RATIONAL ANIMALS

The idea that a person is a rational animal, as a formula for understanding what is distinctive about persons, has been enormously influential in attempts to understand ourselves as human agents. Of course, insofar as we recognize other animals like dogs and cats as agents, we thereby implicitly understand them as rational in a certain way, for psychological explanation is essentially explanation in terms of reasons. What make us different from mere animals, however, are the distinctive abilities to reason we exhibit. Thus, roughly, our reasons are at least potentially articulate and informed by linguistic concepts, and it is because of our abilities to articulate, clarify, and criticize these reasons that we can self-consciously choose what to believe, do, and value, and why. The possibility of such choice brings with it the possibility for distinctive kinds of freedom: freedom not only to act but also to choose our visions of the good, visions which partly define the kind of persons we are. Moreover, such articulateness and freedom make intelligible our being responsible not only for what we do, but also (and more importantly) for who we are.

In this brief description, I have already laid out some important features of the kind of reason that defines us as persons: it is linguistically informed, articulate, self-conscious, critical, and reflexive – i.e., about not only the world but also ourselves. Merely to identify these features is not, of course, to have a complete account of the nature of human reason, let alone of what it is to be a person, for many puzzles remain. Two such puzzles will be my primary concern.