  However, there is a difficulty. It is one thing to make do with intuitive ways of solving problems that are the best available within limits of time and information, while leaving them subject to correction at leisure or in retrospect; it is another to accept a theory that approves one’s actually assenting to certain principles whose contents it cannot endorse. And yet a rule that is a mere “rule of thumb” is a paper shield against temptation. All is well if the theory can be self-effacing, so that the agent discards it as and when he adopts an intuitive viewpoint; but, in Hare’s scenario, in which the agent has internalized both critical and intuitive ways of thinking, how is he to keep out of mind, as he tests his practical commitment to some intuitive principle, that it is simply not of a kind (being absolute, and yet evidently equivalent to no principle of utility) to be critically endorsable?