Continuing with Robert Brandom's Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, the ethical strategy which he adopts in the second half of the book builds on the classical notion of the good life as in what is most conducive to human flourishing, what is good for human beings as human beings. Brandom adopts this conception of ethical valuing and grounds it in his more basic claim that epistemic capacity stands on normative activity, i.e., that knowing that is a species of knowing how. Taking this from the Kantian conception of knowledge as a function of human capacities, of the conceptual structures we have, and the latter as instances of how we relate to statements (recognizing their inferential dimension in terms of what they authorize and obligate us as language speakers to do), he goes on to suggest that this normativity runs all the way down. He makes the further distinction between sentience and sapience, arguing that sapience, which is what we have, rests on but qualitatively changes the underlying sentience.

Sentience, he suggests, is the state of having sensations, sensory information, feelings -- of being aware. Sapience is the state of having the capacity to conceptualize and so think about the things we experience as sentient creatures. At least in the case of creatures like ourselves, he argues, sapience, which he describes as fundamentally normative (a matter of learning and following rule-sets) rests on the sentience we have but radically alters its nature. . . .