Christopher McMahon

Book ReviewsKeith Graham, .Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How We Act Together.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+202.

This short, clearly written book argues that certain universal features of the social dimension of human life have previously unappreciated normative implications. Keith Graham contrasts his approach to normative theory with the method of reflective equilibrium. He thinks that, once we have seen that universal social facts have normative implications, we can obtain normative conclusions that are not tied to the values of a particular culture, as the method of reflective equilibrium inevitably is. Graham does not restrict normativity to morality, however. He has much to say about the moral implications of the facts he cites, but he is wary of the primacy that many writers accord to moral considerations. Especially important for Graham is the possibility that his approach can contest more effectively than the method of reflective equilibrium the individualism that is dominant in Western cultures. Graham begins by setting up a foil. Much contemporary moral and political thought derives normative conclusions from what it takes to be a universal fact of human life, the distinctness of persons. Graham helpfully identifies four different ways this idea might be interpreted. Qualitative distinctness is the view that persons, by which Graham means individual persons, exhibit a number of properties that are not exhibited by entities of any other kind. Distinctness as separateness is a doctrine about boundaries. Persons considered individually are distinct from each other. They live their own lives, each with separate experiences, behavior, and ideas about how that life should go. This sense of distinctness is closely connected with the view that the best state of affairs is one in which as many people as possible are successfully carrying out their plans. Distinctness as integrity is the idea that each individual human life displays a certain unity and coherence; distinctness as uniqueness is the idea that each human life is different. Graham does not deny that there are individual persons, or that, in some sense, all the forms of distinctness he has distinguished are features of human life. But he believes that contemporary moral and political theory has exaggerated the importance of these facts. He regards the first two senses of distinctness as fundamental, so the discussion in the book focuses on them. Distinctness as separateness is challenged on the ground of the causal interconnection of individual lives. This calls into question the picture of a large number of plans that can be separately pursued. One point Graham makes is that virtually every action has causal consequences for the lives of other people. This leads him to criticize John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, as well as the idea that democratic theory can rely on a distinction between preferences for oneself and preferences for others (which Graham calls “nosy preferences”). The most interesting feature of Graham’s discussion of causal interconnection, however, is his claim that the causal preconditions of our actions causally implicate us in