There is much more that needs to be said to counter those who believe a fully determined world leaves no room for a meaningful human freedom. I believe it has been said by others.5 My goal here is simply to state the notion of freedom that is operative in what follows.
3. The Adversaries
Goodness, at least the moral goodness discovered by sound moral judgments, has its skeptics. I spoke earlier of a renewal of ancient challenges to the possibility of objective moral justification. The details of the challenges will emerge as we develop a response to them. However, a preliminary distinction between types of moral doubters will be useful.
First, we have the deniers of the possibility of moral justification, those for whom “doubt” puts things rather mildly. These deniers—we may call them “amoralists”—find the world empty of anything truly meriting the term “morality.”6 There is doctrinal variety among the amoralists, but they hold in common the view that moral justification requires something that either could not exist, or simply does not exist. Amoralists believe moral justification needs some supernatural, transcendent moral standard, which some amoralists hold incoherent, others hold coherent but fantastical, and all hold nonexistent. If Santa does not exist there can be no gifts from Santa, and similarly amoralists believe if transcendental moral standards don’t exist, there can be no moral justifications. According to amoralists my quest for self-justification is as deluded as a child’s wish to get a gift from Santa, for the standards needed for moral justification are as unreal as Santa.
Other opponents of morality do not deny its reality; instead, they lower its status, limit its domain, and shrink its authority. Call these opponents “relativists.”7 With the amoralists, the relativists disbelieve in any supernatural, transcendent moral standards, but unlike the amoralists, such disbelief is prelude to demotion of moral justification, not denial of its existence. Relativists, in contrast to amoralists, hold that moral justification needs no transcendent standards, but the absence of such standards in the relativists’ eyes results in considerably more tepid justifications than is commonly sought by the seekers of moral goodness, myself included.
I share with the amoralists and relativists disbelief in supernatural, transcendent, moral standards, but I think we are in no need of such—indeed, they would be of no help in achieving, robust, objective, moral justification. All we need is Reason—natural, this-worldly, historically evolved, Reason.
4. Reason
Like a pious polemic that would prove the divine provenance of a holy book by citing its opening verse—“This is the word of God”—any reasons given for the value of Reason, any justification of justificatory practice, only convinces the faithful. Justification is the provision of good reasons, and there are no good reasons without it. I am not trying to justify Reason, a point I’ll make repeatedly, because, I would not be accused of the presumption. Reason cannot be its own character witness. Nor can anything else justify Reason. The temptation to seek other Gods to testify to one’s own monotheism is idolatry masking as piety. The will to justify that which justifies, is incoherent (my faith’s term for sinful), and the truly rational must rest content within their rational faith.
I set the bar low for membership in the church of Reason. I count among the faithful everyone to whom I have ever professed anything in the expectation that I would be understood, and anyone who has made a profession to me with the same expectation. This “professional” relationship is transitive, and forms a fellowship that includes all who have offered or will offer into our common reservoir of beliefs their beliefs, and understand it as a truth offering. Regardless of the degrees of separation, stretching across space and time, if there is a chain linking communicants, I view them as belonging to the same community of devotees of truth. I term this community “the social system,” and it embraces every person you or I have ever known of or will ever know of, as well as every embraced person’s embraced persons. The nature of the embrace is simple: to say or write “this is so.” The social system consists of those who have opinions about what’s true and what’s not, and whose opinion may come our way. When I say “us,” that is whom I speak of. The social system is the set of connected makers of claims. Active church members offer justifications for their claims, but even reticent worshippers of truth take their beliefs to be justifiable. It is what one needs to be, and perhaps all one needs to be, a self.
Rationality (Reason’s less reified name) is the capacity to be sensitive to reasons.8 If a reason can serve as a cause of one’s belief, then one is capable of rational belief. If a reason can serve as a cause of one’s action, then one is capable of rational action. Philosophers have called the first theoretical reason, the second practical reason. Neither theoretical nor practical reason is a widespread capability. Like most capabilities, it comes in degrees, but full-blown cases seem to be limited to humanity. Admittedly, there are aspects of Reason in the capabilities of computers and nonhuman creatures, and there is room for debate regarding the rationality of smart phones and simians, of Watson and Washoe.9 However, no ape or algorithm at present gives us grounds for believing that it approaches the rational capabilities of humans, even if the most rational of humans, let alone a typical one, is only partly characterized by rationality. As far as we can tell, only humans routinely cross the rational threshold, even if they spend a good deal of time on the nonrational side of the boundary.
Although reasons are its elemental elicitors, rationality is manifested by one’s relationship to structured constellations of reasons called “justifications.” Indeed, a statement or a belief only becomes a reason as part of a justification. I use the term “justification,” unless otherwise indicated, only to refer to sound justifications. That issue will be discussed later.
Rather than thinking of rationality as sensitivity to individual reasons, we ought to think of it as sensitivity to justifications. Reasons are the pixels for our rational sense, but justifications are its images. When we are rational, we are responding to a justification as a whole—to the justification’s constituent reasons in relationship to each other—rather than to the individual reasons. When it is raining, we have reason to wear boots, but only because we wish to have dry feet, the boots are waterproof, we will be leaving the house, and so forth. By itself, the fact that it is raining justifies nothing, and it would not be rational to always put on boots whenever it is raining, even though rain is a reason to wear boots.
What sort of things are reasons, the building blocks of justifications, the sensitivity to which makes for rationality? Strictly speaking reasons are propositions, expressed as sentences or beliefs. Less formally, reasons are what the sentences or beliefs are about, and as such, reasons come in many ontological types.10 They may be external astronomical facts or internal biological ones. A full moon can be a reason for a hayride, high cholesterol a reason for a statin. They may be social institutions, or rules, or principles. A wedding may be a reason to buy a gift, a third strike to call a batter out, and a solemn oath to remain loyal. Reasons may even be beliefs and sentences, for beliefs can be about beliefs, sentences about sentences. The umpire’s belief that a shoulder high pitch is a strike is a reason for the batter to swing at it, the beauty of a sentence a reason to memorize it. Indeed, no ontological type could be ruled out as a potential reason, for anything can be the subject of a proposition, including other propositions.
Not all propositions are reasons. What makes a proposition a reason is that it has a role in a justification of a belief or of an action. The proposition “it is raining,” becomes a reason when