There are all sorts of ways people use the words rational and irrational.
We might say that something is 'rational'
when what we mean is that we think there's
evidence supporting it; we might say someone
is 'irrational' when what we mean is we
think they aren't very clever... And even
apart from what we mean when we say them,
there are all sorts of things that the words
'rational' and 'irrational' can do,
all sorts of effects the words can have quite apart from what they actually mean,
as we'll be seeing later in this 4-part
series. For now though, let's say that to
be rational is to listen to reasons, and
we'll include evidence as a kind of reason.
So it makes sense to start out by asking -
One thing I think should be fairly uncontroversial
is that reasons always relate to something
else. So there'll be a reason to go to the
shops or there'll be a reason to believe in God but there'll
never just be a reason on its own. The philosopher
Bernard Williams says, "If there are reasons
for action, it must be that people sometimes
act for those reasons, and if they do, their
reasons must figure in some correct explanation
of their action."
We should say that just because someone has
a reason to do something,
just because it is rational in some sense,
doesn't mean that that's the thing that they
will do or the thing they should do.
I might really
wanna eat a whole load of chocolate, and that's a reason for me to do it. But I might also I want to eat more healthily and that's
a reason against doing it. The fact that
it's your chocolate might be another reason
against doing it. Whether or not I do it will depend on which one of these reasons wins out, which is the "winning reason."
So how do reasons work? How do we go from
a fact like, 'Hey Ocean! are selling half-price
concert tickets' to me saying, "I should
queue up and get tickets!" Well, one easy
answer is that reasons correspond to motivations in people.
If you have a reason to do something, if it's rational for you to do something, then you must at least in some small way be motivated to do
it. This view is called Reasons Internalism.
Just because you're motivated won't
necessarily mean that you have a reason to
do something: I might be really motivated
to see Hey Ocean! Live but it's not rational for me
to stand in line over there until I also get the information that that's
where the tickets are being sold. But according
to reasons internalism motivation is at least a necessary
condition of having a reason to do something.
Reasons internalism can seem like it's pretty
intuitive; at least some reasons for doing
stuff really do seem to be relative
to people's motivations. For instance the fact that Hey Ocean!
are selling half price tickets might
mean that it's really rational for me to stand in line and
get them, but not at all rational for you.
Why? Because you're not motivated to see them! That's not a thing you want to do.
The idea that reasons in some sense link up
to what you're motivated to do is sometimes
called the Humean Theory of reasons, because
some of what famous Scottish philosopher David
Hume said seems to line up with it: in his
Treatise on Human Nature, Hume writes, "Reason
doesn't provide the impulse to act but only
steers it. It's the prospect of pleasure
or unpleasure from an object that makes us
want it or want to avoid it." i.e. it's
what you're motivated towards, what you
desire, that determines whether something
is rational for you to do.
Reasons internalism also fits nicely the criterion
we spotted earlier, which is that reasons,
whatever they are, should explain why people
do what they do. One of the most famous examples
in the philosophical literature is of a guy
who really wants a gin and tonic, and he has
a bottle of what he thinks is gin but which
is actually petrol. And he mixes the drink
and drinks it. So was it rational to drink
petrol? Yeah - he really wanted a gin and
tonic and he thought it was gin so that was
a rational thing to do given those desires
and beliefs. That explains why he did it.
The opposite of reasons internalism is reasons
externalism. This is the idea that it can
be rational for you to do something even if you are not at all motivated to do it. Even though you do not
want to see Hey Ocean! and you do not want to stand in line with me, nevertheless
that is the rational thing for you to do. You may
have believed that that petrol was gin and
you may have been really motivated to do it, but still it was not rational
drink petrol; you only thought it was.
Arguments for reasons externalism often proceed
by arguing against reasons internalism.
So one of the problems with reasons internalism might be that it relies on what motivations you have
right now. If I'm piss drunk at 3am and
I really want a kebab then it's rational
to get one, even if it's also the case that tomorrow
morning I will regret that decision.
That puts us in the maybe odd position of being
able to regret and even condemn actions that
were perfectly rational.
On the surface that might not seem like a
very big problem but rationality is often presented
as a virtue, at least in the culture I grew
up in. We might praise a person or a work
or a design for being very rational but if rationality
just corresponds to our motivations, then all
'rational' really boils down to is that
we approve of it, which means that rationality is maybe more of a value-neutral thing.
And the philosopher Max Horkheimer saw that as a big trap lying in wait for all of us. He
makes a disctinction between "subjective reason" and "objective reason." Subjective reason can
tell you means,  but never ends: it can
tell you how to get to what you want but it can't
tell you what you should want in the first place. Subjective reason corresponds to reasons internalism and the kind of thinking
Hume was talking about when he said you can be steered by reasons but ultimately it's about what you're
motivated to do that's important.
One of the most famous examples of subjective
reason in action is the so-called dollar auction.
Suppose we auction off a dollar in an auction
with special rules where the winner and the
runner-up both have to pay whatever they bid.
Bidding starts at one cent, and these two
guys go up in one cent jumps: he bids one
cent, the other guy bids two cents, three
cents, and so on, until the first bidder bids
a dollar. For the dollar.
At that point, the second bidder says, "Well,
if I give up then I lose 99 cents, because
the runner up has to pay too. But if I bid
one dollar and one cent and win then I only
lose one cent, because the dollar I win offsets
the cost of my bid." So, given that he wants
to maximize gains and minimize losses, it's
rational to keep bidding to minimize the loss.
