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Every action or choice depends on the capacity to produce change. The difference produced, or the absence of difference when difference could have been produced, provides the leverage needed for developing justifications and criticism. By comparing the outcomes that could be produced by action, reasons may be found for preferring one to the other. Given the assumptions on which the present analysis depends, those reasons will refer to the conditions of life of those affected by the action. If no reason can be found for preferring one outcome to the others, the choice is a matter of indifference given the accepted ethic.

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If reasons can be found for differing with the choice made on the basis of the accepted ethic, those reasons provide a focal point for argument, clarification, and potential improvement. Of course, not every action or choice is reasoned. What identifies a reasoned choice or action is the element of deliberate weighing or comparing of outcomes, balancing the costs and benefits to humans of selecting each of the alternatives. When a choice is reasoned, some justification for the choice can always be produced; that justification fulfills the necessary preconditions for argument and improvement.

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The concept of reasoned choice accepted here is weak and easily satisfied. Even the most perfunctory weighing of outcomes, and the most trivial of reasons for preference, satisfies the requirements. The quality of the reasoning can vary widely. Alternatives may be ignored or suppressed; calculations may be mistaken; the theoretical apparatus may be faulty; the level of uncertainty involved may be overlooked; and so on. But the process of reasoning, of offering a justification for preference, opens the way to criticism and argument, and that is all that can reasonably be required at present.

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The individual who offers no justification for choice is immune to systematic criticism but also without any capacity to convince others on intellectual grounds. Once reasons are proposed, their adequacy can be questioned, omissions can be identified, the implications of particular weightings explored, additions can be proposed, and so on. In the process, the justification can be strengthened, modified, or rejected in favor of a different decision. Whether in science or ethics, the train of processes required for improvement is set in motion when reasons are offered to support an assumption.

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For the rest, the development of normative knowledge follows the pattern established with respect to empirical inquiries. The instruments of choice are created as a solution to a particular case; that solution can be generalized, applied to the class of cases exemplified in the particular. The instruments used need only compare the content of the options; it is not necessary to develop an external measure that can be applied to each outcome independently and uniquely--a much harder task. Over time, a system of priorities can be created that summarizes the solutions that have been made to particular problems in the past, and the modifications introduced as a result of further experience.

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The critic's task, like the task of the reasoned chooser, is to examine choices systematically, looking for inconsistencies, omissions, and ambiguities, to suggest new aspects of the human situation that ought to be taken into account when choices are made, or to suggest modifications in existing priorities based on an assessment of their implications or consequences in future actions. In each case, the reasons offered to support action or criticism will link the action to the analytic requirements for making reasoned choices, to the substantive body of past human experience, or to both. Criticism is always both methodological and substantive, or it is incomplete.

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… That structure, properly termed the individual's or society's ethic, can be examined for internal consistency and for implications, and thus generalized and improved still further. In a sense, society's mores reflect such generalized solutions to choice problems encountered earlier in society's history. The difficulty with mores is the tendency to ossification that goes with their sheltered or privileged status; criticism of the basic mores is usually a difficult task in any society. As in theorizing, the procedures used to create solutions to normative problems cannot be formalized, but strategies of proven value can be developed for testing and improving the solution once it has been produced and defended

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The first step in reasoned choice is to withhold judgment until the implications of the various options have been examined. If Smith refuses another position out of hand, or "refuses to consider" the offer, the implications of such refusal are profound and extensive. In effect, refusing to consider any alternative means there is no conceivable option that is preferable to the present situation and the anticipated future. That is a truly staggering assumption, quite different from the position of an individual who hears out the details of an alternative position and then decides, after some deliberation, that change is undesirable.

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A reasoned choice is more than a direct affective reaction, although a reasoned choice may be directed by affective reaction if no reason is found to modify that reaction on intellectual grounds. Thus a child's decision to reject "healthy" food on affective grounds (it tastes bad) may be overridden, and with justification, although the decision is complex if the effect is to create a psychic state within the child that is even less desirable than a relatively "unhealthy" diet. In realworld affairs, affective reaction alone is rarely an adequate basis for choice. Indeed, affective reaction is not in itself a judgment or preference; the reaction is felt directly by the individual and reported as a fact.

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Unfortunately, the content of individual affect varies greatly with culture and is subject to conditioning or direction from external sources. In most cases, affective reaction must be combined with intellectual reasoning to produce the need ed justification for preference; too many things that have an important effect on life are not accessible to affect. The individual can be conditioned to react affectively to "injustices" in the operation of government, for example, but the justification for such conditioning is intellectual, based on long run considerations relating to the effect of institutional performance on the lives of affected populations.