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Stoic elevationism is implausible as a theory of human well-being. It notoriously considers ordinary appetitive pleasures to constitute no part of human well-being, and it regards (nonmoral) pain as in no way intrinsically contrary to human well-being or good. Such conclusions about human good and ill are highly counterintuitive, perhaps more counterintuitive than anything utilitarianism is committed to, and although the Stoics offer a variety of arguments for their views, those arguments are widely regarded as unpersuasive and will not concern us here. Let us see, rather, whether any other kind of historically signifi cant (or historically rooted) virtue-ethical elevationism can avoid the excesses of the Stoic view of human good and ill. At fi rst glance, this might seem to be impossible. If a virtue ethics is to be elevationistic, it must understand all distinctions relating to well-being in terms of distinctions having to do with virtue. Doesn’t this mean that how well-off one is will depend on how virtuous one is and doesn’t this precisely deliver us up to the forbidding conclusion that pain is no evil for the virtuous person on the rack? It is certainly natural to think so. It is natural to think that if virtue and well-being don’t, so to speak, coincide, then neither can be understood in terms of the other (suitably supplemented by nonevaluative notions); and it is interesting, in this connection, to consider what Kant says about
Data Mining Software Stoicism and Epicureanism in the Critique of Practical Reason.8 Kant recognizes that these ancient views are not merely inconsistent with one another, but are in an important respect opposites—his discussion to some extent anticipates, though in a less general and
digital signage self-conscious fashion, the distinction we are making between elevationism and reductionism. Kant holds that individual virtue cannot be identifi ed with what effectively serves the well-being or happiness of the individual, in the manner of Epicureanism, but also that individual well-being or happiness cannot, in the Stoic manner, be identifi ed with the individual’s (consciousness of his or her own) virtue. (He refuses to accept the Stoic’s claim that pain is for him no evil.) Kant is in fact a dualist about our higher and lower ethical values, about the admirable and the personally desirable, and he claims that well-being and virtue are “entirely
free ipad 2 heterogeneous” concepts. But it in fact doesn’t follow from the fact, assumed by Kant, that virtue and well-being don’t coincide in either the way Stoics believe or the way Epicureans believe that these notions are entirely heterogeneous. Kant doesn’t say that this follows, and he seems to have independent reasons, to be discussed briefl y in a moment, for holding that we cannot understand virtue in terms of well-being or vice versa. But what is most important at this point is to see why “entire heterogeneity” doesn’t follow from noncoincidence, since that will precisely leave open the possibility of a historically interesting elevationism that 8. See especially part I, book I, ch. 2. the opposite of reductionism 19 avoids the problems of Stoicism. And we can see this most easily, I think, if we consider utilitarianism (which isn’t mentioned in Kant’s discussion). Utilitarianism at one and the same time denies the coincidence of virtue and well-being and insists that the former can be understood or explained in terms of the latter, taken together with nonethical, empirical notions. For under utilitarianism, the virtuous individual is one who contributes to the general well-being
ergohuman at the possible expense of her own, and the familiar criticism that utilitarianism is too demanding is based upon the realization that utilitarian morality puts at considerable risk, rather than insuring, the wellbeing of the virtuous individual. So for utilitarianism, virtue and well-being don’t at all have to coincide in individuals. Yet utilitarian reductionism treats virtue and morality as understandable in terms of well-being rather than as entirely heterogeneous with the latter notion, and in that case, there is room in ethical/conceptual space for an elevationist (virtue) ethics that understands well-being in terms of virtue without assuming, in the way that has such damaging consequences for Stoicism, that virtue and well-being coincide in individuals. It must be possible for there to be a view or views that bear to Stoicism something like the relation that utilitarianism bears to Epicureanism, a possibility that I myself have sometimes ignored in writing about elevationism and that Kant doesn’t seem to regard as a serious option for ethical theory.

I believe that the overall Critical Philosophy no no hair removal gives Kant a reason to ignore this option and to look askance at all monistic theorizing about virtue and personal well-being, a reason emerging from the approach to metaphysics and epistemology taken in the First Critique. Kant thinks that in ethics, wellbeing represents or corresponds to sensibility and virtue represents or corresponds to the understanding; and to the extent the Critical Philosophy rests on a dualism of sensibility and understanding (and of Pizza Express vouchers percepts and concepts), Kant seems to want a corresponding dualism in ethics; and that may be why he insists that well-being and virtue are entirely heterogeneous. So Kant’s larger or more systematic dualism seems to predispose him not only against any form of ethical reductionism, but also against the possibility I want to defend here in both historical and theoretical terms, the possibility of understanding well-being in elevationist terms but not as
Essay writing coincident with virtue or morality. (Samuel Kerstein has pointed out to me that Kant’s position here may have in part also derived from an intuitive conviction that virtuous people are sometimes very unhappy and the wicked sometimes “fl ourish as the green bay tree.”)

