Page 1 of 7

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

13 No. 51 APRIL 1963
pp.97-106
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE REASONABLE MAN
I
The Laws of England place great weight on the Reasonable Man. They will not, and sometimes will
say it is because they cannot, specify exactly what ought to be done in all circumstances, and will
phrase their demands instead in terms of what a reasonable man would in the circumstances do. So too
juries are directed to bring in a verdict of Guilty only if the charge is proved beyond reasonable doubt,
without there being any account offered of what exactly a reasonable doubt is. It is an old tradition.
Plato, Aristotle and St. Paul all insisted on the inability of the letter of the law to exhaust the full
content of its spirit, and Aristotle defines a key term of his moral philosophy by reference to what the
reasonable man would decide, {\it ho_i an ho phronimos horiseien In modern philosophy, however, the
Reasonable Man, and the notion of reasonableness generally, receives little respect. The word is nearly
always challenged. ``What do you mean by `reasonable'?'' it is asked; ``I do not understand what the
word `reasonable' means. According to what criteria is the word being used ?. What are the canons of
being reasonable ?''. This question can sometimes be fairly asked and illuminatingly answered. We can
sometimes subsume the particular inference under some general characterisation of inference types. We
might be able to answer the question by saying that it was an induction by elimination or an induction
by enumeration; we might specify whether it was on economic or political grounds we were advocating
aid to poorer nations, or whether the reasonableness of our policy was simply a moral reasonableness,
that they needed what we could well afford to give. The inferences we actually use in the course of our
arguments are highly variegated, and it may well make our contention clearer if we can classify the
inference we are drawing as being of a familiar type. Thus far the question ``What do you mean by
`reasonable'?'' is [98] fair and helpful: but often it is used rhetorically rather than to elucidate; as a
means of disallowing the use of the word `reasonable' altogether, and insisting that it always be
replaced by a substitute. Used this way, the question often has a paralysing effect on philosophical
discussion, because although sometimes we are using the word `reasonable ' to flag a simple, easily
recognised inference of a familiar, well-specified type, usually such inferences are too obvious to need
any flagging at all, and we tend to reserve the word `reasonable ' to flag those inferences which are not
simple or completely specified in formal terms. In calling them reasonable, we mean not that they are
particular instances of some standard type of inference, but that we believe that a reasonable man after
examining this particular inference will recognise its force. Men challenged to say what we mean in
terms other than the word `reasonable we are often at a loss what answer to return, for the word
`reasonable had been chosen just because there was no other, more specific term available. We can
sometimes recapitulate our argument, stressing those features which seem most to give it weight : but
beyond a certain point we can do no more, and in most cases a determined opponent need never let
himself be brought to admit the force of an argument he does not like. In most cases, as I shall maintain
in this paper, we cannot exhibit our inferences as being of certain, generally accepted, types. The
rhetorical question `` What do you mean by `reasonable'?'' assumes that we can, and our inability to
answer is taken as evidence that our thoughts are confused.
It is taken for granted that all respectable reasoning can be formalised, and that any sense of
reasonableness which cannot be articulated into definite and statable reasons in standard form is
untrustworthy and suspect. Thus Hare, arguing against Toulmin's ``evaluative'' inference, says1 ``If this
is to be a valid inference, there must be a rule of inference (say R) to the effect that inferences of this
form are valid''. It is easy to see the attraction of such a doctrine. Leaving matters to people's subjective
sense of what is reasonable seems to open the floodgates to unreason and prejudice. Only by having a
definite written rule can we combat the arguments of stupid and opinionated men. The programmes of
Page 2 of 7
Carnap and Hempel, if they could be carried out, would secure us against much that is false and
phoney, which less rigid criteria are quite unable to keep out.
