Faith and reason are intrinsically non-violent ...

Originally posted by bbarr
Does 'reason' here refer to theoretical or practical reason? When we talk of reasons to believe this or that, we are talking about theoretical reason.

I actually I thought we were talking about reason as in 'the ability to reason' ie logic. Which really has nothing to do with 'reasons for doing something.' I was not aware that 'reason' could be used in the sense that you appear to be using.

Originally posted by bjohnson407
If so, I think that's right, but I think that the natural tendancy of reason is toward the acquisition of knowledge.

I disagree. I see no 'natural tendency' of any kind in reason and I certainly don't think that reason should as you suggest result in the attempted acquisition of knowledge at the expense of other things.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I actually I thought we were talking about reason as in 'the ability to reason' ie logic. Which really has nothing to do with 'reasons for doing something.' I was not aware that 'reason' could be used in the sense that you appear to be using.

The "ability to reason" about what? We can reason about whether to believe some proposition, as when we look for evidence in favor or against some proposition and then weigh that evidence. We do this well when the formation of our beliefs, and the confidence we have in them, keeps pace with our evidence. But we can also reason about what to do. Here the norms are not so clear, and attempting to provide norms for reasoning well about what to do is to present an account of practical reason. If you think that reasoning well about what to do requires reasoning in accord with the recommendations of virtues like charity, compassion, courage, honesty, etc., then you are probably an Aristotelian. If you think it requires nothing more than figuring out the best way to satisfy your own desires, whatever those desires may be, then you are a Humean. If you think that it requires only taking in consideration those reasons that everybody could endorse; those reasons that are universalizable, then you are Kantian. And these are only the big three views, there are many more different theorists have on offer.

Originally posted by bbarr
The "ability to reason" about what? We can reason about whether to believe some proposition, as when we look for evidence in favor or against some proposition and then weigh that evidence. We do this well when the formation of our beliefs, and the confidence we have in them, keeps pace with our evidence. But we can also reason about what to do. Here the no ...[text shortened]... And these are only the big three views, there are many more different theorists have on offer.

I could be wrong, but I think one can separate the reasons for doing something and the reason with which we reason out what to actually do based on the situation and our underlying reasons. I believe the title of the thread implies that whatever your reasons (norms) your reason should lead you to a non-violent course of action, or possibly that reasoning can lead you to reason that a given set of reasons is desirable which when further reasoning is carried out will lead to a non-violent course of action.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I disagree. I see no 'natural tendency' of any kind in reason and I certainly don't think that reason should as you suggest result in the attempted acquisition of knowledge at the expense of other things.

What is it then? Is it entirely passive? like a calculator or maybe a soup strainer?

Originally posted by bbarr
This whole conversation is confused because fundamental distinctions are being run over roughshod. Does 'reason' here refer to theoretical or practical reason? When we talk of reasons to believe this or that, we are talking about theoretical reason. When we talk of reasons to act we are talking about practical reason. If, as seems likely, we are talking ab er are the reasons that serve to justify an act of an agent.

Get your house in order.

You seem to want to take this discussion in a rather different direction. That or you prefer to characature a few great thinkers and then ignore the discussion all together. Each of the thinkers and approaches you mentioned can be seen as violent if there is a violence inherent in reasoning itself. You've said nothing to show that their not. And, to clarify, I was not just talking about practical reason. A sort of violence is done to the object of investigation when we take it aside and subject it to inquiry, when we remove it from its place in the world and examine it.

If the topic of discussion is reason itself, then I think your moving backwards if your approach is to carve reason up into different schools and analyze them seperately. But if you'd like to have a discussion of Kants KpV or Humes Enquiry... we can start up a new thread.

Originally posted by bbarr
...[text shortened]... If you think it requires nothing more than figuring out the best way to satisfy your own desires, whatever those desires may be, then you are a Humean. ...[text shortened]...

Not to nitpick, but I don't think Hume was that much of an Egoist. Wasn't the first half of that book about empathy and moral sentiment?


Just trying to get my house in order. 😉

Originally posted by bjohnson407
You seem to want to take this discussion in a rather different direction. That or you prefer to characature a few great thinkers and then ignore the discussion all together. Each of the thinkers and approaches you mentioned can be seen as violent if there is a violence inherent in reasoning itself. You've said nothing to show that their not. And, to clar ...[text shortened]... you'd like to have a discussion of Kants KpV or Humes Enquiry... we can start up a new thread.

