1 Choosing Rationally and Choosing Correctly * Ralph Wedgwood 1 Two views of practical reason Suppose that you are faced with several different options (that is, several ways in which you might act in a given situation). Which option should you choose? Let us take an example that Bernard Williams (1981: 102) made famous. Suppose that you want a gin and tonic, and you believe that the stuff in front of you is gin. In fact, however, the stuff is not gin but petrol. So if you drink the stuff (even mixed with tonic), it will be decidedly unpleasant, to say the least. Should you choose to drink the stuff or not? It seems to me that there are at least two ways of interpreting this question. If we interpret the question in one way, “what you should choose” depends on what the available options are really like (not just on what you believe about what these options are like). For example, it may depend on the actual causal consequences of those options, or on other external facts that are quite independent of your state of mind. In this case, the option of drinking the stuff involves drinking petrol, and so giving yourself a decidedly unpleasant experience, while many of the other available options have no comparable drawbacks. So, when the question is interpreted in this way, you “shouldn’t choose” to drink the stuff. We could call this an “external” or “objective” ‘should’. I shall express this “external” ‘should’ by saying that in this case, choosing to mix the stuff with tonic and drink it is an incorrect choice for you to make. As we might say, in choosing to mix the stuff with tonic and drink it, you have got things wrong; your choice was a