Unfortunately much besides the phoney is excluded. The humane disciplines have not been amenable
to being tidied up. Historical explanations as actually put forward by practising historians do not fit the
schema of historical explanation put forward by Hempel, and claims that, appearances notwithstanding,
actual instances do really conform to the pattern laid down, are either made good analytically and
trivially, or are full of Procrustean menace. It is possible, for each historical explanation or inference, to
posit a covering law or rule of inference tailored to fit the case in point, so that the explanation or
inference in question is trivially an instance of a covering law or rule of inference. One merely repeats
the [99] particular explanation or inference in a pseudo-general form. I have my own doubts whether
even this little is legitimate,2 but in any case it must be obvious that not much is to be achieved by such
means. If a philosopher is unwilling to legitimate every explanation and every inference by positing the
corresponding law or rule of inference, and in so far as he is unable, as philosophers have hitherto been
unable, to produce a plausible account of how actual arguments could be shown to fit into antecedently
determined schemata, he must be prepared to extrude such arguments from the corpus of respectable
knowledge. This many philosophers are prepared to do. History is not a respectable discipline in their
eyes. Nor is Law, nor is Literature. These are soft subjects, where anything goes, without objective
standards of argument; and unless and until these subjects can be rationally reconstructed into proper
disciplines with formally defined concepts and properly formulated canons of inference, they are not
worthy to be spoken of in the same breath as respectable subjects like the physical sciences, and
mathematics itself.
The trouble is that not even the respectable disciplines are respectable enough. Many attempts have
been made to formalise scientific inference, but so far without success. Scientific theories, of course,
have been formalised, in a way in which historical theories have not; but it has not been possible to
reduce all scientific inferences to instances of a set of definite and statable rules. There are canons of
induction, but they are not complete. Always it is necessary to supplement them with common sense.
We have many useful procedures for the elimination of falsehood, and Popper has shown what power
the falsifiability principle has. But though we can knock down false theories according to rules, we
have as yet no complete set of rules for thinking up true ones. That demands nous.
The failure of an attempt does not prove its impossibility, and a philosopher might still hope that a
completely formal theory of inductive inference might one day be achieved. We might doubt, but could
not conclusively confute, this claim; and though, so long as scientific inference is not completely
formalised, it would be churlish to condemn the humanities for their informality, we might still be
uneasy and feel that they had got only a temporary reprieve. The case, however, is very much altered
by the fact that even in mathematics, the most formal of all disciplines, the formalist programme cannot
be carried through to completion. This follows from Gdels theorem. Given any respectable
formalisation of mathematics, with definite axioms and definite rules of inference, we can produce an
informal argument which will convince any mathematician of the truth of a proposition which cannot
be proved from those axioms by means of those rules of inference. This to my mind is decisive. If not
even deductive inference can be completely formalised, then it cannot be a reproach to any other sort of
inference that it cannot be formalised either. The programme of the formalisers loses its spell, and it
cannot be an objection to our using the word `reasonable' that we are unable to give complete criteria of
when it may be properly applied, [100]
II
The negative part of my thesis is important, but not constructive. I may fairly be asked whether the
doctrine of the reasonable man means anything more than that the programmes of Carnap and Hempel
are impossible of achievement. ``Shew us the Reasonable Man, and it sufficeth us.''
Page 3 of 7
This I cannot do. What I can do, in a partial and inadequate attempt to meet the challenge, is to offer an
account of how reasonableness is embodied in many men, an account of the social structure of
reasonableness. It is, so to speak, an exercise in logical snobbery. Most people make some
discriminations between more and less reasonable men, and the most reasonable men make the most
coherent and most fine discriminations. More fully, I claim first that a great many people are
sometimes able to say that one argument is reasonable and another is not, or that one argument is more
reasonable than another, or that one person is being reasonable and another unreasonable, or one is
being more reasonable than another. I claim, secondly, that the judgements of different people on the
same arguments, or on the same persons arguing, tend to coincide, though far from completely
coinciding. With closely balanced arguments and arguers support is apt to divide more or less equally,
but there are many extreme cases, which we could regard as paradigm cases, where almost every one is
agreed. This is enough to show that judgements of reasonableness are not matters of personal whim,
varying from man to man arbitrarily. My third claim is that, with persons, being reasonable turns out in
fact to be a dispositional rather than an episodic quality. Although we can all think of counter-
examples, where a man whose judgement we all respect gets hold of the wrong end of the stick and
cannot be brought to see sense, or where some highly hysterical woman for once shows herself
surprisingly sane, on the whole our experience is that people who have been reasonable in the past will
turn out to be reasonable in the future also, so much so that we are prepared to suspend our own
immediate unfavourable assessments of their reasonableness on a particular issue in the anticipation
that further consideration or fuller understanding will counter first impressions. That is, although we
start with the individual's immediate assessment of reasonableness, this assessment is capable of
correction, thanks to the transfer of the quality from particular arguments to particular arguers.
