Overview

Reasonableness plays many roles in our lives. In Anglo-American law, it is the yardstick for a wide range of behavior-the ""reasonable-person standard"" governs everything from contract enforcement to killing in self-defense. In politics, a state can maintain a liberal democracy only if its citizens are reasonable. In ordinary life, we hold each other accountable to reason, criticizing as unreasonable bosses who demand too much of our time or partners who make decisions without regard for our preferences. But what does it mean to be reasonable? Being reasonable is not the same as being rational. It is also different from being thoughtful. In Being Reasonable, Krista Lawlor argues that a reasonable person seeks to understand what is valuable. A reasonable person must be rational enough to figure out what is valuable and thoughtful enough to care about what other people find valuable, but rationality and thoughtfulness alone do not suffice to make one reasonable. Even an ideally rational and thoughtful person might fail to understand, or lack the concern to understand, what is valuable. Being Reasonable is the first comprehensive study of reasonableness. Lawlor provides an account of the nature of reasonableness and, further, explains how we manage to be reasonable. Humans discover what is valuable by listening to their emotions and by listening to each other. By taking command over our emotions, and by interacting attentively with others, we can live up to the standard set by society and law.

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Reviews

“Being reasonable is an aspiration for us all, and Krista Lawlor has given us an insightful and nuanced account of what it is—and how it is far more than being simply rational.”—Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame “This book is a marvelous, philosophically rich study of what Lawlor aptly describes as ‘one of the essential fluids in our social machine.’ Philosophers of law, among others, will find the book profoundly rewarding.”—Gideon Yaffe, Yale University “Lively, engaging, witty, and insightful, Krista Lawlor's Being Reasonable is well suited for a general audience.”—Marcia Baron, Indiana University–Bloomington “Lawlor makes an insightful, original, convincing, and extraordinarily clear case for the work that reasonableness is recruited to do in the law, in Rawls’s political philosophy, and in Scanlon’s moral philosophy. Being Reasonable is the finest thing so far written in the rapidly growing field of applied epistemology. It will help the reader to understand the kinds of standards that we apply in the epistemic evaluation of many different kinds of ordinary beliefs, including (especially) beliefs about who did what to whom, and why.”—Ram Neta, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Being reasonable is an aspiration for us all, and Krista Lawlor has given us an insightful and nuanced account of what it is—and how it is far more than being simply rational. -- Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame Lively, engaging, witty and insightful, Krista Lawlor's Being Reasonable is well suited for a general audience. -- Marcia Baron, Indiana University–Bloomington

Author Information

Krista Lawlor is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and the author of New Thoughts about Old Things: Cognitive Policies as the Ground of Singular Concepts and Assurance: An Austinian Account of Knowledge and Knowledge Claims.

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