¹ London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992.

² I hope my information is no less reliable for being derived from J. Bronowski's television series of the 1970s, The Ascent of Man..

³ Pensees. ×1.

⁴ See I and Thou (1923), tr. Smith, Ronald Gregor (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1966).Google Scholar

⁵ Gellner, Ernest, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (London: Collins and Harvill, 1988).Google Scholar

⁶ A first-generation disciple of Freud's, Hanns Sachs, claimed that despite their pre-eminence in science, mathematics and philosophy the Greeks were too inward-looking or ‘narcissistic’ to interest themselves in technology. I doubt, however, whether we need a fancier explanation than Gellner's.

⁷ The true ends of liberty, he tells us, are truth, autonomy, self-realization and the rest, but since none is attainable without it, liberty itself becomes almost an end (if indeed it is not one already).

⁸ Though perhaps only when seen in different contexts. Here and now, it may be, in any single perspective, a thing is either a means or an end, but never both at once. We may be considering a duck/rabbit phenomenon.

⁹ I have tried implicitly to answer it in ‘Must new worlds also be good?’, Inquiry. Vol. 38 (June 1995; (forthcoming at the moment of writing). The answer, such as it is, is largely in the negative, at least in the case of ends in themselves which are no more than subjectively perceived as such. (For example, torture, for a sadist, might very well be considered an end in itself. But it could hardly be so for his victim, unless by a happy coincidence his victim happened to be a masochist.)

¹⁰ I would like to say how well Bartok's Mikrokosmo. fits this particular bill, but—alas!—most children find it as dry as scales, just as they preferred Barbie dolls, fluorescent plastic dumper trucks and (horror of horrors) My Little Pony to those Arts-and-Craftsy varnished wooden efforts (by Gait Toys, Paul and Marjorie Abbatt and the like) with which their enlightened parents once endeavoured to stimulate their imaginations. (A matchless chronicler of these and similar middle-class agonies is the Guardia. cartoonist Posy Simmonds, as was another cartoonist, the late Mark Boxer, with his ‘Life and Times in NW3’ in the now defunct Listener..

¹¹ Ends in themselves, it should be said, and perhaps paradoxically, are generally perceived as being those goods, activities or relationships in which human beings achieve maximum all-round fulfilment. (See also note 9 above.) If a thing is an end in itself, it is supposed that it must belong, not to a hierarchy, but rather to a spectrum, of ends. Every unqualified end in itself stands at the apex of a hierarchy of intermediate ends, which in relation to itself are means.

¹² A distinction should be made between the use of chemicals (a) to restore the normal balance of mind in psychiatric patients and (b) to upset the normal balance (as formerly in the psychiatric ‘treatment’ of Soviet dissidents). The same distinction holds between genetic engineering used to relieve hereditary disease in individual cases, and the same employed wholesale, say to produce a race of obedient Huxleyan ‘epsilons’.

¹³ A complex, scrupulous and rather pessimistic attempt to devise a naturalistic ethic for the technological age in the light of its increasing Huxleyan possibilities and ecological threats is Jonas, Hans, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar

¹⁴ In The Wild Duc. Ibsen depicts the kind of fanatical idealist (Gregers Werle) who believes that they are, and the disastrous consequences for others of acting upon this belief.

¹⁵ Oakeshott, 's On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar offers a reading of morality in such ‘adverbial’ terms (see pp. 60–81. esp. p 66). There is conceivably an affinity with Nozick's conception of morality as a set of ‘side-constraints’ (see main text, below).