"respond to reason" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It means to react or behave in a sensible or logical manner. Example: The company's decision to cut costs by reducing staff did not respond to reason, as it caused a decline in productivity and customer satisfaction.
Brutus supposes they will respond to reason; Antony is the unscrupulous demagogue.
Because it seems to me that fear's inability to respond to reason, or to the honorific "Dude," is one of its signal characteristics.
The difference, many say, is a belief that wars using religious rhetoric are motivated by absolute faith and will therefore not respond to reason.
Too often, the cry that life is not fair goes up in a moment of crisis and high emotion, as if life and death are negotiable and some force in the universe will respond to reason.
But beliefs purport to respond to reason.
By the 1957 season, Shirley Povich of The Washington Post expressed a clear preference for Pierce over Ford, writing that anyone doubting Pierce's place as the league's top left-hander was "risking committal as an incurable psycho who can neither read the figures nor respond to reason".
Errol Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons.
To respect another person one must engage his capacity to respond to reasons.
What is valued here, again, is autonomous agency, the capacity to respond to reasons.
This locates autonomy in the general capacity to respond to reasons, and not, for example, in acts of internal self-identification.
If by 'rationality' we mean a substantive psychological capacity involving particular desires or dispositions that enable us to respond to reasons, then we have a form of internalism that places substantive constraints on what can and cannot be a reason.
