Why Be Reasonable?

Josh Landy
Can two reasonable people disagree?

Lanier Anderson
What does it even mean to be reasonable?

Josh Landy
How do we bring more of it into our lives?

Lanier Anderson
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Lanier Anderson
And I’m Lanier Anderson. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW in San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosopher’s Corner on the Stanford campus, where Lanier and I teach philosophy.

Lanier Anderson
Today we’re asking: why be reasonable?

Josh Landy
Why be reasonable? Isn’t it obvious? I mean, if we all acted like reasonable people, then we’d all get along.

Lanier Anderson
What do you mean we’ll all get along? Have you had any actual interactions with human beings lately? Any reasonable person would see that we’re never going to agree about religion, about politics, or really anything else.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I think we can agree as long as we act reasonably. So I mean, if if we just stay open-minded and keep listening to each other, we’ll see that there’s a reasonable compromise everywhere we look.

Lanier Anderson
Reasonable, according to who?

Josh Landy
According to a reasonable person.

Lanier Anderson
We’re just going around in circles. If you need a reasonable person to judge whether we’re being reasonable, the whole argument’s doomed, and I think it is doomed, Josh. Just look at all the polarization everywhere around us. I just think human beings are not built to agree.

Josh Landy
That’s a bit pessimistic, Lanier. I mean, surely there are lots of things we can all agree about. Look, you and I, for example, we both recognize the greatness of the Godfather.

Lanier Anderson
So true, but you, Josh, you foolishly think that Tarantino is just a hack.

Josh Landy
I think that isn’t that just a truth?

Lanier Anderson
No way, he’s a genius. See, we’ve been having this argument for years, and we aren’t even close to agreeing. And if people can’t even agree on the things that bring them joy, what hope is there about things like religion and politics?

Josh Landy
I don’t know. Is it really true that we can’t agree on things that bring us joy? Think about wine tasting. I know you’re a big fan of that.

Lanier Anderson
Indeed.

Josh Landy
Okay. So, what’s your favorite wine?

Lanier Anderson
Well, there’s so many, but let’s just say Ridge Geyserville.

Josh Landy
Okay, what’s so great about that wine?

Lanier Anderson
I don’t know. It has okay notes of cherry and raspberry, but also fig and cocoa and baking spices, and some years there are undertones of steak sauce and leather in it.

Josh Landy
Mmm, steak sauce and leather sounds delicious.

Lanier Anderson
Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. But seriously, what’s your point here?

Josh Landy
Well, my point is that you think your wine is genuinely delicious. It’s not just delicious to you; it’s objectively good.

Lanier Anderson
That’s right. The 2024 vintage got 98 points out of 100, so it’s not just me saying that. Every expert out there agrees.

Josh Landy
So you see, that’s my point. Even when it comes to something like whether or not a wine is delicious, it isn’t just a matter of personal opinion. You trained yourself to be a wine appreciator. Some would say wine snob, but I like appreciator. And if we all did that kind of training, we’d end up agreeing with each other.

Lanier Anderson
My training was just drinking a lot, but I see that your argument trapped me there, Josh. Still, all you’ve shown is that I can’t even agree with myself. So how are we ever going to get everyone to be reasonable?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe our guest has an answer. It’s our Stanford colleague Christa Lawler, whose new book is called “Being Reasonable.”

Lanier Anderson
But first, what does it mean for a parent to be reasonable, and how can a child be reasonable back? We sent our roving philosophical reporter Sarah Lai Stirland to find out. She filed this report.

Sarah Lai Stirland
I was talking to my friends the other day and found them wrestling with a classic coming-of-age dilemma with their 18-year-old son.

License to Drive
Dad, let me drive. Okay, you drive. Try and do it like you have a license.

Sarah Lai Stirland
He’s had his license for about a year and a half. In that time, he’s been driving his younger sisters around. They’ve had a couple of close calls. The girls are scared when he’s behind the wheel. The whole family wants him to drive more carefully.

Sandy
Do we rescind driving privileges? I think that’s an appropriate consequence.

Sarah Lai Stirland
That’s Sandy. Her husband Justin calls her logic rash.

Justin
Maybe he shouldn’t be driving. But punishing him like that also punishes us because it’s super inconvenient to have not an extra driver in the family.

Sarah Lai Stirland
In his mind, grounding the 18-year-old son may be logical, but it’s not reasonable from a practical perspective. Preventing him from driving is the opposite of punishment. That’d just be taking a chore away. Also, it doesn’t allow him to practice his driving skills, so he can improve and redeem himself. Here’s how Sandy reasons.

Nadia
I see it as, well, we can restore driving privileges, but it’s not going to be all or nothing. We can have safeguards. We can gatekeep it. Is that work I’m willing to put in? Yes. Is it inconvenient for me? Yes.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Their son declined to comment, but they’ve all been going back and forth for five months on what reasonable consequences even look like for his driving and behavior.

Janet Edgette
Reasonable to me has to do with an awareness of the impact of your choices on people around you.

Sarah Lai Stirland
That’s Janet Edgette, a teen and family therapist and author of seven books. The problem in her experience is that most teens are more interested in persuading their parents to get what they want.

