The good and the rational
pp. 397-417
in: Carol C. Gould, Robert S. Cohen (eds), Artifacts, representations and social practice, Berlin, Springer, 1994Abstract
In this paper, I wish to raise a question which I may not be able to answer but which I hope at least to clarify. For reasons which we shall examine, I believe that the project of technical rationality which has been the hallmark of modernity is today ethically, sociologically and ecologically bankrupt. Does that mean, though, that we must abandon our commitment to reason and turn to some form of post-modern a-rationality? I do not believe so. It does, however, call for a recognition of the primacy of practical reason or, less obscurely, the recognition that the universe does not turn from a random aggregate of discrete entities into a meaningfully ordered whole in virtue of what we believe to be true about it, but in virtue of what we recognise as good within it.