I. It has always been recognized that proposals about the sense of Reason and Rationality will have moral and political implications. My interest in making one more suggestion about their sense precisely is an interest in their moral and political implications. I shall argue that it has been a misfortune that the term reason was interpreted by Plato and Aristotle as referring to a faculty of the divided soul. These philosophers had their own motives, political as well as philosophical, for distinguishing different parts of the soul on different levels, higher and lower. They had their own motives for singling out the reasoning faculty and the act of reasoning as constituting the essence of the person (Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1169a 2)
Reason is the essence of the individual because it is the most authoritative or governing, and the highest element in his soul. Aristotle explicitly makes the political connection here: "Just as a city or any other systematic whole is most properly identified with the most authoritative or governing element in it, so is a man." The parallel between the social order rightly conceived and planned and the soul put in order by nature is carefully worked out. For personal fulfillment and mental stability we have to ensure that the naturally governing element in the soul does in fact govern. If we go against nature in this matter of internal governance we shall suffer for it. There is no choice if we are to live successful lives. But the proper subordinations in the social order depend not upon nature as the eternally fixed framework of things but upon nomos, law or convention. There is a choice in this public external matter: political choice, and the choice is to be guided by the analogy with the natural subordinations recognized in the soul. It is by analogy that the city can be said to be a happy or unhappy city in accordance with the right or wrong political choices being made with the effect that either a harmonious or a discordant social structure comes into existence.
I suggest that, reversing the tradition, we start at the other end of the analogy and proceed in the opposite direction: that we start with natural and universal procedures and institutions which are to be found in all or almost all societies. We then explain the processes attributed by philosophers to the divided soul of a person as based on an analogy with the natural procedures in the state and society. The procedures necessary to any decent social order are to be seen as natural, and the analogous processes in the mind are to be thought of as constructed and distinguished by convention: it is by linguistic convention that mental processes in the minds of individuals are to be seen as the shadows of publicly identifiable procedures that are pervasive across different cultures. I shall be helped in this reversal of the order of explanation by the vocabulary of everyday speech. The words that we ordinarily use to distinguish mental processes- "deliberating," "judging," "adjudicating," "reviewing," "examining," and many others-have both a public and an inner mental use. I am suggesting that the inner mental uses are best explained by referring back to the observable public activities. The relations between the public activities of, for example, deliberating and adjudicating, are open to everyone's observation, and their shadows, the corresponding private mental activities, are assumed to duplicate these relations.
I will first list some of the principal institutions and public procedures which I have in mine as being pervasive and natural in societies, if not strictly universal.
First, almost any organized society requires an institution and also a procedure for adjudicating between conflicting moral claims advanced by individuals and groups within a society. Typically these include claims about property and status, but also conflicts of moral attitudes and beliefs, strongly held, which need to be heard and judged, particularly in societies which are not homogeneous in religion, race, custom and culture. There need to be some procedures, accepted as fair, for hearing the different sides in moral disputes.
Secondly, in any society or state, there needs to be a council or cabinet, even if it is only a council of advisers to the monarch, who discuss the various policy options between which a choice has to be made. The typical political case is a choice between war and peace, after discussion, as in the Illiad.
Thirdly, because adjacent societies and states have conflicts of interest in several domains-strategic, economic, religious-and foreigners, normally objects of dread, are usually not very far away, almost all states, and most societies, need to engage in diplomacy in defense of their frontiers and of their other interests, when they are not at war. There have to be accepted procedures and methods of negotiation. Probably there are some inhabitants of remote and hidden valleys who have been happy without neighbors. But this is not the usual human condition.
Fourthly, societies and states are liable to suffer disasters and yet to survive: for example, a defeat in war, or a failure of crops, or an epidemic, or riots and civil disorder. Any society or state that suffers one or the other of these misfortunes will need to inquire into causes with a view to preventing such disasters in the future. They will need some court of inquiry or commission to review rival causal explanations and to assign responsibility as fairly as possible.
