On Reasonableness

Journal ofApplied Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2,1996

On Reasonableness

MARGARET MOORE

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the concept of ‘reasonableness’ plays an important role in Scanlon’s, Rawls’s, and Bany’s theories ofjustice (or morality). The relationship between moral motivation and reasonableness is critically analysed. Spec$cally, the paper questions whether it is plausible to impute to the agents of construction the desire ‘to just$y our actions to others on impartial terms ’. It ako argues that most of the work is done by the assumption that people are reasonable rather than by the contractarian formulation. Indeed, the paper argues, the argument could proceed entirely by making explkit and arguing for the moral assumptions embedded in the concept of reasonableness [ l ] .

Recent liberal political philosophy has focussed on the concept of ‘reasonableness’ as a criterion for evaluating the justice of political principles and social practices.

In his important and influential article ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’, T. M. Scanlon argues that public reasonableness is at the centre of liberalism. According to Scanlon, the heart of the contractualist project is the possibility of agreement among persons; but, instead of conceiving of individuals as rationally self-interested, as Rawls in A Theoy ofJustice had done, Scanlon proposes that we assume that people ‘have the desire to find and agree on principles which no one who had the desire could reasonably reject’ [2]. Scanlon articulates what he calls a contractualist account of moral wrongness: ‘An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any system of rules for the general regulation of behaviour which no-one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement’ [3].

The concept of reasonable agreement plays a prominent role in John Rawls’s revised argument for liberal principles in his book Political Liberalism. He argues that justice as fairness is a political conception which would be endorsed by people who hold diverse, incompatible but reasonable conceptions of the good; and he characterises the parties to the agreement in his theory as not only rational but also reasonable.

Brian Barry’s argument, in Theories of Justice, also relies heavily on the concept of reasonableness. He criticises mutual advantage theories of justice, such as Gauthier’s, as well as Rawls’s particular version of impartialist justice theory (inA Theoy ofJuStice) before proposing his favoured version of an impartial theory, along the lines suggested by Scanlon. He argues that an impartial conception of justice should not assume that the agents of construction are pursuing their own interests; rather, he endorses Scanlon’s formulation of the moral motive as ‘the desire to be able to justify one’s actions to others on grounds they could not reasonably reject’ [4]. For Barry, as for Scanlon, a principle is reasonable if it is one which others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject. This leaves room for the possibility that there are a number of different social practices and principles compatible

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with justice, but it also has the potential of being able to distinguish between just and unjust principles, and being able to justify liberal principles as acceptable to reasonable people.

The aim of this essay is to develop Scanlon’s, Rawls’s and Barry’s accounts to exhibit the important role played by the concept of reasonableness in each of the theories. In Parts I and I1 of this essay, the relationship between moral motivation and reasonableness will be sketched and criticised. Specifically, this paper questions whether it is plausible to impute to the agents of construction the desire ‘to justify our actions to others on impartial terms’. Second, it questions whether most of the work is being done by the assumption that people are reasonable rather than by the contractarian formulation. The main argument of these sections is that imputing reasonableness to the contractors serves to make the concept subjective, thereby obscuring the fact that we may disagree about what is reasonable. In Part 11, the paper focusses on the concept of ‘reasonable agreement’. It argues that the notion of ‘reasonable agreement‘ serves the important critical function of assessing the justice or injustice, acceptability or unacceptability of certain principles or practices. However, the contractualist idea is principally a heuristic device that forces us to think about all the people who are affected by a principle. This paper argues that the contractualist formulation is not crucial to the argument; indeed, the argument could proceed entirely by making explicit and arguing for the moral assumptions embedded in the concept of reasonableness.

I. The Concept of Reasonableness as an Element of Practical Reason

T. M. Scanlon’s argument in ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’ is mainly directed at giving a philosophical defence of (impartialist) contractualism against utilitarianism by building on the central notion of contractualism that justice is what everyone could, in principle, agree to. Scanlon closely identifies contractualism with the impartial (moral) point of view: if unequal bargaining power is not to be translated into an unfair agreement, the motive for agreement must be something other than self-interest [ 5 ] . Hence, Scanlon formulates a version of contractualism in which people are conceived, not as self- interestedly rational, but, rather, as reasonable people. Scanlon suggests that this captures better the impartial consideration of everyone’s interests that the original position was designed to model in A Theory of Justice, without the confusing assumption of rational self- interest behind a veil of ignorance [6].