Janet Edgette
Most teenagers think they say, “Well, why? Why not? Or “How about if I just go for this or that? And they’re not really negotiating with the idea of working something out in everyone’s favor or something that the parents would be comfortable with, they just want to get the right answer out of their parent, according to them.

Sarah Lai Stirland
It’s a rare teen, she says, who reasons arguments through from their parents’ perspective.

Janet Edgette
If you have a mature, you know, teenager who’s accountable for him or herself, and comes to the table and says, “Mom, Dad, listen, I want to do blah blah blah. And the parents say no, and they say, “Well, listen, let me make a counter proposal and let me tell you more about the event so that you feel more comfortable about it. That’s negotiating in good faith.

Haya
I do that a lot. I think for me, I never take no for an answer.

Sarah Lai Stirland
That 17-year-old Haya, who lives in San Ramon, California, she says she understands what Egypt means and admits that she often lobbies her mother. Haya’s been in the U.S. since second grade. Her Sudanese parents were raised in Qatar and the UAE. Sometimes she’s bewildered by her mother’s reasoning about when it’s okay to exercise her independence. They’ve gotten into it over sleepovers and school outfits.

Speaker 1
There’s just certain things I really don’t understand because she’ll be like, “Go travel to Italy with your friends or by yourself. Just go. I’m like, “Okay, but then I’m like, “I can’t sleep over at my friend’s house. It lives two minutes away. You know, it’s really weird.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Her mother Nadia has her reasons.

Nadia
I don’t see there’s a point that she sleep in their homes, maybe it’s a catch-up thing. I said yes. You go to Europe, and you’ve been study there, and that’s totally different experience. Because if she chooses to go and study abroad, it will be education experience. She might sleep with her friend homes, but she will learn the system by then, our home system.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Sometimes Haya feels forced to defy her parents.

Haya
I play volleyball, and if you know volleyball, you have to wear really short shorts, right? And so a long time, my parents just made me wear leggings. But there were certain times, like picture day, they would everyone wear shorts, and I didn’t want to wear the only one wearing leggings because it kind of ruined the photo. So I would like beg my parents, just please let me wear shorts for one photo. And you know, we didn’t really have like big arguments. They just kind of say no. But then there were times where I would like go behind their backs and do it.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Haya concedes that more recently her mums become more reasonable. For example, over spring break, Nadia actually okayed a sleepover, but only after her daughter laid out exactly what was going on. And when it came to what Haya wears, sure, it’s not always what her parents would pick, but at this point, they just tease her about it. For Nadia, being reasonable means that she freely exchanges opinions with her daughter, even when they disagree.

Nadia
I’m trying always to tell, okay, this is my opinion also, and this is a home rule. If there is a rule, we agree on it with the dad. But I do listen to her because at the end you cannot say you do this. We are in 2026, and that’s it. Impossible. That sounds reasonable, but as parents and teens both know, threading that needle is very tricky.

Sarah Lai Stirland
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sarah Lain Stirland.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Sarah. Haya is part of KALW’s Summer Podcasting Institute. You can listen to her story to come on “To Be Honest, KALW’s podcast by, for, and about teenagers. I’m Josh Landy, and with me is my fellow philosopher Lanier Anderson. Today, we’re asking why be reasonable.

Lanier Anderson
We’re joined now by Krista Lawlor. She’s our colleague in the philosophy department at Stanford, and author most recently of “Being Reasonable: The Case for a misunderstood virtue.” Krista, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Krista Lawlor
Thank you so much, you guys. This is great.

Josh Landy
So, Krista, you’ve been thinking and writing about reasonableness for some time now, but how does it show up in your everyday life?

Krista Lawlor
You know, it sort of shows up as a struggle. I have to try to be reasonable. It’s it’s not easy for me. There’s a joke I think among academics that we study what’s not easy for us, and well, I think in parenting that’s where I get a lot of my firsthand, most emotional moments where you know it’s difficult to know what to do, and you’re trying to listen to your kid. And you’re trying also to get get things right on behalf of your kid, and you’re struggling with yourself. And so that’s when I often will feel myself most poignantly sort of trying to be reasonable, and then questioning whether that is what it takes to be a parent or not. And you know, that’s a struggle.

Lanier Anderson
That sounds like a pretty good example of the struggles of reasonableness. But what does it tell us about reasonableness itself? What is it to be reasonable?

Krista Lawlor
You know, the bottom line is being reasonable involves caring about something, namely caring about getting it right about what matters, or caring about what is valuable.

Lanier Anderson
Okay, so that’s pretty good, but isn’t it enough just to be rational and calculate the best way to maximize our returns? How is that different from this thing that you’re talking about about caring about other people?

Krista Lawlor
Yeah, it’s you know being rational is necessary for being reasonable. You have to be able to reason well. You have to be able to think and and sort out consequences. And a lot of that is just good, plain, old-fashioned reasoning. So I think that’s an ingredient. But reasonableness goes beyond that. You have to actually care about promoting value where you see it, and if you’re rational, you might only care about yourself.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s a little worrying, right? Don’t some philosophers think that the truly rational person cares about other people too?

