Lawlor's defence of reasonableness: why is being rational not enough?

When is a person “reasonable”?

When they do not raise their voice? When they concede the other side's point? When they construct sound arguments? Or when they get beyond their own interest and try to understand what other people care about?

Krista Lawlor, professor of philosophy at Stanford University, moves those questions to the centre of philosophy in Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue, published by Harvard University Press.

The book has made The New Yorker's list of the best books of 2026 so far.

The distinction that does the work#

Lawlor's claim looks simple at first and reaches a long way:

Being reasonable is not the same thing as being rational.

An observation reported in the book gives the difference some flesh. Asked to describe a “rational” person, people reach most often for three adjectives: systematic, unemotional, analytical. Asked to describe a “reasonable” person, they say: empathetic, respectful, a good listener.

For Lawlor, the reasonable person is the one who can see reliably what matters. That requires being rational enough, and it requires taking into account the things other people value. But rationality and thoughtfulness are not, on their own, sufficient.

Why rationality is not enough#

A claim is advanced, evidence is weighed, an inference is drawn, a conclusion is reached.

Lawlor's question begins exactly here. Might someone who does all of that correctly still fail to be reasonable?

The answer is yes. For a person has to grasp not only what they ought to believe but what is important.

A manager may be legally correct about every clause in an employee's contract. But if the employee's family, health or other obligations are ignored altogether, acting lawfully is not the same as acting reasonably.

In much the same way, successfully exposing the logical error in an opponent's position may do nothing to reveal what that opponent values.

Rationality arrives at the correct inference; reasonableness asks which things ought to be taken into account in the first place.

The misunderstood virtue#

The phrase “misunderstood virtue” in the title carries weight.

In everyday speech “reasonable” usually means moderate, accommodating, not too demanding. Lawlor rejects that understanding.

To be reasonable is not to split the difference in every case. Concluding, in the face of an injustice, that there is something to be said on both sides is not reasonableness. Setting one's principles aside is certainly not.

On the contrary: for Lawlor, reasonableness is a virtue that demands judgement — grasping which values genuinely matter, weighing different points of view and acting accordingly.

Not passive tolerance, then, but an active effort to understand.

Who is the reasonable person in law?#

The book gives a chapter of its own to the concept's use in law.

In Anglo-American law the reasonable person standard serves as a criterion across a wide field, from the enforcement of contracts to self-defence.

The philosophical difficulty surfaces at once. Who is this reasonable person? The average person? The person a judge finds reasonable? The conduct of the majority? Or the ideal capacity for judgement one ought to bring to a given situation?

The moment we invoke the reasonable person, we have also set out an implicit theory of which values count as reasonable. Scott Shapiro's work in the philosophy of law, which we have reported here before, touched on a similar point: legal criteria are never neutral technical instruments.

Maps of value#

The book's most productive conceptual instrument is developed in the chapter on disagreement and the sharing of value maps.

Everyone carries a map of value, a sense of what is important in the world. Family, freedom, money, justice, trust, honour, success — each of them sits somewhere on that map.

But the maps are not identical. For one person economic freedom is foundational; for another social security comes first. One puts freedom of expression at the front; another may hold social order to be more important.

These differences do not arise merely from missing information. People really can value different things.

Reasonableness, at this point, means not defeating the other side but being able to read the other side's map of value.

Are the emotions the enemy of reasonable thought?#

The chapter on reasonable emotion questions a familiar opposition: reason gets it right, feeling gets it wrong.

Lawlor's account is more complicated. We do not discover what is valuable by abstract reasoning alone; emotions too can show us what matters in the world.

Anger may register an injustice. Fear, a danger. Grief, the weight of a loss. Love, the value of a relationship.

But it does not follow that the emotions are correct of their own accord. The task is not to suppress them but to learn to understand them and to govern them.

The thesis runs along the same line as Bernard Williams's critique of moral systems, which we discussed in this column last week: the moral life is not a calculation from which the affections have been purged.

Democracy and polarisation#

What gives the book its purchase on the present is the connection it draws between reasonableness and political life.

Democratic societies do not require people to think alike about everything; on the contrary, disagreement lies at the base of democracy. The problem is not thinking differently but being able to live alongside those who think differently.

Within Lawlor's framework, reasonableness turns at this point into a political virtue. A state can endure as a liberal democracy only if its citizens are reasonable.

The argument also intersects with John Rawls. For Rawls the “reasonable” citizen is the one who does not try to impose his own comprehensive doctrine on society by force, and who accepts the terms of an order in which different reasonable doctrines can live together.

Lawlor moves the concept onto broader ground. What is at stake is not only political accommodation but people learning to understand the values of others.

Reasonableness in the digital public sphere#

The book is not about social media. But its theory is well suited to making sense of today's digital public sphere.

People mostly meet material that confirms what they already think; algorithms can reduce the chance of encountering a different view. The upshot is that people do not merely think differently — they also struggle to understand why the other side thinks as it does.

The value-map approach earns its keep here. Thinking someone wrong is one thing; being able to see why they think as they do is another.

And the second does not require anyone to give up their own view.

The link to virtue ethics#

Lawlor argues that reasonableness is not merely a useful way of behaving but a virtue in its own right. That is what ties the book to classical virtue ethics.

In Aristotle, virtue is the trait of character that makes a good human life possible; it calls less for particular pieces of behaviour than for the cultivation of a particular character.

Lawlor's reasonable person is of that kind: someone who listens to others, who can question their own values, who does not suppress their emotions, who attends to the evidence, who does not flee disagreement and who changes their mind when the case requires it — but who does not aim at agreement in every situation.

Reasonableness in the age of artificial intelligence#

The book is not about artificial intelligence. But its question acquires a new sense in that debate.

Large language models can produce answers that look thoroughly rational: they gather information, build arguments, draw comparisons.

A system can summarise both sides of a dispute flawlessly. But can it grasp which value genuinely matters to the people involved?

That question brings Lawlor's philosophy together with the debates about artificial intelligence we have been following all month. The difference between reasoning and good judgement is becoming an increasingly practical matter.

The shape of the book#

Harvard University Press presents the volume as the first comprehensive philosophical study of the concept of reasonableness. It runs to 224 pages in eleven chapters:

Being reasonable and being rational · Reasonableness in law · Mapping the domain of value · Disagreement and sharing value maps · Reasonable emotion · Reasonable belief · Reasonableness in political life · The role of reasonableness in morality · Polarised belief · The past and the future of reasonableness.

That structure shows Lawlor treating reasonableness not as the property of a single discipline but as a virtue that orders, all at once, our dealings with knowledge, value, law, politics and morality.

Publication details#

• Author: Krista Lawlor (Stanford University, Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy)
• Original title: Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2026
• ISBN: 9780674297470 · 224 pages

Lawlor's earlier books are New Thoughts about Old Things and Assurance: An Austinian Account of Knowledge and Knowledge Claims, both of them on knowledge and knowledge claims. No Turkish translation has yet been announced.

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The question the book leaves behind is among the most practical of the day: in a world where we do not agree with one another, can we be reasonable enough to live together?