell,
Oxford, 1 987, esp. ch. 2 for a succinct and extremely effective discussion of the
relation between economic thought and moral philosophy.
4. In his Ethics and the Limits 01Philosophy B ernard WiIliams writes
AristotIe should not have believed that in the most basic respects, at least,
people were responsible for their characters. He gives an account of moral
development in terms of habituation and internalization that leaves little
room for practical reason to alter radically the obj ectives that a grown-up
person has acquired.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1 985, p. 69.
For all of the weight that Aristot!e puts on habituation he also insists that
habit does not mean blind or mechanical action. Dispositions are acquired
through actions that are voluntary, and as we mature, voluntary action is
more and more guided by deliberation and understanding, or at least it can
be. Habituation can supply good or bad starting points but does not explain
away or preclude responsibility for character. In fact, the order of the text of
the Nicomachean Ethics indicates a deepening and more extensive role for
reason and individual responsibility.
5. See Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. III, ch. 5, esp. 1 1 14b 30-35. See also R. Sorabji,
"Involuntariness and Equity" in Necessity, Cause, And Blame Perspectives o n
A ristotle's Theory, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1 980.

Jonathan Jacobs, Philosophy, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, 13346-

1398, USA