The "complete community" mentioned here is the political community, with its laws, but the proposition implicitly refers also to the community of all rational creatures, to whose common good morality (the moral law) directs us.
"I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring," Wollstonecraft wrote in "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters," in 1787, ten years before giving birth to the author of "Frankenstein".
Save in cases of lying or self-deception, one does not believe p and simultaneously assert that is not the case that p. For a rational creature does not believe something that he knows to be false.
In other words, genes may be, in part, an explanation for some of the awful things we do as human beings, but they are never an excuse, given our ability as rational creatures to understand the consequences of our actions.
Tahrir is not a rational creature.
"Do not consider me now as an elegant female, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart," she says in true protofeminist fashion.
But, he says, self-blindness in a rational creature is impossible.
In a rational creature, these are exercises of the rational faculty which do not arise without assent.
A rational creature with ordinary mental states like pains and beliefs, and possessing concepts of pain and belief, might be "self-blind": that is, unable to recognize its own thoughts and sensations.
A self-blind creature, by Shoemaker's definition, would be a rational creature with a conception of the relevant mental states, and who can entertain the thought that she has this or that belief, desire, intention, or pain, but who nonetheless utterly lacks introspective access to the type of mental state in question.
