Reasonable - and - The - Rational - Cambridge University - 2014

178.
THE REASONABLE AND

THE RATIONAL
e g i n n i n g w i t h t h e Dewey Lectures (“Kantian Constructivism in
B Moral Theory” (1980) in CP), Rawls distinguishes between the reasonable

and the rational. The reasonable is a particular form of practical rationality,
but it is not always easy to understand what distinguishes it from the rational. At
times it seems that the reasonable is the broader category: Rawls explains that a
course of action may be rational in the sense of being in a person’s narrow interest,
but nonetheless unreasonable because unacceptable to others (LHMP 164). At
other times, however, it seems that the rational is the broader category: especially
in PL, the principles of justice are said to be merely reasonable, not rationally
justiied in some deeper sense. How can we make sense of these distinctions?
In TJ, Rawls writes that his contractarian theory of justice “conveys the idea
that principles of justice may be conceived as principles that would be chosen
by rational persons, and that in this way conceptions of justice may be explained
and justiied. The theory of justice is a part, perhaps the most signiicant part, of
the theory of rational choice” (TJ 3, 16). This striking claim was soon subject to
severe criticism, and Rawls eventually abandoned it (PL 53 n.7). Even in TJ, it is
clear that Rawls is operating with more than one conception of rationality, and
much of his later work is devoted to clarifying their differences.
In the passage from TJ, Rawls is pointing out that his theory of justice rep-
resents principles of justice as the objects of the choices of the parties in the
original position, who are conceived as merely trying to advance their own inter-
ests under conditions of uncertainty. The parties reason in the instrumental and
strategic manner presumed in game theory, maximizing the chances that they
will realize their ends. In one sense, this explains why the principles of justice can
be rationally justiied: because we can all understand why they would be chosen in
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The reasonable and the rational / 693
the original position. Rawlsian citizens can rationally justify their political claims,
because they can appeal to a common decision procedure with determinate out-
comes. But in another sense, the principles of justice have yet to be justiied at
all, because we have not yet explained why we should accept this particular deci-
sion procedure as the appropriate method for justifying our political claims. As
for why we should identify with the hypothetical choices of the artiicial agents
in the original position, Rawls’s answer is clearly not that doing so advances our
narrowly strategic interests as individual, natural persons. In this sense, the critics
were exactly right to point out that Rawls’s theory of justice is not simply a part of
the theory of rational choice. To justify the design of the original position, Rawls
reaches beyond the theory of rational choice to an argument from relective equi-
librium, claiming that our acceptance of the constraints of the original position
coheres with our moral interests and our moral psychology. If we say that much
of TJ is devoted to the rational justiication of the choice of the original position
as the rational framework for political justiication, then it is clear that we are
using the term “rational” in two different senses. The particular, political use of
strategic rationality is justiied not as itself strategically rational, but because that
particular use is rational in a broader sense. In his later work, beginning with the
Dewey Lectures, the term that Rawls uses for rationality in this broader sense is
“the reasonable.”
The reasonable, Rawls explains, is “a conception of the fair terms of cooper-
ation, that is, terms each person may reasonably be expected to accept, provided
that everyone likewise accepts them. Fair terms of cooperation articulate an idea
of mutuality and cooperation: all who cooperate must beneit, or share in com-
mon burdens, in some appropriate fashion as judged by a suitable benchmark
of comparison” (CP 316). This deinition may appear puzzlingly circular. The
reasonable is deined as referring primarily to fair terms of cooperation (as in
“reasonable political principles”), but those fair terms are in turn deined with
reference to the reasonable itself (reasonable political principles are thus princi-
ples that “each person may reasonably be expected to accept”). To avoid vicious
circularity, we need to understand the reasonable as being primarily a quality
of persons (PL 48; JF 6), although one directed speciically toward principles
of mutual cooperation. A reasonable person is a person who sincerely desires to
identify, propose, and act on principles that all other such persons could likewise
accept (PL 49; JF 6–7). Reasonable political principles are then just principles that
reasonable people could all accept. “Reasonable persons, we say, are not moved
by the general good as such but desire for its own sake a social world in which
they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept. They
694 / larry krasnoff
insist that reciprocity should hold within that world so that each beneits along
with others” (PL 50).
With this understanding of the reasonable in hand, Rawls can reformulate
the sense in which his principles of justice can be said to be justiied. The princi-
ples are justiied because they are rationally chosen through an appropriate deci-
sion procedure, and that decision procedure is appropriate because it is reason-
able, because its constraints express the willingness to ind principles of justice
that all can accept. Each person has a particular conception of the good that he
or she will be trying to advance, but if each person is conceived as ignorant of
what that conception will be, then each person can rationally choose only those
principles of justice that will equally support each person in advancing their par-
ticular conception. In this sense, Rawls writes, the reasonable “presupposes and
subordinates” the rational (CP 317). To be reasonable is to accept that each per-
son has a conception of the good that they will be (rationally) trying to advance.
But to be reasonable is also to accept that one is entitled to advance one’s own
conception of the good only within terms of cooperation that others can accept
as equally advancing their own conceptions of the good.
Because the reasonable presupposes and subordinates the rational, we can
see that the real justiicatory work of the theory is done not by the rational choice
of the parties in the original position, but by the broader concept of the rea-
sonable, which expresses the value of that rational choice. If there is a further
question about whether the theory is truly justiied, that question concerns the
justiication of the idea of the reasonable itself. Here we are not asking about the
basic goodness of the reasonable; Rawls takes it for granted that the willingness
to propose fair terms of cooperation counts as a virtue. The further question is
whether and why this virtue should serve as the sole basis for political justiica-
tion. In the passage quoted above, Rawls tells us that reasonable persons are not
moved by “the general good as such”; instead they have an independent desire to