Scanlon seeks to relate the conception of justice as impartiality to the principles of practical reason, and thereby demonstrate the motivational force of the impartial (moral) point of view. He introduces his contractualist formulation in response to the question: What is ‘the nature of the reasons that morality does provide, at least to those who are concemedwith it’ [7]? Here, Scanlon is not addressing the moral sceptic, but the person who accepts the validity of moral reasons.

The issue Scanlon raises is concerned with the relation at the level of the person between first-order desires and the regulative standard of justice or morality. The standard desire- based conception of practical reason seems to suggest that desires are basically homogenous, differing only in intensity. This must be wrong because morality does not function like that: it serves, Scanlon says, as a regulative standard according to which other desires are assessed [8]. The reasonable person’s first-order desires are subject to a kind of test which is contractualist in form: desires are acceptable only if they can be justified to others on grounds that no-one could reasonably reject. The idea is that we would not want to impose

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On Reasonableness 169

certain claims upon others, even if we have a strong desire to do so, if our actions could not be justified to reasonable individuals. On this view, our motivational structure is hierarchical: we constrain the pursuit of first-order desires in accordance with this higher order regulative test, which not only justifies our actions, but gives content to morality. And the motive behind this regulative test is not the desire to do what is right because it is right, but the desire to act in ways that can be justified to others who are also reasonable [9].

Rawls, in Political Liberalism, is also concerned with the problem of explaining the motivational force of liberal political principles. Indeed, Rawls wrote Political Liberalism because he came to understand that his argument in A Theoy ofJustice failed to motivate liberalism: there was a ‘serious problem internal to justice as fairness, namely. . . the account of stability in part I11 of Theory is not consistent with the view as a whole. I believe all differences are consequences of removing that inconsistency. Otherwise, these lectures take the structure and content of Theory to remain substantially the same.’ [lo]

To deal with this motivation problem, Rawls elaborates his conception of practical reason, which comprises two distinct elements; being reasonable and being rational.

Rawls characterises rationality in the familiar terms of maximizing self-interest that he employed in A Theory of Justice, although he adds that it is ‘not limited to means-end reasoning as they [rational agents] may balance final ends by their significance for their plan of life as a whole, and by how well these ends cohere with and complement one another. Nor are rational agents as such solely self-interested . . .’ [ 111

Reasonableness, by contrast, is a ‘social virtue’, which is closely linked to the concept of fairness [ 121. Reasonableness has two different aspects: (i) the willingness to propose and abide by fair terms of co-operation and (ii) the willingness to recognise the burdens of judgment - the sources of reasonable disagreement - and to accept the consequences of this [13].

Reasonableness is defined on different grounds than rationality: ‘justice as fairness . . . does not try to derive the reasonable from the rational’; rather, ‘the reasonable and the rational are complementary ideas, neither . . . can stand without the other’ [ 141. Merely reasonable agents, Rawls goes on to say, would have no ends of their own which they seek to advance; merely rational agents would lack a sense of justice [15]. These two aspects of practical reason are both fundamental in the sense that they are imputed to Rawls’s agents of construction, and are central to his argument, but reasonableness is conceived of as regulutingrational self-interest. Just as Scanlon decribed the reasonableness justificatory test as prior to our first-order desires in the sense that it regulates and constrains them, so Rawls describes reasonableness as regulative with respect to our first-order agent-centred aims and desires.

The relationship between first-order desires and the regulatory test of what cannot be reasonably rejected has liberal political implications. Just as, in the liberal polity, justice is prior to the good in the sense that actions in accordance with our conceptions of the good are assessed by the rules of justice, so, at the level of the person, individual actions, individual desires, are subject to each individual’s own test of the justice of her actions. Rawls, then, succeeds in motivating justice as fairness by articulating a philosophical psychology that imputes to people a regulatory sense of justice which assesses and controls first-order desires (conceptions of the good).