Krista Lawlor
You know, if you define rationality very broadly, then yeah, there’s no daylight between reasonableness and rationality, but if you think about rationality the way a lot of people do in a more narrow sense, it involves using your knowledge to achieve your goals, and that’s a very individualistic thing.

Josh Landy
So I might use my reason just to make a whole ton of money, and I get that ton of money by clambering over the dead bodies of my rivals and so on. And you’re saying that’s not enough. We we we would like society to be full of reasonable people. They are rational, but they’re not just rational. They’re really thinking about others. How we how exactly are we supposed to think about others if we are reasonable?

Krista Lawlor
On my view, you think about another person’s point of view in this very distinctive sense. You have to think about what matters to them and what their concerns are, because you know what matters to them is what they take to be valuable, and you know you have to be open-minded to hear about what they see as reasonable, it’s all because you care about getting at what really matters yourself.

Lanier Anderson
So, is reasonableness just rationality socialized, as it were, to take account of other people and go beyond my individual advantage, or is there something more to it even than that?

Krista Lawlor
At the bottom of being reasonable, I think there is an emotion, actually a concern, a care about getting to the truth, right? And it’s not just using knowledge in order to come to a conclusion. You actually have an emotion where you’re concerned that you get it right about what’s valuable. You’re also concerned then that other people do as well.

Lanier Anderson
What does that emotion get us that adds to getting it right and thinking hard rationally?

Krista Lawlor
One thing it gets you is a an inclination to change your mind, to admit you’re wrong, you know, to repair certain kinds of relation you have to each other because you were wrong.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about being reasonable with Krista Lawlor from Stanford University.

Lanier Anderson
Does being reasonable help us get along? Is there ever a downside to it? Has your partner, for example, ever complained to you that you always have to be the reasonable one?

Josh Landy
Sensible citizens seeing eye to eye—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Beatles
We can work it out, we can work it out.

Josh Landy
If you want things to work out, shouldn’t you see things the other person’s way as well? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Lanier Anderson
…except your intelligence. I’m Lanier Anderson, and we are asking why be reasonable with our Stanford colleague Krista Lawlor. She’s the author of “Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue.”

Josh Landy
Got a sensible question about what’s reasonable? Email us comments at philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can subscribe to our free podcast and question everything in our reasonably large library of more than 600 episodes.

Lanier Anderson
Okay, so Krista, how does reasonableness help us get along with each other?

Krista Lawlor
That’s a great question. That is a very big question with a lot of answers. I think the first. Place it can help is in your interpersonal relationships, you know, with partners, with spouses, with coworkers. Right? It if you are reasonable, then you’re going to be open-minded about what matters to the other person. You’re also going to be sort of critically minded. You’re not going to let your brain fall out of your head, as Josh likes, and so that can help your your relationships instantly.

Lanier Anderson
So, is it all about individual relationships with people that you’re intimate with, or can it also help you with people who are strangers or who you know only a little bit?

Krista Lawlor
Sure, absolutely. I mean, I think where do you see unreasonableness all the time on the road, on the highway, and if you’re reasonable, you know, you can sort of see that the other person has to get into your lane, right?

Lanier Anderson
But there’s a little bit of a worry about reasonableness on the road because there’s that old joke, you know, that everybody who’s going slower than I am is completely an idiot, and everybody who’s going faster than I am is insane. I’m the only reasonable one. Does that make us question the applicability of reasonableness in that kind of stranger interaction situation? Yeah,

Krista Lawlor
I mean, I think it’s it’s really hard sometimes to recognize that you may be the unreasonable one, and the other person has the better position.

Josh Landy
Yeah, it’s like the joke of the the person who says all of the people are driving the wrong way down the freeway. I’m the only one going the right way, so that’s raises an interesting question. I mean, you know, Descartes famously has that line about how you know of all the goods in the world, the the the most fairly distributed is common sense because nobody complains about not having enough of it. Yes, we all think we are so sensible and presumably so reasonable. How how do you get someone to recognize? Actually, maybe I’m the one driving the wrong way down the freeway. Maybe other people have a point.

Krista Lawlor
Absolutely. I mean, this is a challenge for every one of us, we see our own reasons for doing things. We feel our own emotions, and we feel them to be, you know, appropriate. Although I do think emotions are where we start to get our first hint, especially when we retrospect on them a little bit. Okay, maybe I was a little too upset there. You know,

Lanier Anderson
that brings us back, actually, to a thing you were talking about in the last segment about emotions. It sounds like you think that our emotions themselves can be reasonable, and that is a little bit of a challenge to philosophical common sense. Don’t philosophers usually think that emotions are the main opponent of reason, and they make it hard for us to be reasonable?

Krista Lawlor
Absolutely. There’s this age-old division supposedly between reason and passion, or reason and emotion, and so I am taking issue with that. I think emotions can be a tool for the reasonable person, and I think reasonable self-monitoring can really make your emotions more reasonable and better tools than for finding out what’s valuable.

Josh Landy
We have a question from James via email that I think goes a little bit to this question of what makes something actually reasonable. James says, “What makes something reasonable is that it requires evidence, rationality, genuine curiosity, and honest effort. What makes something unreasonable is that it ignores evidence, is irrational, irrational, and requires no genuine curiosity or honest effort. So, what do you think of that definition, Krista?

Krista Lawlor
I think it hits on a lot of interesting points that you know seem right. I’ve already said reasonableness requires some rationality, but does unreasonableness mean you are irrational, or does irrationality mean you’re unreasonable? I don’t think so. I think you can do what some people would call an irrational thing and be very reasonable in doing it. You can, you know, sacrifice something to another person, and some people would say, well, that’s irrational. I think it’s totally reasonable, though.

Lanier Anderson
It seems like in that kind of case, we are acting a little bit out of emotions. But I guess emotions that you think are reasonable to have, that makes it really important for us to make our emotions more reasonable. How do we do that?

Krista Lawlor
I think there’s a couple of things you can do, and one of them really involves cultivating these dispositions to listen to others, right? And we do listen to others. We take correction from others. So, you know, somebody comes to me and says, you know, you need to calm down just a little bit. And now that’s not easy to hear. But if they’re, you know, in a position close enough to me, then I’ll be ready to hear that. And so, remaining open to that kind of criticism can be a really big tool.

Josh Landy
I think that’s a lovely point, right? Because we often, when we think about being reasonable, we often think about beliefs. Your beliefs are not reasonable, and maybe we think about actions. You acted unreasonably, like you know. The the the teenager saying to their parent that’s not reasonable or vice versa, but you’re saying actually emotions can be reasonable or unreasonable. What are the advantages if it isn’t maybe it’s an obvious question, but what are the advantages of being reasonable about one’s emotions?

Krista Lawlor
I mean, I think it makes your own life go better. It certainly makes the lives of others go better, and then there’s the always that goal of you’re going to learn about things that matter if your emotions are well tuned to your environment, right? If you get angry, then you’ll realize there’s probably something going on. The social fabric has had a little tear here. I’ve been insulted or something, and you know you can trust your emotion then, and that’s a tremendous advantage.

Lanier Anderson
Is what it is to be reasonable about your emotions that your emotions are relatively cool, or can you sometimes reasonably have super hot and aggressive emotions?

Krista Lawlor
Yeah, I think you know sometimes it makes perfect sense if you’re in the right circumstance. If if your circumstances are such that a lot is on the line, and you’re say you’re not performing as well as you’d like, or then you can be super frustrated, and that’s totally reasonable.

Josh Landy
Like that old line “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”

Krista Lawlor
Yeah.

Lanier Anderson
So let’s look at a real hard real life case. A few years ago, there was a famous pitcher, Chris Sale, who completely trashed the locker room in the middle of his comeback after a bad performance. He’s trying to come back from from injury with the Red Sox. Most people thought that was totally unreasonable behavior, but you seem like you’re trying to get us to say that there could be something reasonable about his having an intense emotional reaction in that situation. So why was that intense reaction reasonable?

Krista Lawlor
Yeah. Well, you think about his circumstances, right? Here’s this guy with this huge contract, and he all the weight of the world is on him. He’s gonna save the Red Sox, maybe, and then he just gets injured again. And then when he’s trying to, you know, go through rehab and you know fix himself, he’s just blowing game after game. Imagine if he were took that calmly and coolly. You’d think, what’s wrong with him?

Lanier Anderson
He doesn’t have enough competitiveness, I guess. It is true that he’s a super competitive guy, and now we see that since he’s no longer on your Red Sox and he’s been traded to my Atlanta team. He’s back to his Cy Young winning ways.

Krista Lawlor
Just rub it in.

Lanier Anderson
And it’s all about that competitiveness, isn’t it, Krista?

Krista Lawlor
It is, you know. And competitiveness can be taken too far, but we all recognize that it really gets you somewhere too, if it’s reasonable.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re asking why be reasonable with Krista Lawlor from Stanford University, and apparently we’re also asking about whether the Red Sox are better than the Atlanta Braves.

Lanier Anderson
They’re not. Everybody can see that.

Josh Landy
Apparently, there’s no debate there. We have a question not about baseball, but actually kind of in the ballpark-no pun intended-about what we were talking about a moment ago from Daniel on our website, so Daniel asks whether it’s always reasonable to be reasonable. So he gives a couple of examples. One is the conscientious objector. You’re a citizen of a nation at war, and you think that war has been engaged in for bad reasons. You think it’s morally right to withdraw your support. Another example is rampant inequality, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a privileged minority while other people starve. So Daniel asks, isn’t it unreasonable to be reasonable under such conditions? Couldn’t there be a reasonable refusal to be reasonable?

Krista Lawlor
That’s a fascinating question. Can you be too reasonable? Can you overdo it? I think that once you answer the question, oh, you’re being too reasonable. You’ve already sort of suggested that it’s reasonable to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing, and in that case, then there’s just you were getting it wrong about what it took to be reasonable, right?

Josh Landy
So in fact, there’s no such thing as being too reasonable. There’s only getting it wrong about what would count as reasonable?

