Inclusiveness and reason

ONE of the greatest fallacies that has thrived in our times — because it has been deliberately cultivated — is captured by what is commonly passed on as profound insight: "You can be whatever you like!" And it is just so wrong, so misleading. It is this thinking that leads to the posture that everything is subject to free decision and that there is no longer anything normative in the order of things.

While it is true that transforming the proposition "x is y," a categorical, into "x ought to be y," modal, is illicit, it can be the case that what is in fact so is normative and binding on whoever acts. There are substances that are clearly harmful to us. It follows as a matter of reason that we should not ingest them. Another example has to do with thought: Our minds proceed according to the exigencies of reason embodied in such principles as non-contradiction, identity and sufficient reason. From this it follows that we ought to think "reasonably" — following the rules of correct thinking.