This description of the role of reasonableness in Scanlon’s and Rawls’s conceptions raises two distinct issues, which have important implications for the project of justifymg liberal contractualism. The first issue concerns the plausibility of this conception of human


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motivation; the second is concerned with the relationship between the theory of human motivation (reasonableness) and the contractualist project (the notion of ‘agreement’). The focus in this last section is not on the concept of ‘reasonableness’ but on the idea of a ‘reasonable agreement’, and specifically, the function of the contract or bargain on this conception.

XI: Are People Reasonable?

Is it plausible to assume that people have an irreducible moral motive, a fundamental or primary desire to justify their actions to others? This question is not considered directly by Scanlon and Rawls, both of whom proceed simply by assuming these two elements (of rationality and reasonableness, in Rawls’s terminology) in their conception of the person, presumably because these elements correspond to the kind of reasoning commonly found in most people. But while neither Scanlon nor Rawls consider directly the status of this moral desire, Brian Barry recognises the need to argue that it is plausible to assume such a desire, and to try to relate this desire to the standard conception of rationality.

Barry begins by taking issue with the standard concept of rationality familiar in economic and social theory, which requires the logically consistent and efficient pursuit of self- interest. He argues that the equation of rationality with self-interest is ‘pure assertion’, which he counters with his own assertion ‘that it is equally rational to care about what can be defended impartially’ [16]. He admits that all arguments designed to demonstrate that reasonableness is entailed logically, either in the concept of actions or of reasons or connected with any of the standard operations of human reason, have failed [17]; but, he says, ‘common experience attests’ to the widespread existence of the desire to defend our actions to others [18].

Barry questions the equation of rationality and the prudent pursuit of one’s ends by arguing that this conception of rationality contradicts a widely shared desire to defend our actions before others. He writes,

I do not know how to prove that the term ‘rationality’ is appropriately employed in this way [i.e., equated with impartiality], but I think that the virtually unanimous concurrence of the human race in caring about the defensibility of actions in a way that does not simply appeal to power is a highly relevant supporting consideration. Perhaps almost the whole human race is crazy and only Gauthier and a few others who think like him are sane. But until somebody produces more than an argument by definitional fiat for the equation of rationality and self-interest we can safely continue to deny it [19].

Barry argues that human consistency impels us to try to get beyond looking at things each from our own perspective, and ‘fmd reasons for acting that are reasons for anyone’ [20]. Once we attempt to bring our perspective in relation to those of others, it is hard to deny the fundamental equality of persons: we recognise that others have needs, interests and goals, just as we do, and we seek to regulate what we can do on our own behalf by that recognition and defend our actions to others on impartial terms.

Barry’s argument that there is an ‘irreducible’ human propensity to justify one’s actions to others integrates the demands of morality with the psychology of the person. Ifhe can show that justificatory reasons are also motivatory, that we are motivated to justify our actions to

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On Reasonableness 17 1

ourselves and others in impartial terms, then he can link the demands of impartial contractualist liberalism to each individual’s subjective motivational set.

Two distinct questions suggest themselves in relation to the argument that the desire to justify our actions on impartial terms is widespread.

First, is it true that the vast majority of people, as Barry suggests [2 11, or moral people as Rawls argues [22], have a non-instrumental desire to justify their actions to others on impartial terms? This seems to be an empirical claim which perhaps in principle could be settled on empirical grounds, but, in the absence of any empirical evidence (and indeed, what study could be devised which would show the structure of relationships among desires in human motivation?), there are reasons to be sceptical of the claim that this practice is widespread. Although the empirical argument for the widespread nature of this desire is questionable, at best, Barry is undoubtedly right that a pure egoist, who pursued her interests without regard for the interests or views or desires of anyone else, is so unusual that we would hardly recognise such a person at all. Even beneficiaries of highly unjust systems often try to justifi these institutions, and do not describe them as merely the result of their superior power.

Second, and potentially more seriously, it is unclear whether Barry’s argument gets him far enough. It is plausible to say, as Barry does, that many people are concerned to justify their actions in the sense of offering reasons for them; however, it is not at all clear that the form that this justification takes is the ‘reasonably reject’ criterion, or that the reasons that people provide are validated from the impartial perspective. Even if we accept that people are not purely self-interested, and do exhibit a desire to justify their actions before others in a way that is not reducible to power relations, it does not follow that those reasons are connected to the impartial point of view. There is a gap between the notion of justification, in the sense of offering reasons for one’s actions, and the impartial standpoint of morality.

