the.com/reasonableness
The legal system's favorite fiction: a perfectly average person who never actually existed.
means The quality of being sensible, fair, and moderate enough that a hypothetical calm, average person would agree with your actions or decisions.
from Traces back through Old French 'raisonable' to Latin 'rationabilis,' from 'ratio' meaning reckoning, calculation, or reason itself — the same root that gives us 'ratio' and 'rational.' The '-ness' is just English's workhorse suffix for turning a quality into a noun. So etymologically, reasonableness is literally 'the state of having your numbers add up' — fitting for a legal standard built entirely on an imaginary person whose sums always check out.
- legal standard
- judged against a mythical reasonable person, not you
- origin
- formalized by 19th century English courts for negligence cases
- the catch
- juries decide it, so it shifts by room and era
- philosophy angle
- Aristotle called it virtue as the mean between extremes