This list of indispensable procedures and institutions is obviously not exhaustive. Each of them is an example of the public and political versions of practical reasoning. They all involve the fair weighing and balancing of contrary arguments bearing on an unavoidable and disputable issue. They are all subject to the single prescription "Audi alteram partem" ("Hear the other side"). Herbert Hart drew my attention to the centrality of this phrase, defining the adversary principle of argument, when justice is to be done and seen to be done. In each case the fairness of the public procedure depends upon this very general prescription being followed. In the council chamber, in a law court, at a diplomatic conference, at a committee of inquiry and investigation, the various locally established techniques and idioms of adversary argument will be refined and exercised. Different cultures develop different institutions of adversary argument with different procedures. But the necessities of peaceful confrontation of unreconciled enemies entail that the adversary principle is everywhere employed in some accepted conventional clothing.
Discussions in the inner forum of an individual mind naturally duplicate in form and structure the public adversarial discussions. "Naturally," because advocates, judges and diplomats rehearse what they are to say before they step onto the public stage. Anyone who participates in a cabinet discussion, in a law court, in a diplomatic negotiation, acquires the habit of preparing for rebuttals by opponents. He acquires the habit of adversary thinking. The public situations that I have mentioned give rise to corresponding mental processes which are modeled on the public procedures, as a shadowy movement on a ceiling is modeled on an original physical movement on the floor. Moral conflicts are part of every person's experience. In the ever recurring cases of conflict of principles, adversary argument and then a kind of inner judicial discretion and adjudication are called for. Admittedly there is an important difference here. If the law is inconsistent and unstable over time, and if its procedures suddenly change, the law is apt to be unjust in its procedures. But a person may be inconsistent and unstable in his judgment in cases of conflicting claims on his fairness without necessarily being unjust and unfair. A moral conversion in an individual's mind is not, as such, an irrationality.
In the cabinet or council typically there are opposing views and there are advocates on more than one side. The assumed aim of the advocates in this situation is to show publicly that their preferred policy is the best policy, all things considered. They also have the aim or persuading their colleagues to agree with them. There is therefore a rhetoric of persuasion, devices of presentation, which have an influence on the forms of argument in public reasoning. Obviously not all of these devices will be directly transferred to the inner forum of the mind, even if there are certain situations in which a solitary person tries to persuade herself to do what she believes to be the best thing to do.
In the political and public discussion the adversary principle is a necessity, arising from the declared facts of conflict. In private deliberation, the adversary principle of hearing both sides is imposed by the individual on himself as the principle of rationality. "Hearing" here becomes a metaphor, and becomes "considering" both sides. Most of the verbs that represent thinking are tainted with these metaphors: seeing, weighing, reviewing evidence, and many more. The very notion of a procedure, which I follow in my own mind, is in a sense a metaphor, or at least a transferred term. "Was the proper procedure followed before the decision was made?" is a literal question, admitting a straightforward empirical answer, when it refers to the council. "In your own thinking about this did you follow a proper procedure, reviewing the reasons on both sides, before you made your decision? ", addressed to a person, is a less straightforward, a less determinate, empirical question. In answering it, no logbook of the order of mental events is to be expected, and there is no confirmable observation of the procedure that was followed.
To summarize: rationality in public practical reasoning is the disposition to follow a procedure which is an instance of the adversary principle, that is, the principle of both sides of a case being presented and heard. Rationality, so defined, is literally and observably present or absent in a political or public context. When an individual asks himself, "Have I been methodical and rational in my thinking on this occasion?", the question often does not receive a determinate "yes" or "no" answer, because mental events, unless recorded in speech or writing, have shadowy outlines and a ghostly existence. One cannot regularly decide where one event in a mental process ends and another begins, and therefore whether the proper order of events has been followed. This indeterminacy is one principal reason for thinking of correct procedure, and rationality itself, as primarily a feature of public life rather than as a feature of inner, personal histories. A court of inquiry, proceeding correctly, ensures that the evidence coming from different witnesses is genuinely independent evidence, without one witness influencing another, and this is a matter of the timing of the depositions. There may be situations in which an individual, in his solitary investigation, can similarly arrange that the evidence comes to him in a segregated sequence. But generally speaking, both the separation and the timing of steps in solitary thought, as Descartes required, become an uncertain shadow of public procedures. When Justices of the Supreme Court in the United States publish their decisions together with the supporting arguments, one sees that an adversarial procedure has been followed. When I want to assess the outcome or the arguments, I do not need to inquire into the history of events in the inner forum of their minds.