I would like to see this discussion make sense, and to that extent I am urging that it be taken in a different direction. The descriptions I've given of the accounts of practical reason given by the mentioned philosophers are not caricatures. They are perfectly accurate. The claim "violence is inherent to reason itself" is incoherent until the term 'reason' is explicated. Of course, it was such an explication I was calling for in my original post. In any case, your final claim is nonsense. I do not do violence to a priori propositions like 'modus ponens is a legitimate form of inference' when I prove it in first-order logic. I do not do violence to contingent propositions like 'my cat is on the mat' when I try to find my cat. For that matter, I do not do violence to either my cat or my mat when I try to determine via observation their respective locations. Of course if I take my cat and put him in a cage to study I will do some violence to him (if by 'violence' here you mean simply 'harm' or 'treat sub-optimally'😉, but this has nothing to do with reason itself (on any minimally plausible construal of the term). Rather, this has to do with some particular way of gathering information. Further, to claim that some modes of gathering information are violent entails nothing about knowledge gathering in general.

If you had read either "The Critique of Practical Reason" (or any of Kant's other works on moral philosophy, in particular "The Metaphysics of Morals" ) or Hume's "Enquiry..." or "Treatise..." you would understand the point I am making here. These are radically different accounts of what it means to reason well about what to do. You can't assess whether reasoning well runs contrary to violence unless you have some general account to hand concerning what the norms of practical reasoning are and, hence, what reasoning well consists of.

Originally posted by bjohnson407
Not to nitpick, but I don't think Hume was that much of an Egoist. Wasn't the first half of that book about empathy and moral sentiment?


Just trying to get my house in order. 😉

I didn't claim Hume was an egoist. He was a virtue ethicist of the sentimentalist school. I did claim that he had a particular theory about the nature of practical reason. He claimed that our reasons for action bear necessary connections to our antecedently given motivational states (this is his internalism) and that reasoning well involves nothing more than consistency and means-ends efficiency (this is his instrumentalism).

Originally posted by bbarr
I didn't claim Hume was an egoist. He was a virtue ethicist of the sentimentalist school. I did claim that he had a particular theory about the nature of practical reason. He claimed that our reasons for action bear necessary connections to our antecedently given motivational states (this is his internalism) and that reasoning well involves nothing more than consistency and means-ends efficiency (this is his instrumentalism).

This is much more accurate than what you said to Twitehead. But I'd shy away from calling most things "perfectly accurate."

Originally posted by bbarr
I would like to see this discussion make sense, and to that extent I am urging that it be taken in a different direction. The descriptions I've given of the accounts of practical reason given by the mentioned philosophers are not caricatures. They are perfectly accurate. The claim "violence is inherent to reason itself" is incoherent until the term 'reason' ...[text shortened]... f practical reasoning are and, hence, what reasoning well consists of.

If I had read them? How can you think so little of someone you've never met?

At any rate, your point seems wrong to me. If you reason differently, then reason becomes something different? I think not! Kant and Hume had "radically" different approaches, but the difference wasn't so radical that one or the other rejected reason. My point is that reasoning about an object does a certain violence to that object. I know it's controversial, but I am serious in my desire to work through it.

Surely, don't harm modus ponens when you deduce Q from P (Notice that I said early on that the violence was inherent not all pervasive). But when you deduce via modus tollens that Person with Quality Q is type of Person P, you do a certain type of violence to them by forcing them into a category they may not fit.

You are clearly aware of the history of western philosophy so I will tell you that what I have in mind is more like what Nietzsche had in mind when he proposed that future philosophers do "genealogy of the will to truth." What do we do when we seek after knowledge? Frequently, we cases we do violence.

Originally posted by bjohnson407
If I [b]had read them? How can you think so little of someone you've never met?

At any rate, your point seems wrong to me. If you reason differently, then reason becomes something different? I think not! Kant and Hume had "radically" different approaches, but the difference wasn't so radical that one or the other rejected reason. My point is that ...[text shortened]... truth." What do we do when we seek after knowledge? Frequently, we cases we do violence.[/b]

I don't think little of you, I just think that you have not read Kant and Hume. Or, to be precise, if you have read Kant and Hume you have not understood their respective positions about practical reason. If you had, then you would see that the debate concerning constitutive norms of practical reason are absolutely central to this debate.

Where did you get the idea that I think that interpersonal differences in modes of reasoning entail anything about the nature of practical or theoretical reasoning? I certainly never claimed that, and in any case that claim is based on conflating explanatory reasons (the reasons that actually motivate people to believe or act) with normative reasons (the reasons that actually justify the holding of certain beliefs or the engaging in particular actions). Obviously, the Pope is interested in whether normative reasons are such that they inherently weigh against violence. This is why attempting to get clear on the nature of practical reason is a precondition for this debate to make any sort of sense.