The idea of being reasonable, at least in ordinary discourse, involves the idea of offering reasons for one’s actions and being prepared to listen to and be persuaded by the reasons of others. This practice of reason-giving, which defines the reasonable person, presupposes that others are worthy of reason-giving and some minimum consideration, but it is also compatible with highly partial reasons. Indeed, many of the reasons that people offer to justify their actions are inextricably linked to the things that they deem important from the personal perspective, such as their own desires, aims and ends.

It is not merely explanatory reasons (reasons that explain one’s actions and decisions) which are ineluctably linked to one’s particularistic attachments and projects, but many justificatory reasons are also partial in scope. For example, the majority of people in the province of Quebec (80% of whom are Francophones) seek to protect their language and culture because this is important to their identity, and they support the use of state power to curtail the expression of English on signs and prevent the education of immigrants to Quebec in English. These are important parts of Quebec’s Bill 101, which has the overwhelming support of the population of Quebec, with the notable exception of the English-speaking and allophone minority there, who constitute about 20% of the population of the province. The point here is that this policy is not conceived by its supporters as a selfish or self-interested one, but as a morally justifiable one: the aim behind, and the justificatory reason offered for, this piece of legislation is to protect the French language, which is definitive of Quebecois’ cultural identity. This is not a reason acceptable from an impartial point of view, but rather, connected to a sense of identity which is partial in scope: with protecting my identity, promoting my language, and so on. So, while it is true that


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people are rarely solely self-interested, self-related individuals, the practice of justifylng actions to others, and offering reasons for one’s actions, is not synonymous with the impartial point of view.

If being reasonable may encompass partial reasons, as in the Quebec example, then, even if Barry is right that people exhibit a tendency to justify their actions to others, it doesn’t follow that they test these actions from the impartMl perspective embedded in the ‘reasonably reject’ criterion. It merely means that they offer reasons for their actions.

Thls has important implications for the contractarian formulation that Scanlon, Barry and Rawls appeal to. It suggests that people have many different reasons for their actions, and put value on different things. Can we therefore expect all ‘reasonable’ persons to arrive at the same position? Or will different people find different, even opposing, reasons ultimately persuasive? And, if it is the case that they will not arrive at a common standpoint, how can the contractarian form of argument give us determinate results? Why should we expect that there is something that all reasonable people will agree to?

111: Contractualism and the Reasonableness Motive

III. i. The Idea of Reasonable Agreement

Rawls’s new book promises to justify political liberalism not in the abstract nebulous terms of the original position but in terms of the requirements of practical politics, and specifically to h d a basis for agreement given the diversity of coinprehensive philosophical and religious conceptions. He argues that an overlapping consensus on liberal political principles (his two principles of justice) is possible among reasonable people who have conflicting comprehensive conceptions of the good.

It is crucial to the success of Rawls’s contractarian project that he conceive of the person as both reasonable and rational: they constrain their actions based on self-interested desires by the adoption of the impartial standpoint (which people as reasonable are motivated to adopt). The conception of the reasonable person, which includes the appropriate regulative relation between impartiality and self-interest, justice and the good, is modelled in the original position. More precisely, people, conceived by Rawls as reasonable, are motivated to adopt the original position, which situates people fairly, and motivated to adhere to it.

The original position, Rawls stresses, is a mere ‘device of representation’ which carries with it no metaphysical assumptions [23]. Nevertheless, his argument for adopting the original position device is that it (or more particularly, the veil of ignorance) models the ‘conviction’ that affirming a particular religious or phlosophical doctrine is not a reason to propose, or expect others to accept, a conception of justice that reflects one’s own particular conception of the good [24]. Rawls is able to attribute this conviction to reasonable people because he has characterised the relation among their desires in such a way that the impartial standpoint embedded in his conception of reasonableness has priority over, and constrains, the person’s first-order desires; and that it is impermissible from the impartial standpoint to impose one’s particular conceptions on others. But we have already seen, in Part 11, that it is not at all clear that this conception of the relations among desires is either empirically plausible, or that it does not build the conclusions that Rawls’s argument is supposed to arrive at into the assumptions of what constitutes a reasonable person.

