COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 73: Practical Reason, Begging The Question, Universalizability
10 Feb 2020
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Just because normativity originates in rationality does not mean that rationality is normatively valuable. Fourth, attempting to dissociate reflective capacity from all other characteristics and privilege this capacity as a pure, human essence doesn"t make sense because we can"t reason from the perspectives of others. There is only a personal situated, given interest in ethics. To claim a status for humanity as a whole is to see from a perspective that doesn"t exist. Fifth, this ethic would deny rights to infants and the mentally ill because they can"t rationalize their actions, so it reduces to absurdity. For instance, i might reason that it would be good to study, but play video games instead. Seventh, the principle of reason is question begging because there is no reason to have the principle in the first place. Indeed the principle of reason is, as a principle, not nothing.
