  Humean models of practical reason rest on a basically consequentialist account of the relation of action to value. According to this account, value inheres ultimately in states of affairs, insofar as it is these that are the objects of subjective preference rankings. Actions are then judged rational to the extent they bring about states of affairs that are valuable in this way. It is a matter of controversy, however, whether this is the most plausible way of thinking about the rationality of action. Defenders of satisficing models, for example, think that a given action can be rational even when it is acknowledged by the agent that an alternative action would bring about a more valuable state of affairs. Alternatively, it might be maintained that we can judge an action rational without being able to arrive at any clear independent ranking of the state of affairs produced by it, as better or worse than the alternatives. Perhaps our judgments of the value of actions are ultimately parasitic on our convictions about the what there is reason to do or to admire; in that case, we will not be able to derive conclusions about reasons from antecedent premises in the theory of value (Scanlon 1998, chap. 2). Related questions have been raised about the basic consequentialist assumption that value attaches in the first instance to states of affairs. Thus it may seem to distort our understanding of friendship, for instance, to maintain that what friends value fundamentally are states of affairs (involving, say, joint activities with the friend); what people value as friends are rather concrete particulars or relations, such as the persons with whom they are befriended or their relationships with those persons. Building on this idea in the theory of value, it has been proposed that actions are rational insofar as they succeed in expressing the attitudes that it is rational to adopt toward the true bearers of intrinsic value: people, animals, and things (Anderson 1993).