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Returning to reason reasonably.-

Article Excerpt
RETURN TO REASON. By STEPHEN TOULMIN. Harvard University Press. 243 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Peter Berkowitz

STEPHEN TOULMIN'S Return to Reason provides an occasion to reflect on the remarkable fact that our faith in reason is currently on the decline--and that our professors are taking the lead in killing it.

Of course that part of reasoning that involves the ability to calculate and create is prospering. We continue to produce an astronomical amount of data, to acquire ever greater knowledge of facts and figures, and to invent awe-inspiring machines that enable us to manipulate nature with ever greater precision and that make our lives more comfortable and secure (as well as those that menace us and threaten our species' very existence).

The part of reason in which our faith has been faltering concerns the moral life. One hears the distrust in ordinary talk. Projecting a certain humility, sophisticated people say of this action or that practice, "Who am I to judge?", by which they really mean, somewhat aggressively, "Who are you or anybody else to judge?" In the academy, the often thoughtless live-and-let-live liberal relativism of the 1970s and `80s opened the door in many disciplines to forms of thought that disparaged or denied the ability of reason to distinguish soundly between good and evil, to accurately discern moral principles, and to justly rank rival ways of life.

These days the academic attack on reasoning about the moral life comes from many quarters. In some cases it has less to do with what a discipline says than with what the discipline will not allow, or deems of too little significance, to be said. Economic analysis, for example, assumes that human beings are rational maximizers of their satisfactions. Its object of study is what people actually desire, the cost of satisfying those desires, and how institutions and rules can be...

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