Excepts on Practical Reason
下面的文字摘抄自“ ”How should we live" 的第八章 “Practical reason." 文章的大部分章节评判关于”理性“和“信念，情绪以及欲望”如何影响现代人的决策和行动的主要哲学流派，然后做出总结和归纳。下面的文字是作者（John Kekes) 在批评之后做出的归纳。他的主要观点：关于如何生活，现代文明社会给了人们更多的选择和自由，这些不同生活方式可能互相冲突，互不兼容，但却各有其合理性。这些普通人面临的选择难题其实是社会文明进步的表现。因为在一百年前，阶级和出生严格限定了人们的选择或者没有选择，因而不会面临现代人的选择困惑。
It is one of the great advantages of living in a civilized society that there are several reasonable, possible, and yet incompatible ways of living open to us. I cannot improve on Peter Strawson's way of putting this point, "men make for themselves pictures of ideal forms of life. Such pictures are various and may be in sharp opposition to each other, and one and the same individual may be captivated by different and sharply conflicting pictures." This is because "the region of the ethical is the region where there are truths but no truth." " the region of the ethical, then, is a region of diverse, certainly incompatible and possibly practically conflicting ideal images or pictures of a human life." These incompatible ideals are among the riches of the possibilities of civilized life, not a shortcoming of reason. To accept this is not to deny that reason has requirements, but to recognize that once its requirements are met, there often remain several different and contrary possibilities, each allowed by reason.
The minimum requirements of reason: the propositional content, if any, of the decisions we make should be logically consistent; take into account the relevant facts; weigh the relative importance of the beliefs, emotions, and desires that guide how we should live; and lead to possible actions that have a realistic chance of achieving their aim. If any of these requirements is not met, the resulting action will be unreasonable. Reason, however, also requires us to decide which, if any, of the actions that reason allows we should actually perform. One way of making such decisions is to be guided by aesthetic, moral, personal, political, religious, or other points of view, which, of course, may result in decisions that vary from person to person. Reason may also allow us to make no decision, or to make different decisions that follow from different points of view to which we attribute different importance about which of the possibilities reason allows us to adopt. And even when reason requires us to make a decision, it need not require any particular decision.
One implication of the distinction between what reason requires and allows is that questions about what is reasonable are systematically ambiguous. They may be questions about what reason requires or what it allows. To fail to live as reason requires is unreasonable, but it need not be unreasonable not to live in one of the ways that reason allows, because another way of living allowed by reason may also be reasonable.
