Why Be Reasonable?

August 30, 2026

“You’re being unreasonable.” “Reasonable doubt.” The “reasonable person” standard. Talk of reasonableness is everywhere we turn, but what does it actually come to? What makes something reasonable, as opposed to unreasonable? And why does it matter? Could we hope for a society full of reasonable people, or is that an unreasonable thing to ask? Josh and guest-host Lanier Anderson get sensible with their Stanford colleague Krista Lawlor, author of Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue.
  1. Daniel

    While one can have good or bad reasons for one’s actions, and a bad outcome can be done for a good reason, and a good outcome for a bad reason, reasonableness itself is thought of as a good thing because it refers to a willingness and ability to do things for reasons rather than impulses, grudges, emotions, and the like. And this is a good thing because reasons can be shared with others more readily than emotions or other individual states of mind, indicating that reasonableness is a social relation which enables coordination between individuals independent from subordinating relations put in place by custom and tradition. Now, while it might be reasonable in particular cases to conform in one’s actions to a subordinate relationship to another without a very good reason for it, but merely because “that’s the way things are” or something similar, it would be unreasonable to recommend it as a general rule because that would be tantamount to saying it’s reasonable to be unreasonable. But when is it unreasonable to be reasonable? If a citizen of a nation at war, for example, objects to it on grounds that it is engaged in for bad reasons, isn’t it reasonable to also object to those who carry it out? For although it may seem reasonable to support the idea of having an army and thanking those trained for it “for their service”, it seems clear that where it’s deployed for criminal purposes they shouldn’t be thanked but on the contrary condemned, even to the point of criminal prosecution, e.g. for following illegal orders. And this principle could be applied to other areas and even to society in general where structured in ways which lack good reasons for it, for example where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a privileged minority while others starve. Isn’t it, then, unreasonable to be reasonable under such conditions? Couldn’t unreasonability where reasonably constrained constitute a reasonable refusal to be reasonable?

  2. Daniel

    That’s reasonable under conditions of context-dependency, but a standard reasonableness as appealed to in courts of law is also discernable, raising a question concerning the character of the relation between them. In the case of a soldier’s disobedience to an illegal order, while required by law, it would be impractical upon the calculation that the costs of being punished outweigh the benefits of conformity to statute. What’s reasonable in general, conformity to legal constraints, is unreasonable in particular, acting in such a way where punishment is certain.

    Of course other variables can be stipulated, e.g. evaluation of an order’s perceived moral turpitude, but the example brings up a larger question of the reasonableness of putting the soldier in this situation in the first place. If one is required to disobey an illegal order, why is this requirement not extended to fighting in an illegal war? The answer can not be issued from the fact that the former is clearly delineated and the latter more diffuse, because the difference between them is not categorical, –as the latter is composed of many mundane orders instead of a single, particularly objectionable one.

    One suggestion is that while a soldier must rely on her own moral autonomy in whether or not to disobey an order, this is not permitted with regards to the commitment to fight in a war under appropriate authorization because that would impede the state’s ability to defend itself and therefore its citizens, and with regards to which the soldier’s ethical independence is retained by the potentiality of conscientious objection, ensuring freedom from punishment for combat-refusal but not resolving any objections to the war, since the conscientious objector could not intervene in it and must observe its occurrence, and is limited in her grounds to objections to war in general, not to objections based on specific reasons for any particular war.

    This seems to indicate that there can be no reasonable position which defends the soldier’s situation as not unreasonable. Demands for morally autonomous judgement in resisting illegal orders and those for military discipline necessary to fight wars for just causes are not compatible in any combination to which the predicate of reasonableness applies, further indicating that only the rejection of any war whatsoever without regard to the justness of its cause remains the only reasonable position with respect to illegal order-resistance. Thus the Ptolemaic epicycles of autonomy and obedience in attempts to make war-justification coherent should give way to simpler, peace-centric models of inter-demic relations.

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Krista Lawlor, Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

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