ABSTRACT
The concept of morality itself bears the accumulated scars of conceptual evolution. The account of practical reasoning developed here is in the general category of the 'good reasons' approach. For example, Stephen Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics and Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View. In general, what it owes to these writers is the development of the idea that moral reasoning, like practical reasoning generally, has serviceable criteria of logical validity and soundness, which are to be understood in terms of the purposes of the activity one is reasoning about. It might be thought that moral theory under the general conception is not purified of moral intuitions, that in particular, its substantive rules about participation, teleology, and deontology cannot be 'selected' or coordinated 'within' the general conception itself. Social choice theorists might add something like the following to the account of transitivity given here, there are three possible preference relations, greater than, less than, and equal to.
