The Place of Reason in Ethics

by Stephen Toulmin

Genres: Philosophy

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

Reviews

[Alan Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some interesting points but was ultimately disappointing to me. I was misled by the title: The Place of Reason in Ethics. I expected an in-depth discussion of the basis of ethics—whether ethics is based on reason, emotion, religion, or some combination thereof. Instead, I got a technical argument that took certain premises for granted and seemed to be directed more at the author's professorial forebears at Cambridge and Oxford than with the questions asked by a human being from scratch without the trappings, apparatus, and issues of early twentieth-century academic philosophy.

To take just one example: In the penultimate chapter Toulmin finally deigns to notice the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room: the issue of reason versus religion on the subject of ethics. In so doing, he simply adopts Pascal's solution: reason is of the head, religion of the heart, and never the twain shall meet. Toulmin assumes, without inquiry, a premise that religion should defer to philosophy in the realm of ethics, the function of which he pronounces (as another unexamined premise) to be the rational examination of "the harmonious satisfaction of desires and interests" (223). He does not discuss this controversial issue. Indeed, he fails to address the historical (and still-extant) claims of religions of virtually all kinds to dictate ethics.

This book originated as Toulmin's Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge, and he wrote it during the late 1940s (first published in 1950) in England, the country in which he was born, raised, and educated before later moving to the United States. I attribute his reticence about religion to the time in which he wrote it. The academic fields of evolutionary biology and neuroscience, as we know them today, also were in their infancy, if that, at the time. This was long before the heyday of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, and their like. Accordingly, I am inclined to give Toulmin some slack in this early effort. I've learned from this and similar experiences not to assume anything about a book until I have actually read it. Never judge a book by its title!

Notwithstanding the foregoing, there are some gems, here and there, throughout The Place of Reason in Ethics. I will close with the following example:

The truth is that, if different people are to agree in their ethical judgements, it is not enough for them to be fully informed [pace Hume's theory of ethics]. They must all be reasonable, too. (Even this may not be enough: when it comes to controversial questions, they may reasonably differ.) Unfortunately, people are not always reasonable. And this is a sad fact, which philosophers just have to accept. It is absurd and paradoxical of them to suppose that we need to produce a 'reasoned argument' capable of convincing the 'wholly unreasonable', for this would be a self-contradiction [footnote 2 reference].

[Footnote 2:] I should have thought it unnecessary to formulate such an obvious truth, had I not found it overlooked, in practice, by eminent philosophers. For instance, I recall a conversation with Bertrand Russell in which he remarked, as an objection to the present account of ethics, that it would not have convinced Hitler. But whoever supposed that it should? We do not prescribe logic as a treatment for lunacy, or expect philosophers to produce panaceas for psychopaths.

Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics, 165. (Note: The foregoing quotation exactly reproduces the British spelling and punctuation of the original, which, of course, is different in some respects from American English conventions.)

(edited August 21, 2023)

Alan E. Johnson
Independent Philosopher, Historian, Political Scientist, and Legal Scholar
Author of Reason and Human Ethics, Free Will and Human Life , The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience, and The Electoral College, 2nd ed.

[Gerald Berke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book on the logical and disjoint structures of the secular and non secular