The word "judgment" can be extended in its use to cover the conclusion of almost any kind of published inquiry, whether theoretical or practical. The scales of justice, the fair weighing of evidence on both sides of the case, are there for all to see, whether in a historical inquiry, in deciding between two rival scientific theories, or in a political decision about priorities in the avoidance of social evils. About each of these inquiries we can ask in any particular case whether all the canonical steps were taken on the way to the verdict, the final judgment. The adversary principle as determining fairness between opponents extends more widely still: it applies, for instance, to the judgment of fairness in competitive games and to contests of all kinds. Duels and contests of all kinds were used to settle differences and disputes, if and only if their procedures were recognized by both sides as fair within their context.
As political observers we know that, in fact, most arbitrations and negotiations in the political arena are to some degree corrupt, involving some suppression of evidence, some false rhetoric and misrepresentation. But still the institutions of arbitration and negotiation are plainly designed for fair adversary argument, and it is this design that sets the model for the inner debates of a person, who may also be corrupt, one-sided and self-deceived in his thinking, no less than in his public speaking. That is the interest of self-deception, both in fiction and in philosophy. Like all mental processes, the maneuvers of self-deception are harder to pin down than methods of public deception, but the closeness of the analogy cannot be doubted.
II. Reason
If "reasonable" and "rational" are cut loose from any supposedly identifiable psychological faculty called "reason", an ancient tradition in philosophy has to be reconsidered. Reason has been represented as the essential and superior part of the soul. That has been the story. But we do not know anything about reason as a faculty apart from what philosophers and theologians and others have chosen to put into the concept. Parts of the soul, unlike arms and legs, are a philosophical invention.
Suppose, therefore, that we finally discard all the mythologies of the parts of the soul and we start again with a classification of observable, public activities and the relations between them. What will we gain? First, we will be able to inquire into the mutual dependencies between types of human activities without any preconceptions about the order of value among them or their proper subordinations. Here are some of the principal activities which, within our philosophical tradition, are usually grouped together as activities of reason: the study of mathematics and logic; the weighing of evidence for and against a hypothesis in the natural sciences; the weighing of evidence in a historical or criminal investigation; the adjudication of conflicts in society of the kind that I have just discussed; and the whole sphere of public prudence and policy-formation. Difference skills are required in each of these activities, but thy all have been grouped together under the heading of reason. Consider a strongly contrasting list of natural and thoughtful human activities, which we expect to find in almost all societies in some form or other: story-telling, religious ritual, singing and playing music, the acting of drama, funeral ceremonies and celebrations of the dead, visual art, customs of courtship and marriage, oral and written poetry, finally, the description of ideal societies and ideal persons and ideal ways of life, moral imagination. This list could evidently be greatly extended. Since Vico's Scienza Nuova and Kant's Third Critique, these activities have been attributed to the faculty of imagination, sharply contrasted with activities in the first list. They are activities which we expect to vary vastly in form and content in different places, in different social groups, at different times in history, and in distinguishable cultures. We not only expect the diversity, we positively demand it. Their diversity like that of the natural languages themselves, helps to establish the identity of populations and of cultures.
It is a classical mistake that the first set of activities have been accorded a superior station on the ground that they distinguish humanity from the beasts in the multi-leveled soul. In fact, both lists of activities distinguish humanity from the beasts. The difference is elsewhere. Activities in the first list unite humanity in shared and identical pursuits. The second list consists of activities which tend to divide humanity into distinct groups, with their own languages, customs, rituals, liturgies, arts, and moral ideas. The activities in the first list, particularly mathematics and the natural sciences, do not change their substance or their form as they are spread gradually across frontiers. But for social customs, moral ideals, rituals, liturgies, celebrations, music, poetry, and visual art, we do not expect universal criteria of evaluation; rather, they help to distinguish different ways of life. Javanese music can be enjoyed in Germany, but a piece of Javanese music is not judged by the criteria applicable to German music. Beethoven is enjoyed in China, but his procedures of composition, his style, are not those of Chinese music; no convergence is here to be expected or desired.