Krista Lawlor
I think that’s true.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah. So when somebody, when you’re in an interaction with somebody who is wronging other people, and that person says to you, “Come on, be reasonable with me. Can’t you just see my side of this? You yourself were saying earlier that being reasonable involves taking the other person’s point of view. Can it be wrong to take that person’s point of view, and why is it unreasonable to take that person’s point of view in that situation?

Krista Lawlor
Well, I don’t think being reasonable requires you to actually take another person’s point of view in the sense of taking it up and inhabiting it. I think it means seeing the other person’s point of view, but you can be critical of the other person, and you can think they’re getting it wrong. So if they’re doing something really harmful, you might inquire into why they’re doing that. But that doesn’t mean you have to take up their point of view and see that they’re right.

Josh Landy
So that gets us to a broader area of application of reasonableness, right? We’ve been talking mostly about reasonableness of an individual person’s beliefs and actions and emotions. We touched a little bit on the broader social fabric, but what should we say there? What should we say about reasonableness in the political domain? How does that work, and how should it work?

Krista Lawlor
According to some political philosophers, really important ones, John Rawls, for instance. Reasonableness is utterly essential if we’re going to have a liberal, pluralistic society, a liberal, pluralistic democracy. Why? Because it helps us to navigate these places where our values are so different. And for Rawls, it was really interesting. He thinks disagreement is inevitable and actually not a bad thing, fundamentally.

Lanier Anderson
Is it reasonable for us to disagree in those circumstances, or is it just inevitable?

Krista Lawlor
It’s both reasonable and inevitable, and moreover, for Rawls, it’s a sign that we’re all living our lives as free agents.

Josh Landy
So that sounds a bit like John Stuart Mill, right? This idea that a healthy society is one where people, within limits, get to live their their own best lives, their individual best lives. Again, as long as they’re not harming each other, and then that’s a good. It’s not just inevitable. It’s desirable, and then the question becomes okay. But then it’s kind of chaotic. How do you make sure that it’s harmonious? If I understand you correctly, you’re saying reasonableness is the answer to that question.

Krista Lawlor
Absolutely. It’s you’re not going to get everybody to agree, and that’s not a sad thing. That’s actually a good thing. That shows that everybody is living their own view of how to live, and how do we though make decisions about you know sharing resources, building a road? We’re going to have to arrive at some kinds of agreement, and if you’re reasonable, you’ll be able to work that out.

Josh Landy
So we’ve talked a little bit about politics. What about the law? There are all kinds of places, and you talk beautifully about these in the law, where all of a sudden the law invokes this reasonable person. I don’t know if I’ve met this person. Maybe that person’s sitting in a room somewhere to be consulted. How does that work in the law? You might think that’s just an invitation for things to go awry because everyone has a different definition, and so, wow, how are you going to decide what a a reasonable person would think? Is there a way of seeing it more positively that it’s actually a good thing that the law makes space every now and again for this kind of interpretive license, a little little bit of wiggle room.

Krista Lawlor
So the reasonable person standard is everywhere in the law, and it’s necessary because not only is it necessary to have standards as opposed to strict rules, that gives you a little wiggle room, right? There’s the standard of cruel and unusual punishment. I mean, what is that? We have to decide. We have to interpret it, right? And you don’t just list the things that are cruel and unusual, right? You leave it to the judgment of a jury or a judge, and that’s really important because life throws up new cases, right? So the reasonable person standard is doing what a standard does, which is nice. It’s also telling you explicitly you can use your judgment as a reasonable juror to decide whether whether this person violated the law.

Josh Landy
It’s a reasonable doubt, reasonable person standard, unreasonable searches and seizures. It’s all over the place, and you think it goes well in general?

Krista Lawlor
I mean, I I don’t know what the alternative would be. You’re going to use what a standard of say fairness. You’re still going to have people then using their own judgment about what counts as fair, and so you’ll have times where a judge maybe makes their mind up that something was fair, and it doesn’t seem fair to everyone else.

Lanier Anderson
So, when we appeal to that reasonable person standard, are we imagining a person who is infallible, is reasonable about everything?

Krista Lawlor
The caricature of the reasonable person standard is that you know it’s this you know just incredibly high ideal, and there are no such people. So why should we be using this crazy standard? And part of what I’m trying to do in the book is say this is not an incredible ideal at all. It’s something we’re all aspiring to and trying to be, and so it’s garden variety reasonableness that I’m talking about.

Josh Landy
One of the things it makes me think about is whether, if you’re on a jury, and you’re asked to make a decision based on a reasonable person standard, rather than appealing to your own. Tuitions, maybe you should start thinking about what other people might might say. I think that that seems like it’d be in the spirit of what you were saying earlier. That true reasonableness is a kind of openness to possibility. You might be wrong. Other people might have it right in certain cases. So let’s say you know I’m presented with this. I’m a juror on a case where that has to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, instead of thinking, “Do I think it likely? I should be thinking, “Let me try to imagine myself into the way of into the mind of some other person, or or an average person, or something. Would that be a kind of a trick that you would encourage people to adopt?

