ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins with a reiteration and development of two points that have already been made briefly. Epistemology has all too often either failed to make this distinction or, having made it, failed to observe it consistently. Some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, in particular, confused psychological questions with questions of justification, although the confusion is by no means unknown in more recent times. As one would expect, there is a similar distinction to be made in the field of moral judgements about, or moral attitudes towards, actions. In the rest of this chapter, then, the discussion of the nature of rational or reasonable conduct and the limits within which these and other comparable epithets can be applied will be concerned primarily with questions of rational justification or rational criticism of actions, actual or projected, and with the extent and limitations of such justification and criticism.
