Reason without virtue is just calculation
Why separating reason from ethics was always a mistake
The Enlightenment has been blamed for a lot: colonialism, scientism, the disenchantment of the world, and more recently even for reducing all human relationships to domination. At some point one has to ask: did the Enlightenment actually do all this, or have its critics been fighting a phantom?
Lately I’ve been reading about American Pragmatism. I’m not a big fan, but I’m working on a 24-lecture course for the Teaching Company on world’s practical philosophies and religions, and Pragmatism is one of the topics. In “Pragmatism: An Introduction,” Michael Bacon writes about the contemporary German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (who died earlier this year), including him – whether rightly or wrongly is a discussion for another time – among the Pragmatists. Habermas certainly was a member of the Frankfurt School of sociology, from which we got the original version of critical theory. Bacon says that, according to Habermas [1]:
“The advent of modernity was not without cost, among which [Habermas] includes emotivism, relativism and scientism, all of which connected to the priority placed by the Enlightenment on ‘instrumental reason.’ Instrumental reason is a matter of calculating the most efficient means to secure a given end without regard to the value of that end. In doing so, it is said to reduce all relationships to one of domination, in which one person seeks his or her ends by using others as the means to do so.”
Here, then, is yet another thing that allegedly went wrong with the Enlightenment: too much emphasis on reason, specifically of the “instrumental” kind. Except that instrumental reason isn’t an Enlightenment invention or value. What the Enlightenment actually championed was reason tout court – including the capacity to evaluate ends themselves, not just means. Immanuel Kant, for instance, was deeply concerned with his famous categorical imperative and with questions of dignity precisely because he thought we needed to resist treating people as mere instruments. If Kant was right, the criticism that Enlightenment thinking reduces relationships to domination actually inverts what many exponents of the movement were arguing against. This is how Kant begins his essay (which you can download in full here):
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [2] ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment.”
Now, two other members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” did articulate a more sophisticated critique – that instrumental rationality became dominant in the Enlightenment’s wake, even if that wasn’t the original intention.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument is that once you establish reason as the supreme value (which the Enlightenment did), you create the conditions for a kind of instrumental takeover. Reason gets operationalized, systematized, turned into a tool for calculating efficiency and control. And that works really well for technological and scientific progress, which is genuinely powerful. But the problem is that this mindset starts colonizing everything – how we relate to nature, how we organize society, how we think about human relationships. It all becomes a matter of optimization and domination rather than understanding or meaning-making.
The Enlightenment, then, didn’t intend this, but the logic of systematizing reason, of making it rational and calculable, allegedly created the intellectual conditions for it. Once you’ve elevated reason as your highest authority, what stops instrumental reason from becoming the default way of reasoning? There’s no built-in brake. And then you get the bureaucratic rationality, the scientistic worldview where everything must be quantifiable – all of which treats human beings and nature as resources to be managed.
A defender of the Enlightenment (like yours truly) would push back on a few fronts. First, they’d say that Adorno and Horkheimer are reading back a failure of practice onto the theory itself. The Enlightenment thinkers weren’t naive – they understood there were limits to reason and that not everything reduces to calculation. They just believed reason was our best tool for figuring out what those limits were.
Second, they’d argue that the problem isn’t instrumental reason itself, but the absence in modern times of other Enlightenment commitments. You also need the Enlightenment’s emphasis on individual rights, dignity, and democratic accountability to act as a counterweight. When those ideals erode, sure, instrumental rationality runs amok. But that’s a failure to maintain Enlightenment principles, not a flaw baked into them.
