Originally posted by bjohnson407
If I [b]had read them? How can you think so little of someone you've never met?
At any rate, your point seems wrong to me. If you reason differently, then reason becomes something different? I think not! Kant and Hume had "radically" different approaches, but the difference wasn't so radical that one or the other rejected reason. My point is that ...[text shortened]... truth." What do we do when we seek after knowledge? Frequently, we cases we do violence.[/b]
I don't think little of
you, I just think that you have not read Kant and Hume. Or, to be precise, if you have read Kant and Hume you have not understood their respective positions about practical reason. If you had, then you would see that the debate concerning constitutive norms of practical reason are absolutely central to this debate.
Where did you get the idea that I think that interpersonal differences in modes of reasoning entail anything about the nature of practical or theoretical reasoning? I certainly never claimed that, and in any case that claim is based on conflating explanatory reasons (the reasons that actually motivate people to believe or act) with normative reasons (the reasons that actually justify the holding of certain beliefs or the engaging in particular actions). Obviously, the Pope is interested in whether normative reasons are such that they inherently weigh against violence. This is why attempting to get clear on the nature of practical reason is a precondition for this debate to make any sort of sense.
Of course neither Kant nor Hume nor any other philosopher worth taking seriously rejected reason. The point is that they had different accounts of what reasoning well requires and, correlatively, different accounts of what is required for some consideration to count as a reason in the normative sense.
When I deduce that a person that has the property of being a millionaire is thereby the type of person that has more money than I do, I thereby do them no violence. I may do somebody violence (in some broad and slippery sense) if I stereotype them, but this has nothing to do with practical or theoretical reason as such. This is just one way in which I can reason poorly, and this is certainly not inconsistent with the claim of the Pope. Presumably, when one seeks to determine whether reason
itself (whatever that means, exactly) is antithetical to violence, one is seeking to determine more than whether it is possible to do violence to another by reasoning poorly about them.