But doesn’t the drive for a unifying Atkins Diet Food List system, to the extent we consider such a thing appropriate in doing ethics, actually favor the Kantian ethical dualism at this point over any form of elevationist monism, even one that would be more plausible than Stoicism? To be sure, monism allows us a greater unifi cation within ethics than dualism does, but to the extent Kant’s ethical dualism allows him to dovetail his ethics with his metaphysics/epistemology in a way that ethical elevationism doesn’t claim to do, doesn’t Kant’s ethical dualism come out 20 essays on the history of ethics ahead of any monistic (virtue-ethical) elevationism we might be able to locate in the history of philosophy and/or develop in contemporary terms? That depends, I think, on what one says about the First Critique. If one has doubts about the way Kant treats concepts and percepts and about his replica watches general metaphysical and epistemological methods and conclusions in that context, then that may actually rebound against the approach Kant takes in ethics. Basing an ethics on an epistemology-cum-metaphysics is a double-edged sword, but rather than attempt here to investigate all the epistemological and metaphysical edmonton home builder issues that we would need to examine in order to determine which way the sword cuts, it seems reasonable to explore the historical and contemporary possibilities of monistic, elevationistic virtue ethics in order to see whether, quite apart from any connection to epistemology or metaphysics, such an ethics can fulfi ll the
loveseat (somewhat independent) criteria of a good systematic ethical theory. Those criteria are demanding and interesting enough, so that it seems worth our while to see whether any form of elevationist virtue ethics can meet them, and I shall proceed accordingly. I think a more plausible example of virtue-ethical
replica handbags elevatonism than Stoicism offers us can in fact be found in a certain way of understanding or interpreting Aristotle’s views in the Nicomachean Ethics. The so-called function (or ergon) argument of book I of the Ethics concludes that the good life for human beings consists in a long and active life of virtue. But Aristotle immediately qualifi es this claim by pointing out that how pleasant or painful, successful or unsuccessful one’s life is also helps to determine how good it is (whether it is “blessed”). This further point seems to take Aristotle away from any attempt to explain human well-being in terms of the higher categories of virtue and rationality and toward some sort of dualistic conception of the ethical. But that interpretation is not actually forced on us, because of some of the things
cyprus company Aristotle says later about pleasure. In book X (chs. 3–5), he says that pleasures deriving from perverted or morally unworthy sources are not good, not desirable, and it is possible to interpret this as meaning that a person who gains money or certain enjoyments through injustice or betrayal gains nothing good for himself, fails to have his well-being (even momentarily) enhanced. Sarah Broadie interprets the relevant passages in something like this manner,9 and once one does so, stationary bike stand there is an obvious way to treat Aristotle as an elevationist monist in ethics. For if Aristotle is saying that pleasure and success count as elements in our well-being only if and when they can be obtained consistently with being virtuous, then his conception of well-being or the good life will at every point have to refer to virtue. The good or best life will then,
pet supplies roughly, be a life full of virtuous activity and of pleasures and successes that are consistent with virtue—and (largely) lacking in pains and failures that virtue might require.
funny t shirts And on such a picture there are no purely natural personal goods or evils:

The present essay has been a long time in the writing. The question of how virtue and well-being, or self-interest, connect has interested me since at least the early 1980s; but in the course of developing my thoughts on that issue,I began to see that the differing positions various schools or philosophers take in this area illustrate a wider sort of difference of opinion and approach. When the utilitarian or Epicurean understands or explains hair removal morality/virtue in terms of considerations of human (or sentient) well-being, this constitutes a form of reduction(ism), because morality/virtue is typically or naturally regarded as something higher than the sheer enjoyment of well-being. But in that case, we need a name for the opposite sort of move that the Stoics make when they explain human well-being or happiness in terms of the higher, or more exalted, notion of (having) virtue, and as far as I was able to tell, historians seo firms of ethics or philosophy more generally hadn’t come up with such a name. The name I came up with , “elevation(ism)” is certainly not very elegant; but it is accurately descriptive of the way Stoicism opposes, weight loss pills moves in the opposite direction from, Epicureanism and utilitarianism. If the latter understand the putatively higher in terms of what is putatively lower, then Stoicism understands the putatively lower in terms of the higher. But once one makes this distinction and has this vocabulary, it becomes possible to see that the opposition between elevationism and reductionism is illustrated in a number of areas outside of ethics. The two terms or notions therefore offer pokies us a very general method or prism for viewing large swaths of the history of philosophy, and in what follows I shall be taking up all these themes and relating them to particular issues and controversies both inside and outside the fi eld of
uggs ethics.