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IIZ. ii. The Idea of an Agreement that Cannot Reasonably Be Rejected

Scanlon also puts forward a conception of reasonable agreement, which, like Rawls, imputes reasonableness to people as one of our moral motivations. In this section of the paper, the importance of Scanlon’s conception of the person for his argument will be explored, and specifically, the extent to which the contractualist notion of agreement does any work.

We have seen that Rawls argues, straightforwardly, that principles are justified if they would be endorsed by reasonable and rational individuals. By contrast, Scanlon claims that the contractualist idea is captured best by the formulation that principles are justified if they could not reasonably be rejected.

There are two aspects of Scanlon’s formulation which are designed to enhance its critical purchase. (1 ) At the core of this justificatory argument is the idea that rules are justifiable if they would be acceptable to people who are interested in reaching agreement under circumstances in which no one is deceived, manipulated or coerced. The requirement that inequalities must be acceptable to everyone (in the absence of coercion), including those who are expected to be worst off under the proposed social arrangement is intended to rule out many principles or rules which are unequal in their consequences. Barry argues that, at the minimum, slavery, apartheid and genocide are ruled out: these practices could never be justified by this criterion; and he thinks that other less extreme inequalities would also not be justifiable [25].

(2) The criterion of justifiability - that a principle (or rule or practice) is justified if it would be unreasonable to reject it - turns on the reasonableness of rejecting a principle rather than the reasonableness of accepting it. This serves to exclude certain kinds of attitudes or reasons from counting as reasons for being accepted. Scanlon’s formulation, in terms of what can be reasonably rejected, is intended to be a general standard which can be applied to everyone, with no variation for individually or culturally-relative self-sacrificial attitudes (or excessively egoistic attitudes). Thus, the issue is not whether a slave could accept a slave-holding society, or whether a woman could accept the traditional gender- based division of labour, for it is conceivable that a slave might accept the rationale underlying the practice of slavery, or a traditional woman might believe that it is her role, or women’s role, to be a nurturing support to her husband and children and advance their interests rather than her own. The question is whether the slave or the traditional woman could reasonably reject a slave-holding society or a ‘traditional’ (sexist) society. By focussing on what could reasonably be rejected, Scanlon’s criterion obtains some independence from reasons of the wrong kind. Thus, unfair or inequitable divisions would not be justified by Scanlon’s criterion, and fair divisions would be. This is the case even if the fair division were not acceptable to everyone: presumably, a traditional woman would prefer a traditional society, but she could not object on the grounds that it sacrificed her interests.

The ‘reasonably reject’ criterion, then, does have minimum critical purchase in so far as it rules out gross cases of violence, coercion and murder (genocide, slavery and apartheid). This is no mean achievement, but it is important to see precisely how it is accomplished.

It would seem, on the face of it, that the principal reason why the victims of genocide and the prospective slaves and blacks under apartheid would reject these practices is that their interests - indeed in the case of genocide, their lives - are sacrificed in favour of the interests of others (Nazis, slave-owners and whites).

How do policies such as affirmative action fare under this criterion? Affirmative action is


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intended as a way of promoting people from disadvantaged groups, such as racial or ethnic minorities, women and disabled people. If failure to protect interests is a valid ground for rejecting a principle or policy, then it would seem reasonable for white, able-bodied males, whose interests, let us suppose, are not protected under affirmative action, to reject this policy.

Regional development policies might also be objected to on the grounds that they sacrifice the interests of one group of people to benefit others. Regional development policies typically require people in one region to pay, through compulsory taxation, for the construction of roads or health facilities or programmes which benefit people in another region. The same point applies to any form of redistributive taxation.

The ‘reasonably reject’ criterion is clearly intended to rule out grossly unfair and murderous practices such as genocide and slavery, but not condemn every policy in which the interests of some are sacrificed in favour of someone else’s interests. This is evident because both Rawls and Barry plainly want to justify some form of redistribution and do not think that Scanlon’s criterion rules that out [26]. It would seem, then, that, in deciding whether a principle can be reasonably rejected, it is not sufficient merely to show that the principle is inimical to one’s interests: the criterion assumes that everyone seeks to reach agreement on reasonable terms, and this seems to presuppose an acceptance of a certain degree (as yet unspecified) of sacrifice.

