Can instrumental reasoning stand on its own?I. IntroductionThere is something attractive about ordinary instrumental reasoning or means-end reasoning. You start with a desire, goal or desire and consider the available options as a means to fulfilling or achieving it. If, among the available options, one is the best or only one for satisfying the desire or achieving the goal, one has a reason to select it. If two or more options both seem to lead to the goal, they might still differ in other ways, for example, in the probability with which they lead to the goal – in which case (if that were the only difference) one would have reason to choose the option that most likely led to the goal. To look at things in the simplest form possible, consider a being with only one desire. Suppose this being wants nothing more than to break a street lamp. Even in such a simple case we can begin to say what he should do. Any number of things can be effective. If he has no other purpose - not even that of going unnoticed so that he can do it again with some other lamppost - he can use a rifle, a pistol, throw rocks at him, climb the lamppost to hit him with a fist. , etc. But we can say that there are some things that, in terms of his goal, he should not do, for example, that he should not try to break it (because he will not succeed) by throwing feathers at it, one by one. It seems that, even in this deliberately simplified case, reasoning about means and ends, combined with some knowledge of the world, is sufficient to tell us something about what it should do. This is, of course, not a moral “ought,” but we seem to have generated a normative conclusion, a judgment about duty of a modest kind, without appealing to any mysterious non-natural properties. paper...ah person? Perhaps, a true example of a chosen existentialist would say that there isn't even a reason to engage rather than not engage; you just do it (or you don't do it).[15] This is not offered as a solution to the central problem raised by Korsgaard. As previously stated, I'm just assuming there is a solution. Rather, I am trying to show that, given the existence of a solution to that problem, even if we need some further normative principle, it need not be one that identifies certain ends for us. In short, we can do almost what could have been done if the defenders of the autonomy of instrumental reasoning had been right. (In fact, I think we could do a lot more than we could if they were right – but that's a topic for another article.)[16] And in any case I have no non-dialectical evidence that they are wrong..