Ethical reason is our simultaneously active and receptive contribution to the bounty of nature. We are neither masters nor slaves or automatons, but co-stewards of this world.
The open-ended inclusiveness characteristic of ethical reason resembles the superabundance of form in nature, the same resemblance I’d like to think Plotinus had in mind when he said we should act in ways that express a “likeness to God”, which I take in the spirit of Leibnizian affirmative “wise charity”. (See also Fragility of the Good; Two Kinds of Character; Magnanimity; Second Nature; Naturalness, Mindedness; Interpretation.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 