ABSTRACT

Human beings, by and large, live their lives as they come, making the customary choices. Putting on the right shoe before the left, taking dinner here rather than there, greeting her, ignoring him, working this way, working that, might, any of them have the most extraordinary consequences. People tend to identify the interest of such ordinary selves with some specific interest or list of interests. Decisions of any sort, taken as decisions and not just as opting for one alternative or another, raise the question of their justification. One frequently calls those decisions "technical" that require for their justification estimating whatever course of thought or action will best satisfy the norms pertinent to the choice. In a technical decision, one does not simply assume the usual routines for satisfying the relevant norms. The issue is rational implementation, the determination of that course of action which most effectively satisfies what may be a highly complex set of preferred standards and priorities.