 Ethical standards, for which practical reason’s first principles provide the foundations or sources, concern actions as choosable and self-determining. They are thus to be distinguished clearly, as Aristotle already emphasized, from standards which are practical, rational, and normative in a different way, namely the technical or technological standards internal to every art, craft, or other system for mastering matter. Aquinas locates the significant and irreducible difference between ethics and all these forms of “art” in three features: (i) Moral thought, even when most unselfishly concerned with helping others through the good effects of physical effort and causality, is fundamentally concerned with the problem of bringing order into one’s own will, action, and character, rather than the problem of how to bring order into the world beyond one’s will. (ii) Correspondingly, the effects of morally significant free choices (good or evil) are in the first instance intransitive (i.e., effects on the will and character of the acting person). Only secondarily are they transitive effects on the world, even when that person’s intentions are focused, as they normally should be, on the benefits of those external effects. (iii) Whereas every art and technique has a more or less limited objective (end) which can be accomplished by skillful deployment of the art, moral thought has in view an unlimited and common (shared) horizon or point, that of “human life as a whole [finis communis totius humanae vitae]” (ST I-II q. 21 a. 2 ad 2), for each of one’s morally significant choices (for good or evil) is a choice to devote a part of one’s single life to a purpose which could have been any of the whole open-ended range of purposes open to human pursuit for the sake of benefiting all or any human being(s).