 Constitutive standards are supposed to be partly descriptive of the very activity that they have to assess (Korsgaard 2008: 9). Critics object that it is unclear whether and how they can be violated (Cohen 1996: 177; Lavin 2004; Kolodny 2005). For an agent to be correctly said to have norms, she must be able to break those norms. Suppose that there is a norm that prevents deception. To say that a rational agent is guided by such a norm is to say that she can violate it. But if the norm is constitutive of reasoning, how can she break the norm by reasoning? If constitutive norms cannot be violated, constitutivism implies that immoralism and irrationality are impossible. Korsgaard replies that to count as acting at all, we must at least be trying to follow the principles of practical reason, but she allows that we may fail to do so adequately or fully (Korsgaard 2009: 45–49, 159–176. For instance, while adopting the moral end of benevolence, we may lack grace and understanding, so as to provoke resentment, rather than elicit gratitude. Herman proposes that in defective instances of acting, the constitutive norms are not misapplied but misrepresented (Herman 2007: 171–172, 245–246). For instance, by making a poor judgment about what to do in self-defense, one mischaracterizes and misunderstands what self-defense is and what it requires.