In the latest Philosophical Investigations, Olli Lagerspetz reviews James Sterba’s The Triumph of Practice over Theory in Ethics. Lagerspetz summarizes the book’s thoughtful premise: There is, I think, some reason for suspicion of the dexterity with which ethical theorists often find rational reasons for conclusions that we would favour anyway on intuitive grounds. The official idea is that theoretical thinking helps us make ethically correct decisions by way of deductive reasoning from a general theory of morality. However, in practice, it seems that the process rather goes in the opposite direction. Certain answers are implicitly treated as foregone conclusions, and philosophers, on the contrary, vindicate their own theories by showing that the expected answers can be derived from them.