In Defense of Right Reason

Rational requirements have a special status in the theory of rationality. This is obvious in one sense: they supply the content of that theory. But I want to suggest that rational requirements have another special status—as objects of the theory of rationality. In slogan form, my thesis is: Fixed Point Thesis: Mistakes about the requirements of rationality are mistakes of rationality. The key claim in the Fixed Point Thesis is that the mistakes in question are rational mistakes. If I incorrectly believe that something is a rational requirement, I clearly have made a mistake in some sense, in that I have a false belief. But in many cases possession of a false belief does not indicate a rational mistake; when evidence is misleading, one can rationally believe a falsehood. According to the Fixed Point Thesis, this cannot happen with beliefs about the requirements of rationality—any false belief about the requirements of rationality involves a mistake not only in the sense of believing something false but also in a distinctly rational sense. While the Fixed Point Thesis is a claim about theoretical rationality (it concerns what we are rationally permitted to believe), it applies both to mistakes about the requirements of theoretical rationality and to mistakes about requirements of practical rationality. Like any good philosophical slogan, the Fixed Point Thesis requires qualification. Suppose I falsely believe that what Frank just wrote on a napkin is a requirement of rationality, because I am misled about what exactly Frank wrote. In some sense my false belief is about the requirements of rationality, but I need not have made a rational mistake. This suggests that the Fixed Point Thesis should be restricted to mistakes involving a priori rational-requirement truths. So from now on when I discuss beliefs about rational requirements I will be considering only beliefs in a priori truths or falsehoods. It may be that the set of beliefs about rational requirements targeted by the Fixed Point Thesis should be restricted even more than that. As I build my case for the thesis, we’ll see how far we can make it extend. Even restricted to a priori rational-requirement beliefs (or a subset thereof), the Fixed Point Thesis is surprising—if not downright incredible. As I understand it, rationality concerns constraints on practical and theoretical reasoning arising from consistency requirements among an agent’s attitudes, evidence, and whatever else reasoning takes into account. One does not expect such consistency requirements