6.05.2007

Public Reason or Public Will?

You will see me frequently referring to the public's reason. It may puzzle a reader who is rather more accustomed to hearing about the public will. Government officials typically refer to themselves as exercising the public's will. The media usually interprets polls as reflective of the public will. The public will is a mass concept--a valid concept to describe the phenomenon of political justification (say majority vote or some such procedure). But the public's reason is a new and, in fact, very old concept as well. Here the metaphor is less about the heart (the will) of the body politic, but of its head (its reason).

Voluntarism is a position that holds that the will precedes the intellect in the order of practical action. (Interestingly, Thomas Hobbes's theory of action is often thought to be voluntaristic.) But there are good reasons to reject it as a view of human action because it gets the order backwards. It is indeed the reason of a person which identifies the basic goods that it needs to acquire and the will follows. There are instances of akrasia, of course, but they can be explained by the distinction between the real good and the allurements of a merely apparent good. Therefore, in the order of practical action it is the mind (reason) which precedes the will and it is the mind that corrects and chastens the will when it should exceed its rational limit. In the order of importance citizens place upon their considerations of candidates for public office, a tremendous weight should be placed upon the concept and method of public reasoning of the candidates for public office and less on how well they attempt to auger the "public's will"--although this, too, is important in its own right.

By emphasizing reason it allows us to evaluate a candidate on what should really matter, namely their ability to lead through reason rather than through will. Our elected public officials should be 'intellectual' rather than 'willful', should be deliberative, should give deference to scientific reason in its own domain, should be concerned with laying a rational foundation for policy. For me, a candidates intellectual abilities of leadership are far more important than willfullness (GWB) or even poll driven policythink (HRC). I think you see what I mean. Lets send the thorny toad back to Texas and get somebody who knows how to reason, like Joe Biden, into the whitehouse. In doing so we send a strong message that the twenty first century is not about Triumph of the Will but the triumph of reasonable people reasonably governing their affairs.