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practical Etymology, origin and meaning of practical by etymonline This apparent truism has been questioned by some philosophers, who point out that many of our basic aims in life are rather inchoate; people want, for instance, to be successful in their careers, and loyal to their friends, without being clear about what exactly these ends require of them. To the extent one’s ends are indeterminate in this way, they will not provide effective starting points for instrumental, maximizing, or even satisficing reflection. We need to specify such ends more precisely before we can begin to think about which means they require us to pursue, or to generate from them a rank-ordering of possible outcomes. Here is a possible task for practical reason that does not fit neatly into the categories of instrumental or maximizing reflection, however broadly construed . First, they are intuitively understood to represent agent-relative reasons for action . Thus, if I have promised that I will take yo