propose fair terms of cooperation for free and equal persons. The idea of such fair
terms of cooperation, as we have seen, then dictates the speciication of the par-
ties in the original position, whose rational choices in turn dictate the principles
of justice. On its own, the idea of the reasonable seems to suggest mere political
cooperativeness; it says nothing, in itself, about what the terms of political coop-
eration should be. On Rawls’s view, however, the content of justice is constructed,
via the original position, from the bare idea of the reasonable. The question is
why we should allow this recognizable but thin virtue, this one example of “the
general good as such,” to serve as the sole political virtue.
Rawls’s answer to this question is his political liberalism. Recall that the idea
of the reasonable presupposes that of the rational, because the reasonable pro-
poses that each person, as free and equal, has a particular conception of the good
that he or she is trying to advance. In the choice situation of the original position,
we understand the advancement of such conceptions in a narrow, instrumental
way, precisely because we are ignorant of the particular content of any such con-
ception. But the reality of the various conceptions of the good is more complex
and more diverse. Insofar as persons are rational, they are not simply pursuing
eficient means to already given ends; they are selecting valuable ends according
to speciic criteria. But in the modern world, argues Rawls, under conditions of
reasonable pluralism, we come to understand the complexity and diversity of spe-
ciic conceptions of the good as “the normal result of the exercise of human rea-
son within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic
regime” (PL xvi). There is a plurality of conceptions of the good because these
conceptions are derived from a plurality of comprehensive doctrines, exercises of
practical reasoning which seek to order and justify claims about the nature of the
good. Under conditions of reasonable pluralism, there is no agreement about the
nature of the good, because there is no agreement on the ways in which we can
and should reason about it.
Two consequences follow. The irst is that the thought that our political
principles should be reasonable, that they should be potentially acceptable to all
individuals, no matter what comprehensive doctrine they hold, is not directed
simply at achieving a particular virtue or a kind of practical advantage. Rather,
this thought is a demand of practical reason itself, in the even broader sense of
practical reason demonstrated in the workings of the various comprehensive doc-
trines. Because comprehensive doctrines are exercises of practical reason, sincere
and disciplined attempts to explain the meaning and purpose of human life, their
failure to come to agreement under conditions of modern pluralism is a fact about
what practical reason can and cannot do. Given this fact, a demand for political
agreement on principles that could not be shown to be reasonable would be in
conlict with practical reason itself. And since political principles always demand
compliance, it follows from the nature of practical reason that political principles
must be reasonable.
The second consequence of the fact of reasonable pluralism is that our agree-
ment to merely reasonable political principles can no longer be understood as
fully justiied within Rawls’s own theory of justice. Throughout all of his work,
Rawls insists that part of the justiication of his theory of justice is an argument
696 / larry krasnoff
that the principles of justice are stable, where this means showing why individ-
uals have good reason to comply with what has been shown to be just. Even
in TJ, even before Rawls had explicitly formulated the idea of the reasonable,
he was already asking why individuals have good reason to act on reasonable
political principles, given the full range of their values. In TJ, this question was
answered by a sprawling argument in moral psychology, which seeks to show that
a commitment to reasonable political principles is a natural and coherent part of
the psychology of agents in a well-ordered society. In his later work, however,
Rawls becomes convinced that this kind of generalization about the psychology
of agents threatens to be in conlict with the fact of reasonable pluralism, under
which we come to understand the agency of individuals as essentially connected
to their various comprehensive doctrines, which speak diversely to the nature
and purpose of human life. In that sense, it is the individual comprehensive doc-
trines that must speak to the question of whether individuals have good reason to
act on merely reasonable political principles. The inal stage of the justiication
of Rawls’s political liberalism is thus his proposal for an overlapping consensus,
in which different reasonable comprehensive doctrines justify a commitment to
merely reasonable political justiication in their own ways, as determined by their
particular comprehensive claims. If overlapping consensus obtains, Rawls argues,
political liberalism is fully justiied, because all individuals understand themselves
as having (different sorts of) reasons for rationally justifying their political claims
from the bare idea of the reasonable.
Ultimately, then, Rawls invokes rationality in three different senses. There
is irst the rational in the narrow or instrumental sense, the sense in which the
parties in the original position have reason to choose the two principles of jus-
tice. This is the sense of rationality that Rawlsian citizens will invoke when they
justify their political claims to one another, taking the values of political liberal-
ism for granted. But this sense of rationality is different from the rationality of
liberal political values, which are meant to be expressed in the constraints of the
original position itself. These constraints are justiied because they express the
idea of the reasonable, the desire to justify political principles on terms that all
can equally accept. The reasonable subordinates the rational, in the sense that
we should rationally justify our political claims only in reasonable terms. Finally,
there is the third sense of rationality expressed in the justiication of the politi-
cal use of the idea of the reasonable itself. This is the deeper sense of rationality
at work in the various comprehensive doctrines. Their failure to come to agree-
ment about the nature and purpose of human life is what justiies the idea of the
reasonable as the necessary condition of political justiication under conditions
of reasonable pluralism. And their efforts to integrate the idea of the reasonable
into their accounts of the nature and purpose of human life can generate an over-
lapping consensus around the reasonable as also a suficient condition of political
justiication.
Larry Krasnoff
s e e a ls o :
Citizen
Constructivism: Kantian/political
Cooperation and coordination
Moral person
The original position
Political conception of justice
Practical reason
Reasonable pluralism
Reciprocity

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178.

THE REASONABLE AND

e g i n n i n g w i t h t h e Dewey Lectures (“Kantian Constructivism in

B Moral Theory” (1980) in CP), Rawls distinguishes between the reasonable

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