In the same way as we allow our immediate assessments of the reasonableness of people to be
confronted with and sometimes corrected by our earlier and more considered assessments, so we allow
our own assessments to be modified by those of others whom we respect. This is possible on account of
the fourth fact on which I build, namely that wise men think alike, esthloi men gar haplos, pantodapoi
kakoi3 Again I stress that I do not claim unanimity on behalf of the wise, nor do I deny that the learned
world is riven by controversy : but I do claim that reasonable men do tend to agree more than they
disagree, particularly in their assessments of the [101] reasonableness of third parties. The appearance
to the contrary is, I think, largely illusory. It is like the law. We have the impression that the law is very
uncertain, because we hear of so many doubtful cases; but we forget the innumerably many cases that
are never brought to court, because they are so clear that the parties settle without recourse to
adjudication. So too in general, we have the impression of discord because controversy provokes men
to give utterance, and attracts attention, while agreement is silent and little noticed. And that there is a
large measure of underlying agreement can be argued from the fact that we have more or less
successfully embodied our assessments of reasonableness in social forms. It is open to the critic to
object that what people are agreeing about is not of any importance, or is too much, or indeed
altogether, determined by social conditioning; but that the judgements of the ``wise'' do tend to coincide
can hardly be denied.
With these four facts we can establish and refine a category of reasonable men who more or less,
though always imperfectly, embody the ideal of the Reasonable Man. The ideal gains substance and
shape from its embodiments, rather than vice versa. And I would maintain further that, anchored in the
way I have described, the concept of the Reasonable Man has a fundamental part to play in our
conceptual structure. Although in the nature of the case one cannot produce a proof that the Reasonable
Man is always right and worthy to be believed, I can, I think, show that he has many of the marks of
being right.
First, there is the coherence and stability of the reasonable men, the wise. They tend to agree in their
assessments, and they tend to assess one another favourably. The latter, perhaps, is not a very positive
recommendation. Back-scratching is a fairly common characteristic, and not a particularly endearing
one to outsiders. Nevertheless, the contrary trait, scratching out one another's eyes, is even less
Page 4 of 7
endearing, and a positive disqualification. The fact that reasonable men are not thus disqualified from
being collectively right, should be noted if not dwelt on. The former, the way in which reasonable men
agree in their assessments of third parties, is a strong argument in favour of their being on to something
real, and not just each exercising his fancy. Thus even in the case of perception, where there is a strong
tradition of the democracy of all observers, we are willing on occasion to give credence to the reports
of a minority provided they can agree among themselves. There are some organic compounds which to
certain people have a bitter taste, whereas to everybody else they are tasteless. We do not accuse either
part of the population of being mistaken, although their discriminations and assimilations are not shared
by all. If all seventh sons of seventh sons were able to agree in their descriptions of the ghosts they saw,
we should have to concede that they did possess second sight, and on similar terms we should allow
sixth sense to subjects of experiments in Extra-Sensory Perception.
