ABSTRACT
Morality is a functional enterprise whose characterizing mission is to provide for principles and rules of conduct that safeguard the interests of people—a project in which all decidedly have a stake. The inherently positive potentialities of human personhood, in sum, are exactly those modes of comportment in whose cultivation and development a rational agent can take reflective self-satisfaction. Even as a sensible pragmatic approach to value in the case of individuals pivots matters of legitimation upon efficacy in the service of their real or genuinely best interests. A sensible pragmatic approach to morality at large pivots matters on efficacy in the service of the best interests of people-in-general. The moral quality of an act is thus emphatically one of rational evaluation. Moral obligation accordingly roots in the inherent rationality of acknowledging an ontological obligation to the realization of the values inherent in one's own mode of insertion into the world's scheme of things.
