ABSTRACT
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In his Reason in Human Affairs Herbert Simon claims that “reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot
tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there. It is a gun for hire that can be employed
in the service of any goals that we have, good or bad” (Simon, 1983, 7-8). This is a clear and
provocative a commitment to instrumentalism, the doctrine that the predicate “rational” applies to
our choice of means, but not our ends. In this conception, rationality consists in the effective and
efficient achievement of ends that, so to speak, are given. Human beings exhibit rationality in
selecting means to achieve those ends, not in preferring one end to another. As David Hume
famously says, “Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the
scratching of my finger” (Hume, 1986, 416).