The discriminations of the Reasonable Man are in better case. The resemblance is with flicker
photometry.9 ``Only observers, or groups of [102] observers, who find for these solutions a ratio of
transmission factors, the `Y/B ratio', which is close to unity (at any rate to within 5 per cent) should
make observations in heterochromatic photometry'',9 and these form only a minority of the
population.6 Nevertheless, not only do these observers obtain results consistent as between one
occasion and another, as well as between one observer and another,9 but their discriminations tie in
with those of observers outside the &eactue:lite. It is a rational procedure to throw away the readings of
some, because they are colour blind, and of others, because their readings show a marked deviation
from the mean in favour of blue or of yellow light. And though the majority will not reach the same
results as the selected minority in difficult cases, there are more clear-cut cases where the minority
view will be accepted by nearly everyone. Similarly with reasonable men. They are not merely a self-
appointed &eactue:lite. Although they are not simply elected by the suffrages of the many, and their
findings are often not capable of independent validation by any chance met featherless biped, yet their
judgments are sufficiently consonant with the opinions of the many to clear them of any suspicion of
being merely the eccentricities of eggheads. Though reasonable men have often rejected popular views
as unreasonable, there is enough contact and overlap of judgements to justify THE CLAIM that the
refined assessments of the wise may be more sophisticated than those of simple men, but are basically
the same in nature and intention.
The corrigibility of assessments of reasonableness preserves them from some of the more purely
philosophical criticisms which would prove fatal. No quasi-naturalistic fallacy is being committed,
because we are offering an explication not of the meaning of the word `reasonable' but of how its
applications work out, and no Cephalus fallacy is being involved because we are not offering complete,
criteria for its applicability. That is, it always makes sense to ask whether a particular argument or
particular person, generally accepted, or accepted by those best qualified to judge, as reasonable is in
fact reasonable, and it is always conceivable, until at least the arguments have been gone into, that the
answer may be `No'. Again, many of the traditional arguments against intuitionism do not seem to
apply here. In saying that most people sometimes have a feeling of a particular argument's being
reasonable, or that some people often have a well developed sense of what is reasonable and what is
not, no perceptual analogy is being made. The content of the feeling that something is reasonable is
given by the `that . . .' clause, and it is to miss the point to ask how we are to go from the feeling to the
judgment itself, or to point out that it is logically possible to have the feeling although the argument in
question was not in fact reasonable : for the feeling is the tentative articulation of [103] the judgement,
and if ever we came to recognise that something we had previously thought to be reasonable is not
reasonable after all, we cease to feel that it is.
To the demand, then, ``Shew us the Reasonable Man'', I reply, Establishment man that I am, by
pointing to the structure of our society, and the fact that although there is no completely reasonable
man, there are some fairly reasonable men, who are generally recognised as such by the consensus of
opinion and who, to a much higher degree, recognise one another as such. A fairly widely distributed,
though not very subtle, ability to discriminate on a few occasions between reasonable and unreasonable
Page 5 of 7
arguments is refined and corrected to produce the highly discriminating, though for the most part
informal, assessments of reasonableness which we find in our society. The fact that we can engage in,
and sometimes settle, disputes for which no formal decision-procedures exist and that social activities
which depend on the possibility of this can be carried on, is the final vindication of the Reasonable Man
: and conversely, if nearly all men are reasonable some of the time, some more than others, some quite
a lot of the time but none all of the time, then we should expect society to take the shape which in fact
it does.
III
In order that I may not seem to be merely canonizing the Establishment in the name of Reason, let me
emphasize the fallibility of the Reasonable Man. The Reasonable Man can make mistakes and he
knows it, and this feature determines the whole complexion of our thought. Reasonable men can also
be collectively mistaken, and have been. This is the conclusive refutation of the critics who maintain
that the whole social structure, which I construe as embodying the reasonable man, is really only the
effect of social conditioning. It is intelligible to call in question some view firmly held by the
Establishment; not only intelligible, but sometimes done, and sometimes successfully. The way of
moral and intellectual reformers is hard, but it would be futile if accepted views were not corrigible by
any recourse to reason, and congealed prejudice and orthodoxy were the only standard of appeal: and it
is because intellectual and moral reform is possible and has happened, and reasonable men have been
brought to realise that they were mistaken, that we can construe the structure of society as the
embodiment of an ideal of reasonableness, distorted though no doubt it is by other, non-rational, social
pressures, and not just simply as a system of ossified prejudice.
