Sensible Moral Rationalism

A Sensible Moral Rationalism addresses the rational status of morality: whether people do in fact have sufficient reason to do what morality demands of them. The answer, according to rationalism, is yes; the reasons that make an action morally required are the same reasons that make it reasonable and rational to choose. The main obstacle to vindicating rationalism is showing that rationality generates the right content for morality --honesty, kindness, generosity and so on. Given that this content is substantive rationality must be substantive. Mark van Roojen argues that we make judgements about such rationality when we assess whether one action or belief makes more sense than another, and whether it does or doesn't is crucial both for justifying these responses and for determining the psychology of agents who might or might not be acting on various reasons and motivations. An agent's actual psychology is the one that best rationalizes their behaviour given their situation and evidence and which displays them as making as much sense as possible given these constraints. To play this role in psychological explanations rationality must be gradable and comparative, perspectival and evidence relative, substantive and in one good sense more fundamental than the reasons that explain why one choice makes more sense than another. This makes reason and rationality's normative role essential to providing good psychological explanations and this fact in turn allows us to work backwards from good motivating reason explanations to the requirements of rationality. As it turns out, such explanations are better when they attribute humane and virtuous substantive goals to the agents whose actions they explain. We thus have good reason to think that rationality includes the moral content --honesty, kindness, generosity, and so on --that rationalists hope to vindicate.

Mark van Roojen is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He previously held visiting appointments at Brown University and the University of Arizona. His philosophical work is primarily in ethics and metaethics but he also maintains more general philosophical interests. He is the author of Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction (2015) as well as various articles on moral rationalism, moral epistemology, moral psychology, the semantics of moral terms, and expressivism.