Reasonableness

Understanding Reasonableness

Reasonableness is a willingness to let relevant reasons shape a judgment, including reasons offered by someone else. It combines a hearing with proportion: consider the evidence, the practical purpose and the people affected, then give an answer that can be explained. In the picnic scene, the original plan remains a proposal that the warming butter can improve.

Reasonableness: finding the balance

The picnic cloth is in sun and the butter is softening.

Relevant reasons guide a fitting revision; responsiveness is not surrender of judgment.

Reasonableness gives…

Plans gain resilience because objections can reach them before resentment does. People can see how an answer was reached and offer something more specific than approval or opposition. Even when agreement fails, an explained refusal leaves less mystery about the actual difference.

What Reasonableness makes possible

A reasonable discussion can discover an arrangement that neither participant brought at the start. Someone names an overlooked cost; another proposes a smaller change; the purpose becomes clearer. Changing your answer need not mean losing the discussion. It can mean that the discussion has done worthwhile work.

Reasonableness in ordinary life

• When a shared plan inconveniences someone, ask which part creates the difficulty.
• Offer a reason for declining an invitation rather than turning a preference into a universal rule.
• Revise a household arrangement when a modest trial reveals a better fit.

Nearby virtues, different work

Openness makes a hearing possible; Reasonableness weighs what was heard. Tactfulness shapes the delivery of an answer. Fairness considers relevant claims without favoritism. Reasonableness here concerns making a judgment responsive and proportionate, rather than simply sounding agreeable.

Tactfulness · Openness

Reasonableness and its counterfeits

Automatic compromise is a counterfeit of Reasonableness: someone divides a resource in half without considering that one person supplied it for an urgent need. Genuine reasonableness considers relevant differences. A demand that others endlessly explain themselves while one’s own answer remains fixed is another counterfeit.

How to cultivate Reasonableness

Before defending a conclusion, name its purpose and one fact that could alter it. Summarize an objection in terms its speaker recognizes. Compare workable options, including the cost of changing nothing. Give the final answer with the reason that actually decided it.

Try it today

Take one low-stakes plan you have proposed. Ask a willing participant what it overlooks, and consider one adjustment before deciding whether to keep it.

Keep the practice proportionate

You need not debate coercion or justify a personal boundary indefinitely. A clear refusal can be reasonable; another person’s persistence does not create a duty to concede.

A question worth returning to

Have I explained the deciding reason, or only defended the result?

Quotations and further reading

These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this virtue.

1. But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from it.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty

   CHAPTER II. OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION. · Walter Scott Publishing edition with W. L. Courtney introduction dated 1901; selected passages from Mill’s main text, first published 1859.

   Mill explains that understanding an argument often involves answering the appearances favoring another view. A reasonable hearing must meet the actual objection, not a convenient caricature.

2. In private, men are more bold in their own humors; and in consort, men are more obnoxious to others' humors; therefore it is good to take both; and of the inferior sort, rather in private, to preserve freedom; of the greater, rather in consort, to preserve respect.

   Francis Bacon · The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral

   Of Counsel · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Bacon compares private and collective counsel. His political setting shows why a person’s freedom to speak and the effect of others’ opinions both deserve attention; this is not a command to imitate court hierarchy.

3. For the majority usually drift as the current of their own natural inclinations carries them; and in deriving counsel from one of these, we have to see not only what our adviser says, but also what he thinks, and what his reasons are for thinking as he does.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero · On Duties

   BOOK I MORAL GOODNESS · Walter Miller, 1913

   Cicero asks a listener to examine an adviser’s reasons as well as the advice. A practical answer should remain intelligible beyond its speaker’s confidence.

4. But in things wherein I stand in need of nothing but judgment, other men’s reasons may serve to fortify my own, but have little power to dissuade me; I hear them all with civility and patience; but, to my recollection, I never made use of any but my own.

   Michel de Montaigne · Essays

   CHAPTER II——OF REPENTANCE · Charles Cotton translation, William Carew Hazlitt edition, 1877

   Montaigne claims to hear others civilly while relying on his own judgment. Read critically: listening can fortify a judgment, but the article also asks whether a genuine reason could change it.

5. The judgment based upon this experience may be entirely different from the judgment passed by others upon the basis of its objective or social consequences.

   John Dewey · Human Nature and Conduct

   VI · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Dewey distinguishes judgment from the agent’s experience and judgment from social consequences. A plan’s private appeal is not the only relevant account of what it does.

6. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments

   CHAP. III. Of the manner in which we judge of the propriety or impropriety of the affections of other men, by their concord or dissonance with our own. · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Smith describes judging another’s experience through our own. This exposes a limit as well as a resource: a reasonable listener checks whether the comparison actually fits.

7. For otherwise how is it that in philosophical speculations people are with little pain frequently induced by others to change their opinions, and even Aristotle himself and Democritus and Chrysippus have rejected without trouble or pain, and even with pleasure, some of the opinions which they formerly advocated?

   Plutarch · Morals: Ethical Essays

   ON MORAL VIRTUE. · A. R. Shilleto, 1898

   Plutarch points to philosophers revising earlier opinions without humiliation. Changing a considered answer can be part of inquiry rather than a loss of standing.

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