Elevation versus Reduction

One of the main strengths or attractions total gym xls of act-utilitarianism is that it allows for a reduction of all our ethical ideals and standards to the ethical notion of well-being or welfare. Actions count as right, roughly speaking, to the extent they bring about (the greatest possible) well-being; and utilitarianism also reduces other moral notions to the notion of well-being suitably supplemented 12 essays on the history of ethics by appropriate causal and other concepts. An act counts as blameworthy, for example, if the act of blaming or negatively reinforcing it will have the best or good enough consequences for human or sentient well-being, and a trait counts as a (moral) virtue if it generally leads to well-being rather than to its opposite. Similarly, states of affairs count as intrinsically (and morally) good if they contain more of well-being than of its opposite. Utilitarianism also tends to treat (practical) rationality (or reasonableness) as reductively understandable in terms of well-being. But different utilitarians effect this reduction in different ways. For example, email lists when he isn’t worrying about what he takes to be an unresolvable confl ict between ethical egoism and utilitarianism, Sidgwick regards rationality (and reasonableness and, of course, rightness too) as understandable in terms of what makes the greatest contribution to overall human/sentient well-being.1 But in recent years, Peter Railton, while defending an act-utilitarian view of right action, has accepted a conception of rational choice and action that differs from Sidgwick’s.2 According to Railton, individual sole f80 rationality is understood as a form of instrumental rationality, as the agent’s effi cient pursuit (roughly) of his own ends or, perhaps, of his own interests or his own good. But whether one ties rationality to the general welfare or to the agent’s, the effect is reductive in the same way that utilitarian accounts of rightness, blameworthiness, and virtue are reductive. So I think it is safe to say that utilitarianism reduces all prominent ethical notions to concepts of well-being or personal good.

But then the fundamental ethical category of well-being is treated by the utilitarian as further pokies reducible to empirical or nonethical notions like diamond engagement rings preference satisfaction or pleasure/pain. So utilitarianism leather furniture not only reduces the major concepts of ethics to a single ethical notion, but then reduces the whole realm of ethical value and evaluation to naturalistic and value-free facts. This unifying “”>SEO Services reduction occurs at a considerable price, since utilitarianism notoriously clashes with commonsense judgments about what is morally right or blameworthy electric cigarette (or rational). However, at this point, I think we need to become a bit clearer about the double reduction that I have just attributed to utilitarianism and about the notion of reduction in general. In philosophical parlance, one kind of reduction occurs or is attempted when one seeks to understand the
cheap wedding dresses macro in terms of the micro (the whole in terms of its elements or parts), as, for example, when we
penny stocks to watch” identify salt trade show booths with sodium chloride. But, as I indicated above, another form of reduction takes place when an attempt is made to understand what is “higher” in terms of what 1. In The Methods of Ethics (7th edition,London: Macmillan, 1907), Sidgwick a href=”http://www.africanmangolabs.co.uk/”>African Mango claims  that “rational,” “right,” and “reasonable” all express a single property or concept, and for someone who is otherwise so attentive to usage and examples, this seems a surprising ground-floor mistake. After all, there are many things we consider irrational or foolish without photocopier hire
regarding them as immoral, or involving wrongdoing: for example, trying to jump over a barrier that is simply too high for one (and hurting oneself in the process). 2. See Peter Railton, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review 95: 163–207, 1986. the opposite of reductionism 13 is “lower.”3 Thus when the utilitarian identifi es well-being or doing well in life with pleasure or desire satisfaction, this is plausibly regarded as a reduction because the realm of value seems in some way higher than the merely empirical or natural (is that because it involves standards for judging what actually occurs or might occur in human life or ideals to aspire to in our lives?). For the same reason, it makes sense to say, for example, that Freud and Adler reduced all putatively higher activities and aspirations, respectively, to mere sexual strivings and desire for power. However, as I have already mentioned, when utilitarianism seeks to understand all rationality, virtue, and morality in terms of facts about well-being, that also counts as a reduction, because it is natural or commonsensical to think of the ethical category of well-being as in some sense lower than the categories utilitarianism seeks to understand in terms of it.