This leaves unclear the precise relation between the healthy pursuit of self-interest and the impartial consideration of the interests of others, the desire to reach agreement and the desire not to sacrifice one’s own interests. Indeed, what is ‘reasonable’ here seems to presuppose a shared understanding of the acceptable line between promoting one’s own interests (or not sacrificing them) and considering the interests of others.

Moreover, it would seem that some interests are accepted as valid, while others are deemed unreasonable, and so not given anyweight. Consider, briefly, the case of a Christian fundamentalist who would not agree to a society based on state neutrality on religious issues and equal religious liberty: Perhaps she thinks that society should be organised around Christian values and inculcate the Christian faith in its children. We would not expect the fundamentalist to agree to a liberal society; but why couldn’t she reasonably reject a liberal society because it is based on assumptions which she doesn’t accept?

It is illuminating to see why her rejection is unreasonable in Scanlon’s and Barry’s terms (though not in the sense that she cannot offer reasons for it). First, the appropriate degree of sacrifice which we can reasonably expect people to make is not a quantitative question, as if interests are all equal, and can be computed on a single scale, with a 4 point sacrifice being deemed a reasonable demand, whereas a 5 point sacrifice is not. It is a qualitative question: it presupposes a conception of people’s fundamental interests; and these interests are not subjectively defined. The reason why genocide, slavery and apartheid can be ruled out is not only that they are grossly unfair, but that they involve violations of interests which we think are extremely important, and ought to be protected. The theory proceeds, then, in determining the line between ‘reasonably accepted’ and ‘reasonably sacrificed’, by imputing certain interests to the contractors - such as interests in individual freedom, in bodily security and integrity and well-being - and thus any social arrangement which does not protect people’s interests in rhese things can reasonably be rejected. The interests that a fundamentalist has in ensuring that the principles which govern her society are acceptable to her are clearly not deemed among her fundamental, objective interests.

The ‘reasonably reject’ criterion, then, presupposes a conception of antecedent interests



or objective interests: the contractualist formulation is not essential to the success of the theory. Conceiving of the rules or principles as the result of an agreement or contract is a useful heuristic device, which forces people to reflect on how a particular action or particular policy will affect others. The impartial standpoint embedded in the notion of reasonableness captures the idea that the interests of everyone must be takeninto account. But because only some interests count from the impartial standpoint, the crucial issue is which interests are fundamental (and cannot ‘reasonably’ be set aside) and which are not. Indeed, we do not need to appeal to the idea of a contract or agreement at all. We could proceed simply by outlining what a human being’s objectively valid, or justifiable, interests are, and then criticise social practices which fail to respect these interests. This way of proceeding would not only condemn slavery, genocide and apartheid, it could also be employed to determine the correct balance to be struck between self-interest and impartiality: an individual is justified in protecting her own vital or fundamental interests, but she should be willing to set aside her subjective or non-fundamental interests (what she might actually be interested in) in order to secure impartial rules which protect the fundamental interests of everyone.

Thus, the critical purchase of the ‘reasonably reject’ criterion is achieved by incorporating moral assumptions, such as what people’s fundamental interests are, into the conception of what is reasonable. And these moral values are deeply embedded within particular societies. Western liberal societies, for example, value human freedom, and this is connected to a conception of what people should be free to pursue. Given that these are the basic assumptions, it is not surprising that the criterion, as interpreted by Barry, gives us basic non-interference rules: no coercion, no enslavement, no murder. The conclusion which Barry arrives at is not problematic in itself - most of us would indeed be disturbed if genocide, slavery and apartheid were NOT ruled out by a contractualist account of moral wrongness - but it is important to see that the conclusions are implicit in the assumptions about what is reasonable, and that this threatens to vitiate the entire contractualist formulation.

Once we recognise the notion of reasonableness involves an implicit appeal to moral conceptions, such as conceptions of people’s vital or fundamental interests, it becomes apparent that the issue is not one of merely determining the proper relation between self- interest and impartiality, but that people may also reasonably disagree about what shouldbe agreed to, what interests are most important and should be protected, what is the best outcome from a moral point of view.

