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ountless legal standards ask what the ‘reasonable person’ would do. But who is this person? The reasonable person is not just the average person. That’s easily seen. Sometimes, average people do unreasonable things. This insight has led theorists to propose the reasonable person as some ‘ideal person’, such as the virtuous person, the person who achieves the best consequences, or the person who acts in accord with moral duty.

But this is all too quick. The reasonable person isn’t just the average person, but neither is it simply the ideal person. Instead, the ‘reasonable person’ represents someone who is both common and good.

The reasonable person is often associated with the law of accidents. To determine whether someone is legally responsible for causing an injury, courts apply a test of ‘reasonable care’. Did the person causing the injury act with the care of a reasonable person? But reasonableness sets countless other legal standards: was a killing reasonably provoked? Would advertisements have misled a reasonable consumer? Was a contract offer accepted in a reasonable time? Was a criminal trial reasonably delayed? Reasonableness appears within the law of both the United States and the United Kingdom as well as that of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Russia and Singapore.

Theorists often remark that the reasonable person is not the average person. As the American legal philosopher Peter Westen puts it:

[R]easonableness is not an empirical or statistical measure of how average members of the public think, feel, or behave … Rather, reasonableness is a normative measure of ways in which it is right for persons to think, feel, or behave …

The fact that a reasonable person can’t be an average person inspires ‘ideal’ theories of the reasonable person. The UK’s Supreme Court elaborates this view, on which facts about average people are entirely irrelevant. Evidence about ordinary people is ‘beside the point. The behaviour of the reasonable man is not established by the evidence of witness, but by the application of a legal standard by the court.’ On this view, the reasonable person is some ‘ideal’ person. As the UK Supreme Court observed, it is ‘the anthropomorphic conception of justice … the court itself’

More: https://aeon.co/ideas/legal-standards-invoke-the-reasonable-person-who-is-it

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