Krista Lawlor
Yeah, I think that’s a great trick. You know, think about it from your point of view certainly, and then find somebody who disagrees with you, and then really try to inhabit their point of view,

Lanier Anderson
But also question their point of view.

Krista Lawlor
Sure.

Josh Landy
That’s like a hard trick.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah, how do you pull those things all together?

Krista Lawlor
Well, you know, I didn’t say it was easy. I think this is why we have 12 people on a jury. You know, a lot of cases are now not decided by jury, but I think it’s a good idea to have a lot of voices when it’s a really important thing.

Josh Landy
And as you were saying, like you know, I think it’s easy for us to get sort of hung up on the complications, and there are complications. But then, you know, as you say, there are also cases where it clearly goes well. Like what you were saying earlier about you know you you get upset about something and your friend says maybe you know let’s see it this way let’s see it that way and you think yeah you’re right I I didn’t have to get so upset you know or or the the wine case Lanier can absolutely convince me of the goodness of a particular wine, I’ve seen it happen. All right, not Tarantino, but yes, wine. So maybe we should be encouraged by the fact that in our everyday lives we see it happening all the time.

Krista Lawlor
Yeah, and you know you don’t have to get to total agreement. I don’t think you should think that things are going well only if we agree, even about wine. Actually, things can be going even better when we disagree and we still stay open-minded.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re asking why be reasonable with Krista Lawlor, author of “Being Reasonable.”

Lanier Anderson
Why do people get so unreasonable sometimes? What can we do about it? Is there a way to make society less polarized and more harmonious?

Josh Landy
A rosy refuge for the reasonable. Plus, commentary from Ian Shoals, the 62nd philosopher, when philosophy talk continues.

Taylor Swift
We are never, ever getting back together.

Lanier Anderson
If you can’t be reasonable with each other, then you’re never ever getting back together. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything except your intelligence. I’m Linear Anderson. Our guest is Crystal Lawler from Stanford University, and we’re asking why be reasonable.

Josh Landy
So, Krista, we’ve been talking about what reasonableness is and why it’s a good thing, and you’ve absolutely convinced me both of what it is and why it’s a good thing. But great, I’m done. Now we’re done. But it does raise an obvious question, which is how do we make there be more of it in the world?

Krista Lawlor
Yeah, I wish I knew. I really do. That is the next question. I mean, how do you make room for this quality, which is so basic to us, so central? I think I’ve come to think it’s just built into our DNA. We wouldn’t be as successful as we are as a species unless we had the fundamental equipment we needed to be reasonable, so it’s a question of like, how do you cultivate this thing in us that we are already equipped to be? It’s like teaching any other virtue. I think it probably starts really young, for one thing. So, you know, we teach kids to share. I think we do a little bit of this teaching people to see things from another point of view. We teach them the golden rule, which is very close, right? Do unto others as you would have done unto you. That requires thinking a little bit about right from another person’s point of view.

Lanier Anderson
So that’s a start on things, but maybe we could dig deeper by thinking a little bit about where things are going wrong, because it seems like in the society around us today, there’s a real deficit of reasonableness, and where do you think that deficit is coming from? Why is there so much unreasonableness around us at the moment?

Krista Lawlor
Money. There are enormous disincentives to being reasonable, and incentives to being unreasonable, and you see that in politics, right? You see this the way our political system is structured. Right, unreasonable people get a lot of airtime. You know, in some ways, if you come across as somebody who’s going to compromise with the other side, there’s consequences. Right, your your whole political campaign can be sunk.

Lanier Anderson
Right, so that makes it sound like it’s not just money or power; it’s the competition over these things, that’s driving people to restrict how reasonable they’re willing to be, in your sense of seeing things from the other person’s point of view.

Krista Lawlor
Absolutely, yeah, and I think people recognize this very fact, and they’d like to be able to be more reasonable. Even politicians, you you hear this from some of them, right? But they can’t afford

Lanier Anderson
it. Could we say that even reasonable people in the structure of this incentive system are likely to become more unreasonable

Krista Lawlor
in their actions, at the very least? I mean, we can distinguish between actions and their fundamental nature or dispositions. You know, I do think their actions are punished if they’re if they’re trying to compromise and work across the aisle, right? Sometimes, so even if fundamentally they aren’t changed as human beings, then their actions, though, are over time. I worry that you act unreasonably and you start to lose touch with what it even means to be reasonable. So it

Josh Landy
kind of works from the outside in, in the way that Aristotle was talking about virtues, but in the negative.

Krista Lawlor
Yes.

Josh Landy
So if you keep practicing, you know, unfortunate behavior, you will end up with an unfortunate soul.

Krista Lawlor
Yes, absolutely.

Josh Landy
Okay, so you’re demoralizing me. I’m sorry. We were trying to ask how we make things better. So is there anything we could do about that state of affairs,

Krista Lawlor
I think you know, recognizing it is a first step, and then how do you build accountability back into our institutions? You know, where people’s actions have consequences, and we haul more transparency into our institutions so that everybody gets a look in, and these are all very big questions. But

Lanier Anderson
those sound like interesting suggestions. Say a little bit more about how accountability and transparency can change the incentive structure that causes competitions to encourage unreasonable interaction.