To that extent, the unification utilitarianism seeks and achieves within the realm of the ethical is reductive quite apart from the further attempt to reduce well-being (and thus all other ethical concepts as well) to naturalistic terms, but I think we need to say a bit more about why well-being (or personal good) is regarded as lower than virtue, morality, and rationality. The fi rst point, I think, to be made in this connection is that what counts as an element in our well-being or as good for us may in no way be admirable. For example, in the Eudemian Ethics (1248b 17–27), Aristotle makes the commonsense point that unlike the virtues treadclimber reviews
, (sheer) health is good but not praiseworthy. Now health can perhaps be thought of as praiseworthy or admirable when it is regarded as the result of prudent exercise and self-controlled dieting, as an achievement. But a sheer state of good health, or a healthy constitution that owes nothing to one’s efforts (or any one else’s), is presumably not praiseworthy, and this would appear to be what Aristotle had in mind. A similar point can be made about pleasure and common enjoyment.

These involve something good happening to us, but because they don’t seem to require any virtue, rationality, or morality on our part, there seems to be nothing admirable or praiseworthy about the capacity for and occasions of (appetitive) pleasure and enjoyment. But the distinction between what is merely enjoyable, pleasurable, and good (for us) and what is admirable or praiseworthy seems to involve a distinction between lower and higher ethical values—what else can the word “merely” be doing in this sentence? Claims about rationality, morality, and what is admirable in other spheres express ideals, and in becoming generous or prudent or trained in physics or philosophy, we would normally be thought to be realizing certain actual or possible ideals of character or human aspiration, in a way that enjoyment, feeling secure, and a healthy constitution do not require. Of course,it is also possible to be immoral, irrational, and vice-ridden, but even these 3. One can also try to Proactol reduce the number of entities or concepts one refers to or makes use of in a theory, but this notion of reduction cuts across the distinctions I shall be making in the main text, and I shall ignore it in what follows. 14 essays on the history of ethics negative attributes, like their positive counterparts, seem to involve and make deference to more highly evolved capacities than those required for sheer wellbeing and its opposite. (Again, think of why the term “sheer” seems appropriate in this context.) So in understanding rationality, virtue, moral goodness, and their opposites as (mere) means to well-being and its opposite, utilitarianism is reducing (what is intuitively and antecedently taken to be) the ethically higher to (what is intuitively and antecedently taken to be) the ethically lower.

And to that extent, utilitarianism defl ates ethics internally by telling us that there is nothing to the apparent distinction between higher and lower ethical values, telling us that the virtue, rationality, etc., that we tend to think of as higher than mere or sheer well-being or welfare is really at the same level as (what we antecedently regard as) the lower.4 Note, however, that such reduction(ism) isn’t the inevitable effect of any attempt to unify the concepts of ethics, a price we have to and should be willing to pay if we value theoretical systematization and unifi cation highly and are willing to pay the price of rejecting many Rolex replica watches of our ethical intuitions.5 There is another mode of intra-ethical unifi cation that involves just the opposite of reductionism. Above, I called this elevationism,6 but in order to understand  how such a different mode of unifi cation is possible and may even be ethically plausible, we would do well to begin by considering the difference between Stoicism and Epicureanism. 4. In speaking just a moment ago of more highly evolved capacities, I wasn’t necessarily referring to or making use of the theory of evolution, something that would have been unavailable to the ancients and to many modern thinkers. But the capacity for thought or virtue does, I think intuitively, seem like a higher capacity than the capacity for enjoyment and (sheer) well-being. It didn’t take the theory of evolution to make these things seem higher on the scale of values or ideals.