III. Harmony
Why did philosophers think reason should govern the soul and the city? Because reason guarantees convergence towards agreement on principles, including principles of justice, and hence guarantees harmony: no more conflict in the soul or the city. From the stratification of classes in the city, each playing its own role, a satisfying harmony is to arise, and that harmony defines social justice. Similarly with the governance of the individual soul. Individuals cannot fall into painful inner conflict if in each of them personal ideals, desires, emotions, and habits of feeling are governed and restrained by prudence and calculation. This picture of a possible harmony under the governance of reason is carried through the Christian centuries and persists in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and it persists in contemporary Liberalism also. Whatever the contingent differences between us arising from our personal history-from our memories and imagination-the king in his castle and the peasant in his hovel are one, in their common humanity, in virtue of the overriding superiority of rational principles which king and peasant both implicitly recognize. Consider the most interesting and influential political and moral theory of our time: Professor Rawls' A Theory of Justice? The necessity of harmony and agreement in the rational choice of principles of justice for institutions is presupposed; the veil or of ignorance is to filter out divisive interests, divisive sentiments and allegiances. At the same time, Professor Rawls revivified the study of political philosophy by taking one necessary step away from the traditional search for harmony. He declared that his rationally chosen principles of justice must be independent of conceptions of the good. But he has also acknowledged that his principles are to be rationally chosen specifically by those who live in a liberal and democratic society, where they may represent an overlapping political consensus about the nature of justice. Once again there is a harmony, but a harmony within the liberal stockade.
I have two objections to this restricted application of the principles of justice, rationally chosen. First, it is an insufficient restriction, because the illiberal and antidemocratic citizens of a generally liberal and democratic society have no good reason to accept some of the principles, for example, the primacy of liberty. Someone whose conception of good and evil is founded on a supernatural authority which represents any tolerance of a contrary moral view as evil will not accept liberal principles of justice. In any truly liberal society such persons are to be expected. Secondly, this confinement of reasonably acceptable principles of justice to liberal and democratic societies bypasses the outstanding political problem of our time, which is the relation between, on the one hand, self-consciously traditional societies, where priests of the church, or rabbis or imams or mullahs, and other experts in the will of God maintain a single conception of the good which determines the way of life of the society as a whole; and on the other hand there are the liberal democratic societies which permit, or encourage, a plurality of conceptions of the good. The severity of this problem was for a long time concealed by the belief in a positivist theory of modernization, a theory that is traceable to the French Enlightenment. The positivists believed that all societies across the globe will gradually discard their traditional attachments to supernatural forces because of the need for rational, scientific and experimental methods of thought which a modern industrial economy involves. This is the old faith, widespread in the 19th Century, that there must be a step-by-step convergence on liberal values, on "our values".
We now know that there is no "must" about it and that all such theories of human history have a predictive value of zero. They are just diachronic versions of the Platonic belief in a final rational harmony. In fact, it is not only possible but, on present evidence, probable that most conceptions of the good, and most ways of life, which are typical of commercial, liberal, industrialized, societies will often seem altogether hateful to substantial minorities within these societies and even more hateful to most of the populations within traditional societies in other continents. As a liberal by philosophical conviction, I think I ought to expect to be hated, and to be found to be superficial and contemptible, by a large part of mankind. In looking for principles of minimum justice, one needs to see that one's own way or life and habits of speech and of thought, not only seem wrong to large populations can be repugnant in very much the same way in which alien habits of eating, or alien sexual customs, can be repugnant.
Liberals such as Professor Rawls and I believe that there is no great moral significance to be attached to the accident of our place of birth and of our inheritance. Our moral opponents, whom liberals sometimes call fanatics, are apt to see destiny, intention, or design in their inheritance, and from their ancestry they infer a very specific mission, a specific set of duties, and a clear design for their lives.
