  Given such examples, a critic may urge that it’s hard to see how we are here concerned here with evaluation as opposed simply to a kind of classification. But Hursthouse demurs. A good human being is a human being endowed with characteristics that conduce in characteristically human ways to the four ends of survival, reproduction, characteristic enjoyment and freedom from pain, and the good functioning of the group. And, at the level of character, those characteristics are just the virtues. But humans are special, as a highly salient characteristic feature of human beings is rationality. This makes the evaluation of human conduct very different from that of cheetahs or polar bears. Being rational, we can elect to assign some feature of our characteristic behavior no normative weight at all, or even negative weight. There nonetheless remains a distinctive and characteristically human way of carrying on: the rational way, which we characteristically regard as good and take ourselves to have reason to pursue (Hursthouse, esp. 221–222).