The very fact that we naturally speak of ideals of virtue/rationality but not of well-being already indicates the thought of something higher, because although we can speak of low aspirations, there is something oxymoronic about the idea of low ideals. The naturalness of the idea of height here may be further  videnced by the fact that it is/was natural to think of God or the gods as physically higher than we humans: as in heaven or onMountOlympus(Hades would then be an exceptional place for a god or gods to be). And, of course, the gods or God were also (before the theory of evolution) conceived as higher beings than we are, and higher in something like the way that we, in turn, are higher than nonrational animals. We can certainly then ask whether it is physical or ontological height that comes/came conceptually or historically fi rst. The idea, furthermore, that the realm of value as a whole is higher than that of sheer or mere (empirical) factuality also seems to have a place custom shirts in our minds (and not just, e.g., in Plato’s mind). We can talk of mere fact in a way that we aren’t inclined to talk of “mere value(s)”—unless we are strongly, perhaps brutally, reductionistic. In the wake of what I have just been saying, I think more historical work needs to be done on the question of how we come by our (intuitive) notions of higher and lower. But, in any event, the use I have made of these notions here seems to me to have a ring of intuitiveness, and I hope the reader agrees. (I am indebted on these issues to discussion with Richard Kraut.) 5.

I am not going to try to discuss here whether such quasi-scientifi c attitudes toward the doing of ethics are entirely appropriate given the practical aims of morality and the richness and complexity of our ordinary understanding of moral phenomena. 6. I haven’t been able to fi nd any more idiomatic, natural, or attractive term for conveying the opposite of both higher/lower and macro/micro reduction. the opposite of reductionism 15 Epicureanism is reductive in the manner of utilitarianism, though on an (arguably) egoistic, rather than universalistic, basis. What is antecedently regarded as higher is understood in terms of what is antecedently thought of as lower via its claim that practical rationality and (the) virtue(s) generally are nothing more than steriods effective means to—and thus exist at the same level as—a person’s well-being. (Like utilitarianism, Epicureanism then effects a second reduction by treating well-being or human good as a matter simply of pleasure, or, more accurately, freedom from pain.)But if Epicureanism, like utilitarianism, assimilates the admirable and putatively higher to the desirable and putatively lower, Stoicism works in just the opposite direction, understanding or explaining the putatively lower values of well-being or personal good in terms of the supposedly higher ones of rationality and virtue.

And I have suggested that we introduce the term “elevation” for this second form of assimilation. (As I also mentioned, however, historians of philosophy haven’t previously come up with any term for this phenomenon; and this is odd and surprising because, as we shall be seeing in a moment, many kinds of theories both inside and outside ethics assimilate levels of entities/concepts/phenomena in the manner of Stoicism.) So we can say that Stoicism elevates human well-being to the level of human virtue/morality/rationality. For the Stoics, human well-being (or happiness) consists in being virtuous. Virtue or the virtues taken together are the sum and substance of human well-being: nothing beyond (the attainment of) rational virtue is required for us to be well-off or have good lives, and nothing that fails to improve us in virtue/rationality can be, therefore, of any real benefi t. A virtuous individual bereft of wealth, friends, bodily/appetitive pleasures, and good health—indeed even on the rack and in great permanent pain—can be as well-off as it is possible for a human being to be, and so on a Stoic account human well-being is regarded very differently from the way it ordinarily is.

For common sense, whether or not virtue, or various virtues, are part of a good life, certain enjoyments and activities that seem neither admirable nor the means to anything admirable are defi nitely seen as constituents of living well, of a good life, of personal good, or well-being. But Stoicism denies the intrinsic personal goodness of so-called worldly and appetitive goods, and it doubts even the universal instrumental goodness of such things because it questions whether they usually lead to the virtuousness of those who enjoy them. And so the following contrasts can be drawn between the Stoic and Epicurean treatments of the relation between personal good/well-being and the virtues. The Epicurean defl ates our ideas about virtue and admirability by regarding these things as simply a matter of what is conducive or not conducive to the well-being (or happiness) of individuals. What is normally seen as higher than mere personal well-being (as being, e.g., admirable in a way well-being or enjoyment isn’t and/or as depending on evolutionarily higher capacities than well-being depends on) turns out, on the Epicurean account, to be of a piece 16 essays on the history of ethics with, at the same level as, facts solely about human well-being and its causes or effects.

But rather than reduce virtue/admirability to personal well-being (or happiness), the Stoic infl ates or elevates our ideas about personal good (or well-being or happiness) by thinking of the latter solely in terms of (what constitutes) human virtue or admirability.7 What is normally seen as lower than (ideas of ) virtue turns out, on the Stoic account, to be of a piece with facts about virtue. And if, for the Epicurean, virtue is nothing more than a factor in personal good or happiness, then, for the Stoic, happiness and well-being are nothing less than virtue or virtuous living; and these contrasts should at this point make it understandable that Stoicism should be deemed a form of elevationism if Epicureanism is regarded as a form of  eductionism.

