Reasonable Minds
If reasonableness means getting it right about what really matters, then true reasonableness requires an openness to transcendence.
Review by Anna Heetderks
Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us; granting us in this world knowledge of your truth, and in the age to come life everlasting.
— Prayer of St. Chrysostom
There was a period of time when I was around five years old when my little brother David and I would wake up early in the morning and bounce on our beds until our dad came to collect us while my mom got a few more moments of sleep. Every morning, a version of the following ritual took place: my dad gave us each a banana to have with breakfast; David attempted to eat the whole banana bite by bite as I, his role model big sister, did with ease; the banana inevitably broke as he tried to eat it, a casualty of his developing motor skills; cue a wail of anguish. Morning after morning, my dad dispensed the same wisdom: “Banana broke, tastes the same.” David refused to be comforted. Until one day, after proceeding through the ritual, David, in the middle of his meltdown, paused. Through tears he whimpered to himself: “Banana broke. Taste the same.”
According to Stanford philosophy professor Krista Lawlor, my brother had just exercised, for the first time, a version of reasonableness. In her new book Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue, Lawlor explores what it is about “reasonable” people that makes them such, landing on the idea that to be reasonable is about being concerned to “get it right about what really matters.” In other words, to understand that what’s really important is not that the banana broke but that it tastes the same.
Lawlor plays out the wider implications of this idea in much more serious contexts, from law to relationship to politics to ethics. She is careful to distinguish reasonableness from rationality: rationality, in her view, involves utilitarian pursuit of individual self-interest, while reasonableness is an inherently social quality that entails understanding and making decisions based on what matters to others, not just oneself. If someone is concerned with knowing what is true and important, she argues, they will be inclined to believe there is something to others’ beliefs about what is true and important. Lawlor reiterates repeatedly the importance of communal truth-seeking, conceptualizing reasonableness as a “special way of seeing”—the ability to critically inhabit another’s point of view. Reasonable people are intellectually generous and humble: they are open to the possibility that what matters to the other person really is of value, and, if true, they are willing to change how they see and interact with the world to account for that. Thus, reasonableness lends itself to pluralism: reasonable people can acknowledge the value and potential truth of other reasonable people’s beliefs and thus settle on ordering principles that allow for differences in belief (so long as those beliefs arise from shared “basic constitutional principles”).
There’s much to commend in Lawlor’s exploration of reasonableness. The unique contribution of the book is the idea that reasonableness is a distinct virtue; as Lawlor says, a “substantial trait.” One could rephrase her core claims by saying simply that a reasonable person desires the true, the good, and the beautiful. And in distinguishing reasonableness from rationality and persistently emphasizing the importance of forming a shared understanding of the “landscape of value,” Lawlor deftly conveys that understanding and assessing what is of value in the world is not a task the individual alone is up to.
Where Being Reasonable falters is in developing a robust framework for understanding what is true and valuable in the first place. To be fair, the scope of the book is deliberately narrow: Lawlor is primarily interested in defining reasonableness in practice, not in the larger epistemological questions of how reasonable people know what is ultimately true. But to create shared maps of value, there must be a shared source of value. Lawlor implies that this value is consensus-based, that we in our collective reasonableness determine it based on observable material realities. Unsurprisingly, Lawlor’s theory of reasonableness finds its political manifestation in John Rawls’s liberalism, which is necessarily underpinned by appeals to scientific evidence. Rawls believed that people can have different privately-held worldviews but that those shouldn’t form the basis of public thought; he argued that reasoning with each other about politics forbids appeals to principles or beliefs outside “plain truths widely accepted,” including the “uncontroversial conclusions of science.” In this story, it is unreasonable to appeal to particular principles, including religious ones, which means reasonableness ends up orienting to the lowest common denominator, which is essentially materialism. As a result, this version of reasonableness—ostensibly about seeking and finding the truth—ends up significantly restricting our common truth-seeking abilities.
The issue is that, as Lawlor acknowledges, our value-laden beliefs and value-free beliefs are at times indistinguishable.