Of course neither Kant nor Hume nor any other philosopher worth taking seriously rejected reason. The point is that they had different accounts of what reasoning well requires and, correlatively, different accounts of what is required for some consideration to count as a reason in the normative sense.

When I deduce that a person that has the property of being a millionaire is thereby the type of person that has more money than I do, I thereby do them no violence. I may do somebody violence (in some broad and slippery sense) if I stereotype them, but this has nothing to do with practical or theoretical reason as such. This is just one way in which I can reason poorly, and this is certainly not inconsistent with the claim of the Pope. Presumably, when one seeks to determine whether reason itself (whatever that means, exactly) is antithetical to violence, one is seeking to determine more than whether it is possible to do violence to another by reasoning poorly about them.

Originally posted by bbarr
I don't think little of you, I just think that you have not read Kant and Hume. Or, to be precise, if you have read Kant and Hume you have not understood their respective positions about practical reason. If you had, then you would see that the debate concerning constitutive norms of practical reason are absolutely central to this debate.

Where d ...[text shortened]... mine more than whether it is possible to do violence to another by reasoning poorly about them.

You make two points worth commenting on

The first is based on a misunderstanding, so I will clarify: I am not just talking about practical reason. Perhaps the pope was, in which case I'm sure he has some account of why the violence done in the name of a misguided practical reason (say Eichmann's Kantianism) is not intrinsic to the practical reason itself. But I, in order to talk about reason itself, am focusing on the basic structure of reason as a pure faculty of the understanding. Reason has the same basic structures regardless of who employs it or what they are discussing. That's what makes it so useful for arguments. Kant used the same transcendental logic of the first critique when he discussed practical reason in the second. And Hume used "relations of truth" to analyze and expand on "matters of fact" just as much in his metaphysical arguments as his ethical ones. And the two together both used categories to carve up the world and analyze it. Anyone can see that they had different approaches, but the basic elements of the reason are present in both.


Second:

Your example of the millionaire gets at the heart of the matter. But there are more pernicious ones. If I look at someone and say "X is a Girl" therefore "she shouldn't have a penis," and "she" turns out to be a trans person I do a certain sort of violence to her. Especially if I'm the doctor who decides whether to perform a "corrective" operation. In that case, imposing rational order on reality does a sort of violence. The question is whether that violence is intrinsic to reason or if it is extrinsic and imposed by the reasoning agent.

Originally posted by bbarr
[b]I don't think little of you, I just think that you have not read Kant and Hume. Or, to be precise, if you have read Kant and Hume you have not understood their respective positions about practical reason. If you had, then you would see that the debate concerning constitutive norms of practical reason are absolutely central to this debate.

...[text shortened]...

Kant's ethics was not concerned with "constutive norms," but rather obedience to the moral law. Hume is a trickier case. At any rate, as I explained above, the debate concerning constutive norms is unrelated to my claim that "reason is intrinsically violent." It is, however, and interesting one. So if you have anything of substance to contribute to it, why not get the ball rolling and throw out a preliminary hypothesis that we can engage with?

Originally posted by bjohnson407
You make two points worth commenting on

The first is based on a misunderstanding, so I will clarify: I am [b]not just talking about practical reason. Perhaps the pope was, in which case I'm sure he has some account of why the violence done in the name of a misguided practical reason (say Eichmann's Kantianism) is not intrinsic to the practical rea trinsic to reason or if it is extrinsic and imposed by the reasoning agent[/i].[/b]

Big, you're committing an elementary fallacy in your analysis.

Do you think this is a valid argument:

My pet is a dog.
Hence, all pets are dogs.

I hope you don't, but you are making a formally equivalent argument here, namely,

This doctor commits violence as a result of his reasoning.
Hence, reasoning about an object does a certain violence to that object.

This is obviously not a valid argument either, and bbarr's millionaire scenario is a fine counterexample. Further, this counterexample is not merely an exception but rather the norm. We all reason about things all day long without violence regularly manifesting as a consequence. What violence befalls whom when I conclude that I must end this sentence with a question mark?

However, I think you are both being far too generous in supposing that the pope actually intended his declaration to convey a real propositional assertion. It's obviously just trite rhetoric to feed the masses' hunger for such, not an informational finding that the world is this way and not that way. In short, you're trying to figure out what the pope meant when he didn't mean anything at all.