Perhaps this most fundamental of all opposition in politics comes from contrasting attitudes to time, historical time. The Enlightenment, and particularly the utilitarians and the philosophical radicals in France and in England, wanted, first, to change the attitudes of Europeans and Americans to their own history. The past, with all its superstitions and magic, was to be seen as a dark childhood, a mere preparation for the coming of age and future maturity of mankind. More radically still, they wanted, by the use of the notion of consequence, to change people's image of the present in relation to the future. Those who talk of a false rationalism in the Enlightenment are asserting the equal claims of memory and imagination to supply moral direction, alongside the claims of the calculation of consequences. They suggest respect for consistency over time as a value in law and in social custom and in government, respect for history itself as an inquiry into the past, and respect for dead heroes and for the past masters of any imaginative art. The exercise of imagination, the sources of which are in memory, is no less a form of thought than is an exercise of intellect. A story-teller, a sculptor, a musician is no less a thinking person when he works than is a lawyer, a mathematician, or a scientist.
When "Remember 1689" is chalked on a wall in Belfast by a Roman Catholic calling to mind William IlI's Protestant Settlements, it would most certainly be useless to respond: "Be reasonable: forget the injustices of the past, as you see them, because the past cannot now be repaired: it is more reasonable to start from now and to try to build a peaceful society for the future.'' The response comes back: "You are asking us to forget who we are. We define ourselves, as a community, by what we reject. We should cease to exist as a community if we thought only of the future and of what you call reasonableness. That would be disintegration, the loss of integrity, both as individuals and as a community." Self-definition by opposition is the moral equivalent of the old logical principle, Omnis determinatio est negatio.
There is a legitimate use of the norm of justice which evaluates a political or legal decision apart from the procedure that determined it and which refers the decision for evaluation to some specific moral theory or set of moral principles. I have elsewhere called justice, so interpreted substantial. Conceptions of substantial justice are divisive, for example, setting those who are conservative in their moral principles at odds with reformers. There are as many different principles of substantial justice as there are distinct moral ideals and moral theories. But moral enemies are driven finally to come together from their separate corners to build political and legal institutions temporarily acceptable to all of them as arenas for fair negotiation, because they know that the substance of political and social majority can never in principle be melted down into a few self-evident principles. Diversity of moral conviction is as natural to humanity as is the habit of hearing evidence and argument from two or more sides before settling a conflict.
What emerges from a fair political contest will often be described, by those of who are intent on a specific form of substantial justice, as "a shabby compromise". For the individual also, as for society, compromise, shabby or smart, is both the normal and the most desirable condition of the soul for a creature whose desires and emotions are often ambivalent and always in conflict with each other.
To speak of a smart compromise, as opposed to the usual shabby one, is half serious. A smart compromise is one where the tension between contrary forces and impulses, pulling against each other, is perceptible and vivid and both forces and impulses have been kept at full strength: the tension of the Heraclitean bow. An example would be a singer's effort to hold together in her singing complete technical control with complete spontaneity of expression. This tension of opposites is felt in all excellent musical performances and in most great works of art and literature. But we do not normally live like this, with such sustained and undiminished tension, whether as individuals or as communities. We are not masterpieces in our lives, I hope, and the lives of communities are not master classes. We look for some relaxation of tension, but, until death, we do not look for the disappearance of tension, whether in the soul or in society. The notion of procedural justice demands that men and women, whatever their religion or their moral convictions, should rank political activities second or third among the most important of all humanities, whatever their different moralities put first or second. This proposal is an inversion of the Protestant and Kantian moralities; it puts the protection of just political procedures in competition with the pursuit of substantial justice, and balances against the other. In the liberal tradition the moral values of the individual person have usually been taken to override public commitments. I have been arguing that this must be wrong, if moral conflicts are not a contingent and, in principle, alterable phenomenon but rather are a permanent distinguishing feature of humanity.
Let us keep the supposed superior faculty of the mind, reason, with its long aristocratic history, in its proper place as an equal alongside the other thoughtful activities assigned to the imagination. Let there be no philosopher-kings, and no substantial principles of justice which are to be permanently acceptable to all rational agents, seeking harmony and unanimous agreement. Rather political prudence, recognized as a high virtue, must expect a perpetual contest between hostile conceptions of justice and must develop acceptable procedures for regulating and refereeing the contest. The contests are unending if only because what is generally thought substantially just and fair today will not be thought just and fair tomorrow. This is as it should be, always provided that the old and new moral claims can expect finally to be given a hearing. The rock-bottom justice is in the contests themselves, in the tension of open opposition, always renewed.
HomePage for Academic Dialogue on Applied Ethics | Background for Meta-Ethics |