Krista Lawlor
Well, I’m thinking lately about dark money. You know, the fact that people can contribute, corporations can contribute large sums of money to political campaigns, and it’s lights out in terms of their identity. So then they don’t have any consequences for having manipulated the election to go their way, whereas if there’s more transparency, then they have some public accountability and they have to live with it.

Lanier Anderson
So maybe part of what it takes to be reasonable is to be willing to take responsibility for your own contributions to the situation.

Krista Lawlor
That’s a really interesting idea. Yeah, I mean, taking responsibility for what you’re doing means you’re going to accept that other people’s judgment might matter.

Lanier Anderson
So I can see how that kind of taking responsibility or encouraging the other person who’s your interlocutor to take responsibility and stepping up to take responsibility for yourself could help repair a situation in a one-on-one interaction where you and I are face-to-face, and we interact with each other, and we know we’re going to interact again, and we can build up trust over time. But how can we scale up from that kind of individual relationship to broader relations with an anonymous public, so that we can get what my friend Joshua so wants-more reasonableness in society overall.

Krista Lawlor
Yeah, scaling up is always difficult, right? Interpersonal relations are one thing, and then societal institutions-that’s a wholly different thing. But I do think it would help, right? If a corporation, for instance, or a billionaire who’s giving money to some cause of their choosing, also had to reckon with the fact that everybody knew that. I think that might force them to think a little bit more about their actions from the point of view of others.

Josh Landy
I mean, we were talking on a recent episode about the death of of shame, right? How you know shame used to be a factor that had a certain kind of effect on people and made them feel bad, and and to watch change their ways. I I feel like unfortunately that’s diminishing a little bit. I I worry that you know the the only reason that Europe and then later, of course, the United States of America ended up in a pluralistic society. Was because there was a civil war, and things were so bad that everyone thought, well, you know what? I I really think everyone should be a Catholic, but I’m willing to trade in that belief for a society where people. Don’t murder each other, and I really worry that you know. First of all, we’ve forgotten the lesson of those days, and second, that it would take something like that to to get us to a point where people actually want more reasonableness. That is to say, the people who have the power, because unfortunately, it seems like right now it’s rational to be unreasonable. That’s the point you were making. There are incentives for people to be unreasonable for politicians, for corporations. Short of, I mean, because you know, your your suggestion is a very good one, which is you know, increase the disincentive for people to behave that way. But then you need the power to change the incentive structure, and we don’t have the power because of everything we said. So I don’t know. As you can see, I’m spinning in circles because I can’t see a good way out. How do we get out of this bind?

Krista Lawlor
It’s so complicated and difficult. But I understand what you’re saying. The the how do you start to unravel this power structure, it’s not a simple thing, and I certainly don’t want to come across as well. Everyone should just be reasonable, and then we’ll be fine. That’s not at all the answer. This is a major problem that we all have to to solve, and the idea that you have to get to a place of total fear of each other is such a doomsday kind place to get to. Yes, I think that would do it. I think if we finally got to the place where it was civil war and everyone feared each other, then we would realize that we have to get along. But hopefully, we don’t have to go that far down that road.

Lanier Anderson
So you have an argument about polarization that I was really fascinated by, and that argument suggests that even people who are being completely reasonable can, because they’re updating from different starting points, because they have different prior beliefs, when they get new information, it drives them further apart rather than closer together, and it makes them more polarized. Can you talk to us about how that argument works and what we might do to break that cycle?

Krista Lawlor
This is a fascinating thing. I found this very fascinating too. There’s a lot of interesting social science about this. Keith Stanovich’s work on my side bias has this wonderful little example where, you know, you think one chess player is better than the other, and I think the exact opposite. And we come into the room and we see the chessboard and the players have taken a break, so we don’t know who’s playing what side. And you think, oh, my guy’s winning, and the other guy thinks, oh, my guy is winning. And you know, you come to the world with your own background assumptions, beliefs, evaluations, and then you look at the same evidence, the same chessboard, and you just form different opinions about what’s going on. And it’s just there’s nobody needs to be making mistake. Nobody needs to be being irrational at all. So that suggests that differences in belief are inevitable, absolutely inevitable. So the question is, what do you do once you realize that that’s the fact? And since that’s the fact, then you can’t take disagreement itself is a sign that the other guy is just an idiot, or is ill-intentioned, or you know isn’t thinking correctly. Disagreement you have to recognize is no indicator of the fact that the other person is is messing up.

Lanier Anderson
Okay, so let’s say you and I are the disagreeing people, and we’re confronting the evidence, which because we disagree, we take in different ways. How do we break that cycle and get out of the situation? Is there a different way of looking at the evidence, or a different way of looking at each other? What is it?

Krista Lawlor
Well, it starts with knowing what the other person’s starting place

Lanier Anderson
is. Oh, I see.

Krista Lawlor
Right. If I say, “Oh, you think that’s what follows from this evidence? Tell me more about what you were already believing. Tell me more about how you were evaluating it. And then once we start sharing that, then we can look for more information to see if those background beliefs are false. You know, maybe maybe we’re both making a mistake in our background beliefs, maybe one of us is.

