 What such an argument overlooks, however, is precisely the factor of autonomous moral reflection that the bees’ imagined rationality would bring with it (see sections 2.4–2.5, and McDowell 1995). True, we might expect relatively unreflective and tradition-bound bees to speak of “sacred duties” to kill brothers or fertile daughters, in a way that lines up with the relevant genetic relations that figured into the evolution of their given moral senses. But we could equally expect more reflective bees (the buzzing philosophers among them) to raise the question whether they really had good reason to do everything that their evolution has disposed them to do in the service of maximizing their genetic propagation. These more philosophical bees might consider the possibility that some potential goods of bee life, in the context of ongoing innovations in rational bee culture, might be available to them if they resisted certain impulses and acted differently; and this might lead to the development of at least partly autonomous moral norms, and hence moral senses that are a complex mixture of inherited dispositions and rational judgment.