Some of the most intractable problems are problems of this kind. In an ethnically or racially divided society, does one treat people as equals and with respect by granting them equal rights as individuals, or by preserving their culturally distinct institutions, and granting them rights and representation through these institutions? There are moral arguments and drawbacks on both sides of this issue: one could argue that the first strategy is problematic because it is assimilationist; the second strategy, too, can be criticised on the grounds that it treats people only in terms of their identity as black or native or Croat.

Divisive issues such as abortion are also not resolved by appeal to the criterion of what could be reasonably rejected. The abortion issue revolves around two quite different moral points of view: one, which focusses on the fact that autonomy is not possible for women if they are left hostage to biological factors beyond their control, and that women have a right to control their own lives; and the other, which focusses on the life or potential life of the fetus. It is difficult to know how the ‘reasonably reject’ criterion would apply in this case, but it seems plausible to argue that one or both sides would be conceived of as unreasonable


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because unable to arrive at a compromise or policy which incorporates the desires of the other side. This is suggested by Scanlon’s definition of the reasonable person, as someone who is motivated to seek agreement with others on terms they could not reasonablyreject. It would seem to follow that in an intractable controversy such as abortion, one or both sides are not motivated to seek agreement, and are therefore being unreasonable. This conclusion highlights the problem with such an abstract criterion: not only is it difficult to envision what an acceptable (to both sides) resolution of this issue might be, but Scanlon’s basic assumption, viz., that people are motivated solely by the desire to reach agreement with others (terms are not important to them), is quite false. Ln the case of abortion, the issue is not one of the appropriate line between healthy self-interest and regard for the interests of others; we have two contending moralities, and two quite different reasons or justifications for these points of view, which are weighty enough (in their proponent’s eyes) to lead them to reject the arguments advanced by those on the opposite side of the issue.

The problem with Scanlon’s assumption is that people don’t simply want to reach an agreement: person A might want an agreement which satisfies her basic aims and desires and interests (not any kind of agreement will do). Person B might be interested in an agreement if it satisfies her interests, but she would not agree to something unless she has an interest in it. Once we recognise that people are not simply interested in reaching an agreement, but that what is actually agreed to is important to most people, it becomes apparent that Scanlon’s conception of the subjective motivational set serves to sidestep many of the most difficult issues facing a contractarian form of argument. There is no substantial degree of pluralism in Scanlon’s conception, because people reason in the same way; and the obvious fact that people have aims and interests and desires which they seek to advance in an agreement, and may reasonably disagree over what should be agreed to, is not considered at all by Scanlon.

The principal difficulty with Scanlon’s concept of ‘reasonableness’ (as well as Rawls’s and Barry’s; see Sections II.ii and 1II.i) is that it is subjective in the sense that it is attributed to each moral subject as part of her moral motivations, and is not explicated in objective, i.e., inter-subjective, terms. His assumption that each person constrains her first-order desires according to what satisfies the ‘reasonably reject’ test is functionally equivalent to assuming a common standpoint for all moral subjects, which serves as the basis of agreement. The assumption is that each person reasons in the same way, and indeed that this reasoning is contractarian in form; thus, the contractarian argument makes sense because it mirrors the form of moral reasoning which occurs in each of us.

The problem with this, of course, is that the contractarian formulation is not doing much work: most of the work is done at the level of his fairly abstract conception of the person, and specifically by the assumption that each of us has a fundamental desire to act in ways that no one could reasonably reject. Of course, a theorist has to make some assumptions about the nature of the person and so on, but the contractarian formulation should do some independent work: what comes out of the argument should be more substantial, more elaborate, than what went in; and should be able to illuminate some intuitions or assumptions, and provide a basis for rejecting others. But Scanlon’s theory seems dangerously circular. He assumes that each of us is motivated to seek agreement which no one could reasonably reject. Once he makes the assumption that each of us is motivated to seek agreement on impartial terms, all the concrete problems about what counts as reasonable, about how to bring people’s diverse interests and desires into relation, do not arise in the first place.

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IV: Conclusion

Because reasonableness has mainly been conceived as a subjective concept, as one of our moral motivations (by Scanlon, Rawls and Barry), the meaning of the concept has been left indeterminate and the possibility that the concept itself is contested has not been explored.

