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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Kant writes: If … the only aim of Nature regarding some creature possessed of reason and a will were its preservation, its well-being, in a word its happiness, then she would have come to a very bad arrangement in choosing its reason as executor of that aim. For all actions that it had to execute in this her intention, and the whole regulation of its behaviour would have been able to be prescribed to it much more precisely by instinct, and that aim thereby much more certainly maintained, than ever could happen through reason …
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35 The research for this paper was supported by a British Academy Fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship. I wish to thank both organizations for their help. I owe a particular intellectual debt to Dr Florian von Schilcher, of the Institut für Zoologie in Munich, for many hours of discussion on the topics of this paper. I have also benefited from comments by Vinit Haksar, Peter Jones, Mary Midgley and members of the philosophy societies at the University of Edinburgh and University College, London.