Having set elevationism and reductionism at odds, I think it is now important to note what they have in common. It is well known, for example, that reductions needn’t preserve meaning—“salt is sodium chloride” is not an analytic or a priori truth. Similarly, neither utilitarian nor Epicurean reductionism need claim an analytic status for itself, and the same holds true for Stoic elevationism. These are theories, and they can be true in the way theories are true rather than defi nitionally or by virtue of some form of ethical mathematics. In addition, the idea of reducing one kind of entity or property to another is often clarifi ed by invoking the notion of certain distinctions being reducible to certain others. For example, we naturally think of the mental as in some sense higher (evolutionarily and perhaps spiritually) than the purely (or merely) physical, and if the mental then turns out to be reducible to the physical, then every valid mental distinction can be reduced to or identifi ed with some distinction made in physical terms.

According to such reductionism, then, where no physical distinction/difference obtains, no distinction/difference will (be able to) occur at the mental level either. But none of this entails that every physical distinction will be accompanied by some mentalistic one. As long as the mental is a function of the physical, the reducing relation can obtain even if no function from the mental to the physical can be found, and so, more briefly, we can characterize typical reductions of the mental to the physical as claiming that physical distinctions are necessary but not suffi cient for the existence of mental distinctions. By the same token, when Epicureanism (or utilitarianism) reduces virtue to well-being, it treats all distinctions of virtue as accompanied by distinctions in (causal, relational, and other) facts about individual well-being or happiness. But it needn’t claim that every distinction in facts about the production 7.

The word “inflation” actually won’t do as a general term for the opposite of the deflation or reduction advocated by Epicureanism, because it strongly suggests the falsity of any theory or view to which it applies. We shall be seeing that at least one form of ethical elevationism (though not Stoicism!) is far from implausible in contemporary terms. The term “sublimation” won’t do for other reasons. So I think we may be stuck with “elevation” for the broad range of phenomena we shall be talking about here. the opposite of reductionism 17 of well-being (distinctions, e.g., about who certain character traits benefit or about when those benefi ts occur) will be accompanied by or give rise to a distinctionhaving to do with virtue. Elevation can be understood in essentially similar terms. When the Stoic elevates the personally good (up) to the virtuous or admirable, he or she is committed to saying that every distinction with regard to the former can be thoroughly understood or accounted for in terms of distinctions relating to the latter, just as, when the Epicurean reduces the virtues or virtue (down) to matters of well-being, he or she is committed to saying that every distinction with regard to the former can be thoroughly understood or accounted for in terms of distinctions involving the latter.

The only difference between the two processes or results lies in the respective heights of “the former” and “the latter” in the two cases. In elevations, distinctions with regard to the presumptively lower are always correlated with distinctions that involve the presumptively higher, but the reverse need not be true. In reductions, distinctions regarding the presumptively higher are always accompanied by distinctions relating to the presumptively lower, though, again, the reverse need not be true. So in some sense, reduction and elevation are the same thing operating in opposite (vertical) directions. Moreover, the distinction between reduction and elevation also applies well beyond the confi nes of ethics. For example, just as in ethics we can be dualistic about virtue and well-being (I shall have more to say about this possibility shortly) or else identify these concepts either reductively or elevatively, one of our main choices in metaphysics is between mind–body dualism and monism of an either reductive (materialist or physicalist) or elevative (idealist or phenomenalist) character. Indeed, quite a number of disagreements outside of ethics allow of historiographic clarifi cation through these categories.

We think of concepts, for example, as higher (as depending on more highly evolved capacities) than percepts or sensations, yet British empiricism basically reduces all concepts to percepts, whereas Continental Rationalism treats sensation/perception as a matter of obscure conception and thus counts as a form of elevationism. Kant’s insistence on the distinction between percepts and concepts would then represent the “dualistic” option in this area of philosophical thought. Similarly, and thinking now in terms of wholes and parts (rather than in terms of the higher and the lower), the choice among reduction, elevation, and dualism can also be seen to apply in the fi eld of social philosophy. Social atomism is the reductionistic option regarding the relation between individuals and the societies of which they are members, whereas an organicism that treats the individual as a mere aspect or refl ection of society constitutes a form of elevationism, and the view that the social and individual levels need to be differentiated represents dualism in this area. But however historiographically signifi cant these extra-moral applications of our distinction may be, we have more than enough to occupy us in considering its relevance, and, in particular, the relevance of elevationism, to ethics