The standard of reasonableness, if interpreted as an inter-subjective concept, open to debate and criticism, is a useful heuristic device, which has some critical purchase - it can rule out gross cases of violence, murder and coercion.

However, it is important to note that this criterion has critical purchase only by ‘transcendentalising’ the self, by appealing to what the reasonable person, not the person as she actually is, but the person as reasonable, would not reject; and this conception of the reasonable person further presupposes a concept of essential or fundamental interests which the self can justifiably protect. Because the theory operates with a conception of justifiable objective interests which serves as the basis of the conception of reasonableness, it must disregard or abstract from people’s subjectively-defined interests, such as their interest in living in a society of a certain kind. This, in turn, means that the reasonable agreement criterion is of limited usefulness, because some of the most controversial issues or questions revolve around which human interests are fundamental, which interests should be protected by the state.

This conclusion should hardly be surprising: if, as Barry, Rawls and Scanlon all accept, reasonableness is a rnoralcategory, it would seem to follow that people with different beliefs, different moralities would have different conceptions of important human interests and different conceptions of what constitutes a reasonable justification.

The concept of reasonableness is not meta-political in the sense that it is neutral on political issues, and regulative with respect to political debate: it is itself an essentially political question. Whether we would prefer that our society values human freedom above security and order, for example, or universal individual rights above group-based rights - these questions cannot be determined by appealing to a concept of reasonableness. What is reasonable is open to debate, and indeed being actually agreed to in debate, in a political forum, may be definitive of public justification and reason-giving.

This conclusion - that the criterion is quintessentially political - does not lead to relativism: practices such as genocide, apartheid and slavery are ruled out by the assumption of the basic moral equality of human beings, and this assumption can always be argued for, and is indeed rarely denied in theory (though practices based on violence and coercion persist).

What recent work on the concept of reasonableness needs to do is to unpack some of the basic moral premises which make the argument go, and ensure that these are explicitly argued for. There may be no agreement on some issues, but if public justification and reason-giving are important (and who could reasonably reject the practice of reason-giving?), then it must be important to spell out the fundamental assumptions on which one’s reasons and arguments are based.

Margaret Moore, Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3Gl.


178 M. Moore

NOTES [ 11 The author wishes to thank Brian Barry, Vinorio Buffacci, John Charvet, Les Jacobs, John McGarry, Jan

Narveson, Steve Newman and Wayne Norman for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. She is also grateful to Joanne Bender and Joanne Voisin for research and editorial assistance.

[2] T. M. SCANLQN (1982) Contractualism and utilitarianism, in: AMARNA sm and BERNARD W U S (Eds.) Urilitnrirmism ad Eeyond (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 11 1.

[3] M,, p. 110. [4] BRIAN BARRY (1989) Theories ofJusck-e (London, Harvester-Wheatshedl p. 284. [5] T. M. SCANLON (1982) Contractualism and utilitarianism, p. 11 1. [6] Ibid.,p. 125. (71 Ibid.,p. 105-6. [a] Ibid.., p. 110. [9] See SAMUEL FREEMAN (1991) Contractualism, moral motivation, and practical reason, The 3ournd of

Philosophy, LXXXVIII, 6, pp. 293-5. [lo] JOHNRAWLF (1993) PdinkdLihaiim (New York, ColumbiaUniversity Press), pp. xv-xvi. (111 Ibid.,pp. 50-51.

[13) Ibtd.,p. 54. [14] Ibid.,~. 52. [15] Ibid.,p. 52. [16] BRIANBARRY (1989)op. cit.,p. 285. (17) Ibid,pp. 286-7. (18) Ibid., p. 284. [19] Ibtd.,p. 285. [20] Ibid., p. 288. [21] Ibid., p. 285. 122) JOHNRAWLS, (1993) PdcicdLiber&,pp. 35,6248. [23] Ibid., p. 24. [24] Ibid., p. 24. [25] BRIAN BARRY, op. cit., p. 347. [26] JOHN h w u (1993) op. cit., pp. 48-50; BRIAN BARRY op. cit., pp. 284-288.

[121 Ibid., p. 54.

C Society for Applied Philosophy, 1996

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On Reasonableness