Trouble is, it's now rational for the first
bidder to bid too. If he backs out now he
loses a dollar. If he bids one dollar and
two cents and wins, he only loses two cents.
And so on, forever, until these two guys are
bidding millions and millions of dollars - even
up to infinite dollars just to win one
dollar.
That's subjective reason: they have a goal,
a motivation, already, and they are chasing
it. The sensible thing to do would seem to be to abandon that goal but that would require "objective
reason," which Horkheimer says can tell
you what you what ends you should adopt and what things you should
be motivated to get. By the way Horkheimer wasn't the first philosopher to make
this distinction: Francis Hutcheson,
to name just one other, made a similar distinction in
the 1700s, but we're gonna use Horkheimer's distinction for now because we're about to criticize him.
Horkheimer says that objective reason used
to be a lot more common in society: it used to be the
job of religion and even to a certain extent
philosophy to tell you what values you should
hold and what ends you should adopt. Laws
and constitutions, he says, used to be designed
to correspond to "the laws of reason,"
i.e. the natural, objective state of things
rather than just whatever the people that wrote them were motivated to seek.
Horkheimer goes on to say that nowadays objective
reason has crumbled away and subjective reason
reigns supreme. "The present crisis of reason
consists fundamentally in the fact that at
a certain point thinking either became incapable
of conceiving such objectivity at all or began
to negate it as a delusion." To this shift
he even attributes the rise of fascism, since
personal interest took the place of objective
reason and "lays the ground for the rule
of force in the domain of the political."
The idea that what is rational might depend
on what you want to do is, he thinks, a potentially
incredibly destructive idea.
But Horkheimer goes wrong in a few places. He says that objective reason used to be a lot more common in
society but by his time, 1947, it no longer was, but when exactly did objective reason rule the
roost? He points somewhat vaguely to the Enlightenment texts and documents like the American Constitution
as examples of objective reason but we nowadays know that the Enlightenment texts did not
escape the often very subjective context in which they were produced. We've mentioned before on the show that writers like John
Stuart Mill and John Locke - their ideas were ideological components of colonialism;
the US Constitution was written by, and arguably
to a large extent for, slave owners. That's not to say there's nothing good in any of those texts, but just that there is actually
a lot of subjective reason going on there. More than people previously thought. Even Horkheimer admits that the so-called
objective reason of Plato, who was all about
trying to see beyond our subjective
perspectives into a bigger, more objective world, was grounded in a society built by slaves
and to a large extent used to justify slavery, as we'll be seeing in Episode 3. The idea that
reason nowadays just means the advantage of
the powerful kindof overlooks the idea that
arguably it always has meant that, and the idea that politics nowadays is somehow violent, more violent
overlooks the idea that politics is arguably
essentially violent and always has been. Horkheimer
argues that reasons internalism or subjective reason would be very bad if it was incredibly predominant.
But that alone doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't.
Still, Horkheimer might be onto something
by trying to realize the implications of reasons
internalism. Reasons internalism has some
very interesting implications, for instance if it's true then all imperatives are
hypothetical. What that means is
any sentence of the form "You should do
X" must be preceded by, "If you want Y."
So "If you want see Hey Ocean! with me you should
stand in line and get tickets." "If you
want to stay dry you should take an umbrella."
"If you want - something - you should
obey the law?"
If we're reasons internalists then we have to take a sentence like, "You should obey the law"
and in front of it put "If you want..."
what? And what we put in that gap might potentially tell
us an awful lot about what law and law enforcement are. For instance, one potential example of an answer
is, "If you want to avoid being subjected to
violence by the state"
and that answer opens a lot of doors, politically, into revealing what law enforcement is.
When it comes to legal matters, the philosopher
Joseph Raz says that the law offers "content independent reasons." The law doesn't
take a bunch of reasons into consideration and say "If you want to achieve
XYZ good things that we thought of when we were writing the law," then you should obey the law; what it does is take those XYZ reasons and replace
them with the threat of violence. We don't
obey the law because we think that it is wise and
just and well reasoned we obey it because
otherwise it's gonna be enforced. Raz thinks
that the law is essentially coercive, not
cooperative. And this is something that
philosophers like Foucault realized before
Raz did, and which oppressed minorities like
black people in the USA and Indigenous People
in Canada, to name just two examples we've
mentioned on the show before, realized quite a long time before Foucault did as well!
On a different note, the philosopher Herbert
Dreyfus has used something like Horkheimer's
distinction to argue against the possibility
of artificial intelligence. Programming a
computer with something like subjective reason
is simple enough - "If you receive this
input whilst seeking this goal, produce this
output." But telling a computer to seek
its own goals is more difficult, unless you
express it in a higher-order subjective form
like, "If you get this input, change to
seek this goal." Dreyfus sees computers
as we know them as always in danger of becoming
stuck in something like the dollar auction,
unable to use what we might call common sense
and assess situations in an objective way.
But even beyond the law and beyond AI lurks something that reasons externalists call The Central
Problem. According to reasons internalism
if you have a reason
to do something you must me motivated to do it, and if you don't have the motivation then
there's no reason for you to do it. So what happens when we take that idea and apply it to morality? What
if you just want to be bad? And that question is going to be the focus of Episode 2.
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