Lawlor views the reasonable person as someone unbiased, able to objectively weigh evidence and considerations and decide what is right and wrong. The issue is that, as Lawlor acknowledges, our value-laden beliefs and value-free beliefs are at times indistinguishable. “Our apparently ordinary empirical beliefs can be the product of our value judgments,” she writes, “and this fact can be hard to discern.” To take it a step further, all of our beliefs are value-laden. That shouldn’t keep us from seeking out the truth via empirical means, but does mean we must be clear-eyed about how we construe it (and the fact that our beliefs are constructions in the first place).
Lawlor’s perspective reflects what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame”—a view of the world that believes what we can see and physically experience to be all that is. Taylor believes that as products of modernity, we all inhabit this frame of thinking, but that we can respond to it in two ways: to uncritically adopt the materialist, disenchanted assumptions of the immanent frame, assuming without a second thought that this is reality (a “closed” take) or to realize that the “closed” take is indeed just a “take” and not an unbiased assessment of reality, and then to deconstruct its assumptions and entertain the possibility of transcendence.
Lawlor’s take is a closed one that ices out appeals to the transcendent as beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse. Lawlor is by no means hostile to religion in her book, and sees it as perfectly acceptable for reasonable people to hold different religious beliefs. But she nevertheless believes that appeals to religion cannot exist as part of public reason. It’s true that in a pluralistic society, it is important to establish a common system of principles and beliefs. But we have to realize that the “liberal constitutional principles” Lawlor elevates themselves constitute a belief system we’ve constructed, and as historian Tom Holland has famously posited, an irrevocably Christian one. The principles to which Lawlor points as a shared public framework are products of religious belief, of the pursuit of transcendence. We believe in equal rights for all people, for example, because the American founders believed those rights were given by God, a public religious claim of the type that Lawlor is uncomfortable with.
To strenuously seek to discern what is important in the world in community with others, as Lawlor describes it, is a worthy goal. But constraining ourselves to seeking out shared truth and value only through secular material pathways prevents us from realizing our potential for reasonableness. We may be able to establish agreement on a narrow slice of the truth, but it comes at the expense of the whole. Whether God is real; what constitutes a person; whether Jesus rose from the dead—these are all very important matters of truth or falsehood that cannot be proved or disproved by, or even discussed in terms of, observable evidence. Lawlor is correct that reasonableness is a communal endeavor, but if we are truly invested in getting to the bottom of what matters most, it should also be a transcendent endeavor.
Taylor points out that for most of human history, we have understood ourselves as creatures who inhabit and are shaped by a world imbued with meaning outside of our existence; it is only recently that we have come to center ourselves as insulated minds that generate the meaning ourselves. If we adopt the former way of seeing things, we can still value empiricism and the scientific method as powerful tools to help contextualize our existence in the world and as ways of knowing that we can easily share with others and replicate across time and space. But our aim in doing so is not to impose naturalistic explanations on the world, but to deepen our understanding of the logos, the divine order of the universe in which all things, ourselves included, live and move and have their being. Thus, we must be open to many means of discovering truth. As Comment magazine puts it, “We believe there are different ways of knowing—that the thinker and the practitioner have equally valuable wisdoms worth airing, that relationship and context matter for the ways in which we perceive reality, that the child with Down syndrome perceives truths that a Nobel Prize winner cannot.”
At the end of the day, for the Christian, reasonableness is a virtue because it points us to the end of all reason, the logos in flesh, Jesus Christ. As physicist and Catholic priest Michael Heller said, “that Christ is the logos implies that God’s immanence in the world is his rationality.” Our reason must be incarnational, aware of our abilities and limitations as embodied people who are part of a larger story. All we see is not all there is. Aquinas’s understanding of faith as the perfection of reason gets at this— our pursuit of the truth must rely on the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. So yes, it matters less that the banana broke than that it tastes the same. But what matters most of all is that there’s a world coming where no one will ever cry over broken things again. Are we reasonable enough to care about knowing if that’s true?
Anna Heetderks lives in Washington, D.C., and works in the state capacity space. She is a native of Charlottesville, VA, and a 2024 graduate of the University of Virginia. She is an editor of Fare Forward.
Being Reasonable was published by Harvard University Press on March 17, 2026. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here.
