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Title: Practical Reasoning about Final Ends by Henry S. Richardson, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy, John Haldane, Gilbert Harman, Frank Jackson, William G. Lucan ISBN: 0-521-57442-0 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 February, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00

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Comment: What made me purchase *Practical Reasoning About Final Ends* was Henry Richardson's laudable intent to defend the possibility of rational deliberation about ends, first at the personal and then at the interpersonal level, thereby challenging the ("pseudo-")Humean claim that ends are extra-rational givens and that reason is merely an instrumental faculty guiding us in their pursuit.

Unfortunately, as I read the book, I gradually discovered that Richardson and I had very different conceptions of what rationality is.

In my conception, rationality involves both the correct identification of facts and the consistent integration of one's knowledge and principles, i.e. it necessitates both connection with reality and coherence. To be rational, an individual's ends must not only be "mutually compatible", but also "compatible with the requirements of living" (see for instance Tara Smith's lectures on *Rationality and Objectivity*, published by Second Renaissance).

In Richardson's conception, on the other hand, rationality is reduced to coherence, and reality is thrown out of the window: "rationality in deliberation is largely a matter of the mutual fit among commitments" (p277). What he is concerned with is "a rationality relative to individuals' initial commitments" (p231). Connection to reality he considers to be something else than rationality which he calls "objectivity", the "possibility" of which he discusses in chapter 48, page 304 of this 307-page book.

As a result, what Richardson's theory of rational interpersonal deliberation boils down to is a theory of compromise, or the "dialectical softening" of "hardened positions", which recommends starting from some proposition on which the two parties can agree and then expanding outward, both abstracting and concretizing the proposition to enable a rough agreement on the question at issue.

The example Richardson chooses to illustrate this process, a debate between a Western liberal and a traditionalist Sunni on the question of rape, I personally found unconvincing. According to the author, both parties can initially agree on the fact that "rape is wrong". However, since they have different definitions of what constitutes rape and of the concept of "wrong", I fail to see how this can count anything more than verbal agreement. And second, if rationality truly is merely a matter of making commitments fit, I was disappointed to see the author "softening" the Sunni's "hardened positions" and not the Western liberal's. It would have been much more enlightening to see Richardson attempt to show how a "rational" fit between commitments could have been achieved by making the liberal come to the conclusion that after all, it was proper to have 13-old Jehan Mina flogged and imprisoned for five years for having been gang-raped.

All things considered, even though Richardson does make a few good points on the concept of final end, the incommensurability of ends and the futility of explaining choice by invoking "preferences", I found the book typical of most modern academic philosophy, consisting mostly of platitudes interspersed with much hair-splitting and scholarly references to such academic idols as Quine, Wittgenstein and Rawls.

If you are really interested in rationally selecting your ends, I would rather recommend such books as Tara Smith's *Viable Values* or Germain Grisez's books on ethics, which have the merit of starting from reality and human nature instead of initial personal commitments.