## Metadata - Author: [[Julian Baggini]] - Full Title: The Edge of Reason - Category: #books ## Highlights - There is a great deal written about particular forms of reason, such as deductive logic and inductive inference, but much less on what reason, in the most general sense of the word, involves. This lacuna is reflected in the fact that we have two words – reason and rationality – which lack agreed, precise philosophical definitions and are in practice synonyms. ([Location 75](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=75)) - Since reason has become a debased currency, it is no surprise that fewer and fewer believe it has any value when dealing with threatening foreign powers. ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=91)) - The project of this book is to develop a notion of reason which is both sufficiently thin and sufficiently substantive to enable this kind of public dialogue, one which allows for a wide variety of opinions on what is in fact reasonable but is not so permissive as to allow any sincerely held opinion. It is thus an attempt to try to bring as many people as possible together into a single ‘community of reason’ in order to protect and strengthen the domain of public reason. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=110)) - Those of us who want to champion reason must be merciless in pointing out its limitations and frailties. Reason is powerful but to use any power to its fullest potential you need to understand its weaknesses even better than your enemy does. ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=119)) - Only our most intimate friends know our deepest flaws, and in the same way the greatest skeptics about reason should be those who seek to defend it. ([Location 124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=124)) - Reason has only been knocked off its pedestal because it was raised up too high. Paradoxically, a more modest version of rationality will prove to be more powerful and valuable than the almost omnipotent mythological version which preceded it. Reason is, as Michael P. Lynch puts it, ‘marked with frailty, fed by our sentiments and passions, whose pale promethean flame must be cultivated lest it gutter and dim’. ([Location 154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=154)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One of the central myths of rationality is that if we use it properly, we can do away with the need for personal, subjective judgement. It is always rebarbative to the philosopher to reach a point in an argument where it is necessary to admit that others may be presented with the same chain of inferences yet justifiably reach a different conclusion. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=159)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Hilary Putnam, for example, became famous for changing his position on a number of key issues over his career. ‘I’ve never thought it a virtue to adopt a position and try to get famous as a person who defends that position,’ Putnam once said, ‘like a purveyor of a brand name, or someone selling corn flakes.’ ([Location 520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=520)) - As Max Planck famously said, ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=694)) - Although there are certain defined methods of reasoning, such as deduction and induction, and these are very successful, there is no single, homogeneous rational method. Rather, there are numerous techniques and good reasoners must use their judgement to decide which they select and how they use them. ([Location 762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=762)) - If the idea that philosophy doesn’t actually depend that much on deduction seems heretical, the fuller truth is even more surprising: it often doesn’t rely on arguments at all. Time and again in the history of philosophy, the key moves made by philosophers turn out on careful examination to be more like observations than arguments. What the philosophers have done is noticed something extremely important and directed our attention to it. ([Location 1132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=1132)) - Attending is often more useful than argument. As Wittgenstein put it, the best way to respond to a skeptic who says, ‘I don’t know if there is a hand here’ is to say, ‘look closer’.14 Attending is a crucial element in good reasoning and provides the clearest example of the ways in which philosophising inevitably requires the use of judgement and cannot rely solely on what logic and evidence dictate. ([Location 1157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=1157)) - The psychologists Daniel Bartels and David Pizarro conducted a study in which they presented people with versions of the trolley problem. They found that ‘Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness.’ This implies the ‘counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.’ ([Location 1535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=1535)) - The is/ought gap, as it is known, has come under tremendous fire in recent decades. The basic thrust of the objection has been that we cannot so neatly distinguish between the two kinds of statement. Most notably, Philippa Foot argued that it is a kind of fact about the natural world that living things have needs and desires and that therefore it is a matter of fact that certain things are of value to them. ([Location 2338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2338)) - Note: wow, this is Andreas Weber's argument in Biology of Wonder - We could call such statements ‘normative facts’, meaning they are facts that contain elements of value. ([Location 2345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2345)) - Foot’s argument is that practical rationality of all descriptions has to start by taking something as a reason for action and there is no logical reason why prudential self-interest is a more rational reason to act than the needs of a child. ‘Practical rationality is taking the right things as reasons,’ as she put it. ([Location 2356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2356)) - If a creature has interests – being able to pursue projects and live a life which it finds meaningful, and/or can feel pain and pleasure, physical and psychic – then we have reasons to take those interests into account and not frustrate them without good reason, nor refrain from assisting them when it is easily in our power to do so. ([Location 2412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2412)) - The question is whether a creature’s having interests is an objective reason for us to take them into account, a reason which is comprehensible, assessable, defeasible, interest-neutral and compelling. It is certainly an objective fact that other people and animals do have interests. We should not be distracted here by the fact that there is clearly a subjective element to well-being. There is no problem in thinking there are objective truths about subjective states. Most clearly, it is an objective fact that subjective states exist. If we recognise this, it is a small step to accepting that it is an objective fact that some subjective states are preferable for those who experience them than others, and that this gives them an interest in being in those preferable states rather than distressing ones. So it should be clear enough that it is an objective truth that agents have interests. ([Location 2424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2424)) - Kant offered the option of believing that ‘The ground of obligation … must be sought not in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but a priori simply in concepts of pure reason’, while Hume had us believe that ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’ The mistake here is to assume that ‘a priori pure reason’ – a subset of what I have called disinterested reason – is the only kind of real reason. Hume, by example, showed this was not true, reasoning beautifully a posteriori and inductively. However, when he talked about reason he often did so as though it always and only meant a priori pure reason. This was clumsy. As Blackburn suggests, a more accurate description of Hume’s moral theory does not restrict reason to the a priori. ‘When we deploy some concerns in order to query or criticize others,’ says Blackburn, ‘there is nothing to stop us from describing the process as one of reasoning.’15 The right way to put things is not that ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ but that the passions as well as cold cogitations provide reasons. ([Location 2479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2479)) - Rationality is usually contrasted with faith, and with very good reason. But it often takes a kind of faith to be sure that what we believe is in fact demanded by reason, rather than simply being the result of poor reasoning. There is a difference between what is rational and what seems rational, and too often people assume the latter is the former. This distinction requires no skepticism about the power of reason, only skepticism about our ability to harness that power. ([Location 2535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2535)) - For me, if the demand for consistency were to clash with the demand to avoid mass slaughter without a very clear greater benefit at the very least, then I have no hesitation in saying that it is consistency which would go. Making this kind of judgement, however hypothetical, is important in identifying the bedrocks I described in chapter one, the core beliefs which anchor all our others. For example, it is important to know whether Christians who argue that their creationism is consistent with science would, if forced to choose, decide between the Bible or science. Knowing this is a test of the sincerity of any claims to be following science. Similarly, I would hope we would accept that in a competition between consistency and avoiding mass slaughter, much as we desire to make our morality rationally consistent, the litmus test of morality is not consistency but moral sentiment, a desire not to do more harm than is necessary. We seek consistency, but we seek decency more. We hope and expect that we will never have to choose one over the other, but we accept that if we do, it is consistency that we will jettison. ([Location 2543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=2543)) - To be truly rational we need to acknowledge the limits of our rationality: nothing is more irrational than an unwarranted faith in reason. ([Location 3099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=3099)) - Political pluralism is not the same as democracy, and democracy is far from sufficient to create a fair and decent pluralist society. In a democracy, a majority could promote only its own interests and ignore those of minorities, abandoning pluralism. ([Location 3230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=3230)) - In order to avoid slipping into majoritarianism, democracy needs to be combined with some kind of embrace of pluralism, so that it becomes a means of negotiating between different interests and visions of the good life and not merely a way of deciding collectively which one path to follow. In some ways pluralism is therefore a higher value than democracy. However, in practice it depends on democracy. ([Location 3234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01L7SSCQW&location=3234))