The fallibility of the Reasonable Man accounts for much else. It is this that is responsible for the
dialectical character of much of our thinking. If I were infallible, my soliloquies would be above
reproach: but being liable to err, as we all are, it is wise to talk things over with somebody else as a
check, and being fairly often mistaken, as I am, it is unlikely that I shall be able to talk for long without
my listener wanting to interrupt. [104] Argument is not, as many philosophers have been inclined
uncritically to assume, a matter of a solitary ego cogitating about an impersonal it, and developing a
theme in a series of articulate and logically connected propositions forming a continuous monologue: it
is rather a two-person activity, yours as much as mine, each of us probing the weak spots in the other's
case, each modifying and correcting his position or his formulation of it in the light of the other's
objections or misinterpretations. With the partial exception of mathematics, where some of the
arguments are almost beyond question, most of our reasoning is dialectical in structure. It proceeds
through claim and counter-claim, objection and rebuttal, considering first one side of the case and then
the other; and the typical connective of argument is not `therefore' but `but'.
The dialectical nature of our thinking imposes further conditions. It not only reflects our fallibility, so
that reasonable men can find themselves in disagreement---if they did not disagree there would be
nothing for them to argue about---but requires that there should also be other beliefs shared by both
parties---if they did not agree at all, there would be nothing for them to argue from.8 Not only some
beliefs but certain goals must be held in common.9 For a dialogue is a co-operative venture as well as a
dispute, a talking with as well as a talking against, a conversation as well as a debate. From the clash of
opposing opinions in the course of a discussion we seek to shake loose the falsehoods among them and
winnow out the truth, but the interchange becomes a sterile and empty altercation unless both parties
are united by the common purpose of seeking truth, so that each would rather modify his position for
the sake of truth than maintain it by means of turning a deaf ear to all argument for the sake of his
amour propre. This is the distinction between dialektike and eristike, between rational discussion and
the mere scoring of debating points, that Plato draws in the seventh BOOK of the Republic.
10 The differences between dialektike and eristike, because they are impossible to characterize except
in vaguely moral terms, have been overlooked by philosophers who have seldom realised that argument
is properly between friends, not enemies, and that though one may well begin an argument with the
Page 6 of 7
intention of vindicating the rightness of one's views, it is also a condition of having a proper argument,
that one should bring to it a willingness to be convinced of the wrongness of one's views, should
convincing reasons be adduced. Only if each party to an argument recognises himself, and believes the
other, to be subject to the common tribunal of reason, in the sense that each would rather reach the right
solution than merely have his own [105] way, is it worth while arguing at all. There is an essential non-
egocentricity which being reasonable requires, and which also is a sine qua non of a man's engaging in
any common pursuit. A rational agent cannot be completely solipsistic in his thinking. The entirely
self-centred subject suffers from a logical original sin that precludes him from reaching the level of
rational discourse. By a certain grace, which we cannot explain, human beings are enabled to burst out
of their egocentric predicament and are not completely cut off from their fellows, but can commune
with them, and together with them can on occasion participate in the elucidation of what is reasonable
and right.
The rules for the reasonable conduct of a dialogue cannot be fully formulated, and therefore no
complete classification of sound arguments is possible. Nevertheless, a useful, although partial,
classification of types of argument can, be built up on the basis of the extent of agreement in purpose
presupposed by the argument and the sanctions for failure to play fair. The minimal agreement for
discourse to be possible is that both parties should desire to communicate, and there are some rules
failure to observe which involves a breakdown of COMMUNICATION. The corresponding type of
argument is deductive argument. It presupposes only this minimal measure of agreement, and if a
person refuses to acknowledge the force of deductive inferences, then communication with him
becomes impossible, and we can only say, with Plato, let us separate, ean chairein. It is natural to
extend agreement to cover not only the bare condition of consistency, without which on any individual
occasion communication would break down, but the stronger condition of a common external world,
without which common context we could not come to communicate with one another. If there is any
common external world, the appeal to the evidence of the senses, ``Go, look and see'', must be an
appropriate method of resolving some disputes; and if that common external world is to serve as a
backcloth to effective communication, it must have a soi-disant consistency of its own that would
justify the use of inductive inferences in argument. Nor need we stop short at things. We have an idea
of what it is to be a person, since if we were not persons we could not be, as we are, communicating
with each other, and on the assumption of other persons being of like passions with oneself, one can
hazard, though arguments about other people are more than usually frail, a conjecture on how they feel
and what their reactions to given circumstances are going to be. Further fusion of purpose and deeper
levels of rapport are possible, right on to the extreme, ideal case, where the parties forget their separate
interests altogether, and want nothing so much as to merge their individual viewpoints and achieve a
TRUE marriage of minds in a common apprehension of the truth.
