The Autonomy of Reason

The Enlightenment has been widely described as an age of reason, but the moderate Enlightenment — at least until Kant — put many more limits on reason, especially in areas like religion and politics, than Plato and Aristotle did.

Kant made the autonomy of reason — its non-subordination to anything else — an explicit theme. Rhetorically, of course, he also famously talks about limits on reason, but really what he wants to limit are extra-rational accretions woven into Cartesian and Wolffian rationalisms — various received truths, and so on. Descartes had quickly moved from hyperbolic doubt to question-begging acceptance of many received truths as intuitively reasonable. Wolff and his followers, to whom Kant was primarily reacting, did not even pretend to doubt.

If reason is to be truly autonomous, it cannot start from received truths. Kant himself was sympathetic to some of these received truths, but too honest to pretend they were self-evident or derivable from reason alone. Kant is often misunderstood as mainly a critic of reason, and certainly not its unconditional defender, but he is actually clear that the autonomy of reason is unconditional. Too often, readers of Kant focus too much on autonomy of a subject rather than autonomy of reason, but the practical autonomy attributable to a so-called subject in Kant is actually derivative, based on the putative subject’s participation in the autonomy of reason. In Making It Explicit, Brandom says where Descartes had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant focused instead on their grip on us (p. 9). (See also Kant’s Groundwork.)

Hegel has been widely misunderstood as an example of the autonomy of reason gone mad. Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard have performed an invaluable service in clarifying what Hegel was really trying to do, which was in part to sincerely take up Kant’s honesty about received truths and to push it even further.

Aristotle said that of all things, reason most deserves to be called divine. He does not use a word like autonomy, but the effect is the same. Nothing is higher. (See also Interpretation; Brandom on Truth.)

I think of the Kantian autonomy of reason as necessarily involving something like the free play of the Critique of Judgment. The Reason that is truly autonomous in the Kantian sense will be a hermeneutical Reason (see Brandom and Hermeneutics).

Blame and Blamelessness

Ethics for Aristotle is primarily concerned with ethos (dispositions to act in particular ways, associated with character and culture), and only secondarily with particular actions. Particular actions are mainly addressed in a higher-order way, through discussions of practical judgment and responsibility. We should try raise people to have good character, and we should generally trust people with good character to do the right thing.

For Aristotle, perfection is always perfection according to a kind, and perfection according to a kind is understood in such a way as to be actually achievable. The Greeks in general had a concept of blamelessness that was considered to be achievable. The world could do with a lot less blame; we should learn from this.

I would say you are blameless if you have done all that is within your power (and you are a hero if you in a meaningful way actually take responsibility for things that are beyond your power). If you really act from a disposition to recognize others as independent of yourself and your wishes — as one would a friend — and are reasonably attentive to circumstances, then you cannot reasonably be faulted for your actions, and your conduct will be blameless. If one has been well socialized, being blameless is not really all that hard.

A blameless person can be wrong, and can even do things for which apology is appropriate (because of an actual bad effect, not any blameworthiness). But if you consistently recognize others as independent of your wishes and take reasonable care that your words and deeds are appropriate to the situation, then you are blameless.

I think the practical import of this stands even on the basis of Brandom’s innovations (see Rethinking Responsibility; Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness). Adding back in a responsibility for unintended consequences that is shared with many others and whose failures are forgiven should not negate what I am calling blamelessness.

I also think that blaming in general serves no constructive practical purpose. To blame someone is basically to say they deserve punishment. Punishments resemble vengeance; they may be deemed justified in some circumstances, but we should not fool ourselves that they are constructive. Punishment per se does not improve anyone’s ethos. Either someone really gets the message that they did something wrong — in which case there is no need for punishment — or they don’t, in which case it is unlikely that punishment will change that. I don’t pretend to have a general solution for crime in society or for misbehavior of children, but I distrust the impulse to punish. Fear of punishment sometimes prevents bad behavior, and sometimes behavior is what counts, but fear has nothing to do with moral improvement.

Reasonableness

How reasonable we are in acting in our lives is largely a matter of our emotional constitution. Our character is the result of many choices we have made, and many things that have happened to us. Character is not something we are born with; it is acquired, by living a life.

A life of reason as a moral goal has little to do with applying logic to situations in a calculating way. Reasonableness has to do with not being unreasonable — i.e., not behaving in ways that are unreasonable from the point of view of others. This is largely a matter of what might be called emotional intelligence.

A cornerstone of this is recognition of other people as independent from us and our wishes. Aristotle pointed out that mutual recognition of this sort is one of the defining marks of true friendship or love. Hegel made mutual recognition a general goal.

However, our ability to participate in mutual recognition here and now comes back again to our emotional state and our acquired emotional constitution. (See also Interpretive Charity; Practical Judgment; More Difference, Less Conflict.)

The Status of Ethics

For a long time, I mostly reduced ethics to empathy and an endlessly open Socratic quest for truth. The way to be ethical was just to seek the fullest possible understanding, in things small as well as large. Truth about how things really are seemed to me to be the decisive factor. Thinking about politics and history in terms of abstractly considered, putatively free choices by individuals seemed like a massive source of confusion, failing to take real-world contexts and constraints into account.

Under the influences of recent discourse about normativity, I now consider a sort of meta-ethics to be a good candidate for first philosophy. Logic, epistemology, and ontology can all be seen as depending on normative considerations.

It took some time for me to become comfortable with normativity talk. I was suspicious that in the background there must inevitably be some sleight-of-hand grant of deontological status to empirical “norms”, which would give the whole thing an inherently conservative slant. But this need not be the case. Normativity is just a fancy word recent philosophers use for value.

I still prefer to translate deontological vocabulary to something more hermeneutic. The only unconditionally binding imperatives are purely formal, and thus cannot provide unconditional guidance for action. This does not mean anything goes. There are meaningful differences and gradients everywhere. All differences are relative by definition, yet they are still differences.

The Platonic dialogues posit the Good as the first principle of all, prior to any matters of fact, beyond being and beyond knowledge. Aristotle developed a rich account of normativity internal to nature. Each thing has its own internal good, which for an animal for instance is a way of life. Modern mathematical natural science explains many new facts without reference to normativity, but nothing about this invalidates normative discourse. Kant and Hegel argue in effect that normative, “practical” reason about what to do is superior to (and actually informs) theoretical reason about what is.