REASON, Tossy Thomas

The faculty of reason also known as rationality, or the faculty of discursive reason is a virtue that governs the exploratory interactions of humans with the universe - such as those employed in our practice of the natural sciences. It is a mental ability found in human beings and normally considered to be a definitive characteristic of human nature. It is closely associated with such human activities as language, science, art, mathematics and philosophy. Reason, like habit or intuition, is a means by which thinking comes from one idea to a related idea. But more specifically, it is the way rational beings propose and consider explanations concerning cause and effect, true and false, and what is good or bad. In contrast to reason as an abstract noun, a reason is a consideration which explains or justifies some event, phenomenon or behaviour. The ways in which human beings reason through an argument are the subject of inquiries in the field of logic. Reason is closely identified with the ability to self-consciously change beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and institutions, and therefore with the capacity for freedom and self-determination. Psychologists and cognitive scientists have attempted to study and explain how people reasons, e.g. which cognitive and neural processes are engaged and how cultural factors affect the inferences that people draw. The field of automated reasoning studies how reasoning may or may not be modeled computationally. Animal psychology considers the controversial question of whether animals can reason. We also reason theoretically about what morality requires of us; but the nature of theoretical reasoning about ethics is adequately addressed in the various articles on ethics. In order to do justice to the full range of philosophical views about moral reasoning, we will need to have a capacious understanding of what counts as a moral question. For instance, since a prominent position about moral reasoning is that the relevant considerations are not modifiable, we would beg a central question if we here defined "morality" as involving modifiable principles or rules. For present purposes, we may understand issues about what is right or wrong, virtuous or vicious, as raising moral questions.

The topic of moral reasoning lies in between these two other familiar topics in the following simple sense: instead of asking what is true, morally, or what makes moral truths true, those concerned with moral reasoning ask how it is that we responsibly attempt to figure out what is true, morally.