Much academic writing has suffered because the author has not kept clearly in view what sort of
discourse he is composing and what sort of reader he is addressing, but keeps breaking off in the course
of his argument to give qualifications or justifications appropriate to quite a different type [106] of
argument addressed to a different audience. In philosophy the confusion has been worse than merely
stylistic. Instead of being content to deal with one sort of problem proposed by one sort of enquirer, the
philosopher has felt impelled to try to answer in one breath every question that any one could raise, and
meet every conceivable objection. The philosopher must take on all comers, and therefore is unable to
avail himself of the agreement which underlies any particular argument, but must confine himself to
reasoning that is coercive on everybody, that is to deductive reasoning, and with this alone must set
himself against the world. Thus it is that, since the time of Descartes, philosophy has been almost
exclusively concerned with the problems of a solitary and suspicious don, wrapt in his own thoughts,
prepared to be as unreasonably sceptical as his forebears were foolishly credulous, who occasionally
emerges from his bedroom to make sure that his study furniture is still where it was the night before,
and is tempted at intervals throughout the day to peer back round the bedroom door just to make
absolutely sure that it has really not become inhabited by a horde of pink elephants. These problems
have their importance. Epistemological persecution mania is a distressing complaint, and one by which
Page 7 of 7
we are all afflicted sometimes. But not at all times. Loneliness is not the only condition of mankind,
and our sociability is as philosophically significant as our solitude. To be a philosopher one does not
have to be an anchorite, solely concerned with one's own experience, and anxious only to use language
as a means of mapping it for one's private delectation: one can also be a member of a community of
colleagues, all of whom mean well some of the time, but all liable to mistakes and errors. Not all their
arguments are sound, nor all their objections well-founded : but it is a manageable task to deal with the
actual objections people actually advance, whereas it is a hopeless endeavour to answer all the
objections one can imagine an advocatus diaboli bringing up: and criticisms can be constructive as well
as destructive. And therefore in our philosophy we should base ourselves on a different view of human
nature, fallible still, but not necessarily false, reasonable, though not necessarily right: we should
continue to realise that our colleagues and companions may be wrong, but should no longer half
consciously assume that they must be: we should be wary of human judgement, but not despair of it,
and should seek to correct rather than confute. For, in the last resort, human judgement is all that we
have to go by: and we can only trust that it is possible for us to be reasonable, and sometimes even to
be right.
J. R. LUCAS
Merton College, Oxford.
1. Philosophical Quarterly, 1950-51, p. 374.
2. See Lucas, ``The Lesbian Rule'', Philosophy 1955.
3. Nicomachean Ethics Bk. II, 1106 b 35.
4. See J.Guild, Proceedings of the Optical Convention 1926, Vol. 1, pp. 88-104.
5. J.W.T.Walsh, Photometry, p. 311, based on Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society
of New York, 23, 1928, p. 361.
6. Guild, op. cit., p. 99; out of 130 observers, only 25 were ``normal''.
7. Contrast Walsh, op. cit., p. 293, on the direct comparison of colour differences without the use of a
flicker photometer: `` . . . When, however, the colour difference is increased beyond this limit, not
only do different observers disagree markedly, but the same observer becomes inconsistent from
day to day''.
8. Cf. Lucas, ``On Not Worshipping Facts'', Philosophical Quarterly, 1958, p. 146.
9. Cf. David Pole, The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein, London, 1958, p. 59. At the time of writing
this paper, I did not have the opportunity of considering Mr. Pole's subsequent BOOK, Conditions
of Rational ENQUIRY, which DEALS with the theme of this paper in a slightly different, but
much more adequate, fashion.
10. Republic 539 b.e ; for the word, see Sophist 23le.
11. Return to bibliography