Of the various conceptual formats that are designed to help us organize our thoughts concerning what we do, the distinction between means and ends is among the most widely employed. This is only to be expected. After all, the distinction is a very elementary one, and easy to grasp. Moreover, a schematism grounded in any plausible version of the distinction is bound to be exceptionally well-suited to its task. For the notion of an arrangement of ends and means comprehends both the purposefulness and the rationality that are essential features of our active nature; and it also facilitates considering the relationship by which they are connected. That is, it focuses quite naturally on the ways in which our goals are linked to the processes of reasoning by which we attempt to determine how to achieve them.

A familiar approach to the differentiation of means and ends, and to conceptualizing the relationship between them, invokes two sharply distinct types of consideration. Considerations of the first type have to do with the usefulness of the proposed object. They pertain to the instrumental value that it derives from being a means to some desirable end external to itself. This external end may be desirable, of course, only as a means to some still further end. In that case, it is not a final end; it is intermediate or subordinate, and its value too is wholly instrumental.