Lanier Anderson
So one of the things that is required to be reasonable is to know more about the other person that you’re interacting with. Yeah.

Josh Landy
Well, I feel like we’re ending on at least a somewhat hopeful note, and it’s been a thoroughly reasonable conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Krista Lawlor
Thank you both. This was great.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Krista Lawlor, professor of philosophy at Stanford University and author of *Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue* So, Lanier, what are you thinking now?

Lanier Anderson
Well, I think today I learned that being reasonable is a lot more social than I thought it was, and that it turns out to be reasonable. You have to know a lot about what the other person you’re talking to is really thinking.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, it’s also an encouragement to us all to do more of that. But I was also thinking maybe it’s an encouragement to Hollywood to make more dystopian fictions, right? If people realize what’s at the end of the road we’re currently on, maybe we won’t need to actually go through it.

Lanier Anderson
People would pull back.

Josh Landy
We would like to hope. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website philosophytalk.org. And while you’re there, you can subscribe to our free podcast and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Lanier Anderson
Now, what you’ve been waiting for: No reasonable person would talk this fast. It’s Ian Shoales the 60-second philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… I hadn’t been thinking about reasonability that much lately. I mean, it’s all around us, but I couldn’t really say what it is. I do know we try not to engage with conflict anymore, unless we have squads of mercenaries and lawyers on speed dial. We try to reframe things, which is why now we deal with what we call situations, which often require making some kind of deal, which nobody knows how to deal anymore. Even our big old deal maker in chief, sorry to say, nobody’s giving the guy gold stickers but him. What kind of fairy tale is that? Reasonability aside, plain old unreason appears to be thick on the ground these days, and Monsanto’s waiting until lawsuits die down for at least as its weed killer that will chow down in sinister ambiguities like they were popcorn. That lot of good that’ll do anyway. Any reasonable person would already reject sinister ambiguities. That’s for punk rockers and European comic books, but you know, fair enough. I’m objectively judicious, and my tolerance level is tremendous. So it’s understandable that when somebody suggests that it might be a reasonable solution to whatever situation you find yourself in, you might wonder, okay, sure, what’s reasonable? We hear all the time on PBS interviews, from consultants and media coaches, podcasts, other whatnots, meet the press type shows, where every statement is couched in strident yet vague language, it’s conflict avoidance language. You call actions unacceptable, alarming, intolerable. What did her dad say? Bring my daughter back at a reasonable hour. No, but it’s that. Back by midnight, your head is coming off. Now, see, that’s understandable. That makes sense. There’s a whiff of disapproval. But those days are gone. Ain’t got to be no shotgun weddings unless you know you’re into that, what we call woke is this vast, unwritten, invisible field of protocol that was half baked a century ago. But there’s so much of it. If you look to comment on anything, there may be misunderstandings, but there’s so many euphemisms and hedge words. Entire weeks can go by without insulting the spirits that have gone before. The point being, our culture has turned out to be rather wispy, despite the tons of granite and inspiration going into its creation. No money in art except for collectors, and they’re kind of losing interest because it’s kind of boring right now. Wasn’t it hard to compete for attention? Seems like we’re haunted only by ourselves. For some reason, we seem bent on erasing our culture, norms, history, whatever. But at the same time, touting those acts of destruction as historical moments that need to be remembered. But don’t let Trump get you writing it down. It’s hard to get a tingle from the good old glory, is what I’m saying. Even the glorious rudiments to which we still cling seem lessened somehow. Our pride, for example, once made our arrogance seem cute to some people. It seemed reasonable to be attracted to me. Now my pride is a shriveled husk, and my arrogance is only in display in dusty glass cases into the court of third floor. Is it reasonable to acknowledge that my character flaws, if such there be, make it understandable why I made the emotional decisions I made in my life, understandable and yes, not entirely unreasonable. But reasonability again is the ghost of reason haunting the museums now that art has gone away, half dead, half alive, lumbering soundlessly in the attic. I must go up and see, but I’ll be home at a reasonable hour. Listen, before I go, here’s a truism, a science fiction parable told by indirection, a prediction, a prognosis, a metaphor, a reasonable assumption, an understandable lapse in judgment. Okay, here, if we’re going to go to Mars, we’re going to need robot doctors. Now, who’s going to argue with that? It’s an entirely reasonable assumption. What I’m afraid of is, though, we’re going to be knee deep in robot doctors because, frankly, we’re never going to get to Mars. Could put them all on the moon, I guess. I don’t know. Lines are open. Oh wait, no, they’re not. There’s no lines. They never were. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of K A L W San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2026.

Lanier Anderson
Our executive producer is James Kass. The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Billy Thompson, Karen Ajluni, Steve Choy, and Linda Fagan.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Lanier Anderson
The views expressed

Josh Landy
or misexpressed

Lanier Anderson
on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Lanier Anderson
And I’m Lanier Anderson. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

The Secret of Santa Vittoria
Be reasonable and keep your fat mouth shut, or I’m gonna feed you my fist. I swear.