On reasonableness

Most people don't like being told what they should do or how they should think. Moralizing, in particular, gets under people's skin.

In a recent piece at The Electric Agora, Daniel Kaufman makes the very plausible point that overuse of terms like 'should', far from encouraging people to act in a certain way, often only encourages them to 'hunker down' or become defiant.

But his claim about people losing respect for "reasonableness itself" is not so plausible, I think.

He wrote:

"Just as stupid, petty, and unenforceable laws cause the public to lose respect for law generally, and just as – I think – the wild overuse of ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ and their cognates has eroded respect for morality, the proliferation of weak, groundless, often self-serving “shoulds,” whether of the moral variety or otherwise, may cause people to lose respect for reasonableness itself.”

Would it not rather be the case that respect would be lost for the person – and by extension the category of person – doing the ‘shoulding’?

I don’t think reasonableness is at risk at all. Reasonableness is and will remain widely respected. It has power and force and always will.

You could say, I suppose, that it is not reasonableness but the appearance of reasonableness that counts. Calm and cool wins arguments. Even Donald Trump strives to appear reasonable at times.

But the thing is, it’s hard to separate reasonableness from the appearance of reasonableness, because reasonableness is not just about reason but also about manners and behaviour.

And if you are giving a good enough impression of reasonableness then you are – for all intents and purposes – being reasonable.