Rational temper cannot be reduced to scientific reason. Reasoning about what is really good for us is integral to it

Humans cannot survive without evidence and reason. If you aim to live, then on seeing a cobra you better recognise the evidence that it is venomous and run for your life! Instrumental rationality is a primitive form of reason, as old as human beings themselves. Rational inferences too are intrinsic to daily existence. Farmers can tell by examining the nature of the soil what will and will not grow in it.

Forms of reason

So why are we encouraged to develop a rational temper when early socialisation already makes us rational? Because we learn skills of evidence gathering, inferring and instrumental reasoning in the limited domain of our own experience but modern life in industrialised societies can hardly be lived by these alone. To recognise and handle complex evidence, intricate deductive and inductive reasoning, sophisticated forms of instrumental reasoning, formal education is necessary. A modern society’s need for such rational creatures is insatiable. But is this all there is to human reason?

Two other forms of reason are even more important if we must move beyond survival to living our lives well: (a) reasoning about valued ends. It is not enough to explore the best possible means to satisfy whatever we happen to want. We also need to reason about which desire we should pursue. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, we are not just weak but strong evaluators — not only with an ability to (weakly) evaluate if money is to be spent on satisfying this rather than that desire but to ask what place money has in our life. In short, we (strongly) evaluate our desires by some standard of higher worth. Of what use is a prosperous life without friends, family and community, or without dignity and self-respect, we might ask. The Buddha gave up an affluent, royal life to reason precisely about such ends of life: what makes life meaningful to us as individuals, as social beings and finally, as humans inhabiting the world. Developing a rational temper is learning to reason about what makes life worthwhile, what we should really care about.

Equally important for us is (b) contextual moral reasoning, found aplenty in ordinary practice, but needing more cultivation. Suppose that your child is ill, your wife is out of town on work, and you have an urgent meeting to attend. What would you do? I doubt if you will put the health of your child and the meeting on the same scale of commensurability and do a cost-benefit analysis. Nor will you look at your moral rule book and ask which of the two acts is dictated by some command, some categorical imperative such as: always, place the highest value on your work, or alternatively, always put your child's health above all else. Single-value rules are absurd because neither value can easily supersede the other. To be sure, the health of your child is more important than a work-related meeting. But even so, a moral rule, if there was one, will have to be sensitive to actual circumstances obtaining at that time. So, if the child’s temperature is, say, 100 degrees and your attendance at the meeting is critical, you would probably leave your child behind with some reassuring words. But if the temperature was 104, you would face a dilemma: if the meeting is really urgent, you might request a trusted neighbour or friend to help you out. But if there is no alternative, you will probably skip the meeting with regret or postpone it.

This way of negotiating values is not only appropriate in personal life but offers a good model for public reasoning in societies. Collective decision-making cannot put all preferences, regardless of their respective worth, on the same commensurable scale and then subject them to cost-benefit analysis: a million people have both a little green patch and a personal gym and therefore the benefit of building a mall on the site far outweighs the cost of losing a public park. This reasoning is wrong because the larger environmental benefits of a public park must enter our reasoning as an independent, qualitatively different value and not as one aggregated desire that can be easily exchanged for another. But nor can we have an absolute, non-negotiable, single-value perspective to come into play here: always, no matter what the circumstances, our physical environment must have greater value than all else. To my mind, single-value doctrines are as dangerous as value-free, quantitative, cost-benefit analysis.

Exemplar of moral reasoning

So how should we proceed when reasoning about norms, laws and public policies of our society? We needn’t go too far here because our Constitution serves as a prefect exemplar. At stake in the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly were multiple values: individual freedom, the religious freedom of groups, equality among individuals, and inter-religious group equality. The Constitution does not elevate one value, say individual freedom, above all others. Instead, it moves deftly through each of them. So, recognising the importance of inculcating specific religious values among children of smaller groups, the Constitution grants a fundamental right to minorities to found educational institutions (collective freedom). All religious groups, large or small, are, nevertheless, given the right to apply for state funding (equality between groups). However, a condition of accepting state subsidy is that a child, say, a Hindu, cannot be refused admission to a school run by, say, Christians (no discrimination on grounds of religion — individual equality). Finally, once a Hindu child is admitted to a Christian school, she cannot be forced to attend prayers in the chapel (individual freedom).

This approach of wading through values, accepting potential conflict between them without allowing any one to trump others, finding the right balance, endorsing ethically sensitive compromises is the hallmark of sound moral reasoning. This art is an integral part of being rational.

Rajeev Bhargava is a political theorist with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi