  Many philosophers take this holistic approach to be the most promising way of thinking about the tasks of practical reason. It defines an important and difficult problem for practical reason to address, without departing from the metaphysically modest assumption that there is no court of appeal for the rational criticism of an agent’s ends that is independent of those ends themselves. The holistic approach finds its most sophisticated and influential expression in the maximizing conception of practical rationality. According to the maximizing conception, the fundamental task of practical reason is to determine which course of action would optimally advance the agent’s complete set of ends. Thus it is widely accepted that the rational action for a given agent to take is the one whose subjective expected utility—reflecting both the utility of possible outcomes, from the agent’s point of view, and the agent’s beliefs about the probability of those outcomes—is the highest. 