This chapter considers whether practical reason is substantive or only instrumental. It examines egoism, in a normative form, as well as hedonism, for which pleasure and pain are the fundamental sources of practical reasons. The chapter also considers what metaphysical commitments a theory of practical rationality must make if it embraces some apparently irreducible normative notion, such as that of intrinsic value.
Keywords: instrumentalism, egoism, hedonism, metaphysics, theory of rationality, desire