ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three different classes of entities that can be thought to be responsive in different but related ways to distinct but related kinds of norms. It suggests that a certain way of understanding the manner in which evolutionary explanations work in the explanation of the behavior of living organisms provides with an unproblematic model that can be extended to the other two cases. In one important respect human beings belong to the same class of organisms as cats. Non-instrumental norms occupy an odd intellectual status. Full responsiveness to norms depends crucially on responsiveness to error. Some of the highly instrumentally rational agents, the social scientists who use rational choice theory, are even capable of learning how to respond instrumentally rationally appropriately to the instrumentally rational behavior of other agents. One phrase that is sometimes used to pick out this extraordinary class of agents is 'social scientists that employ rational decision theory'.
