Rationality is a highly touted quality in both philosophy and real life. Charging someone with being irrational is a strong challenge in everyday interaction. In philosophical circles, it is the ultimate insult. The question I wish to pose and ponder briefly is simply why this has come to be the case, as well as some reasons for why rationality is perhaps not always the marvelous thing that we have built it up to be.
Rationality is essentially the notion of having compelling reasons for something. If I have a good reason for selling my Apple stock, it is rational for me to do so. Rationality takes many forms, such that my version of rational thought may be substantially different from yours. What constitutes a “good” reason is open for debate, and it is shockingly unclear what exactly makes certain reasons good ones, while other reasons are not so good.
Practical rationality is a currently popular version of rationality that remains at the forefront of philosophical discourse. In addition, it conforms rather nicely with the norms of modern American society, such as mass consumerism and self-centeredness. Practical rationality, roughly stated, is the view that if a particular action is in the agent’s own interest, the agent has a good reason for following through with that action. If I stand to make a large profit by selling my Apple stock, and I want to make a large profit and have money in general, I have a good reason to go ahead and sell my Apple stock. It is rational for me to do this.
An alternative to rationality’s practical format is ideal rationality. This is the view that an action is rational if a perfectly rational agent would behave as such. Ideal rationality says that I have a good reason for doing something only if the ideally rational agent has reason for acting as I intend to. If the ideally rational agent has a good reason to sell his Apple stock, so do I. On this example, making a profit is probably sufficient reason for the ideally rational agent. However, if my reason for wanting to sell my Apple stock is that I think apples themselves taste bad, this is not a good reason for the ideal agent.
Both of these formulations of rationality have problems. With ideal rationality, the problem becomes deciding upon what your ideal actually is, as well as defending that particular ideal against other versions. An additional problem, once an ideal has been discerned, lies in figuring out what an ideal agent would do in a given instance.
Practical rationality is obviously more user-friendly, as one must simply consider the agent’s own interests in determining if a certain action is rational. However, agents, or people as they are known in the real world, have a variety of interests, some of which are quite ridiculous. Do we really want to say that if something is in your interest, it is rational? What if you have an interest in raping underage girls and you have figured out a foolproof way of avoiding arrest and imprisonment? Is it rational for you to rape underage girls?
While ideal rationality is highly impractical, practical rationality is deeply unsettling, as it gives us little room to declare specific behaviors irrational regardless of any other considerations. This does not necessarily disqualify practical rationality, or ideal rationality, but it does point to certain concerns that are not easily workable and are often sidestepped by proponents of these particular views.
This suggests, I believe, that there is more to our decision-making processes than simply doing what is rational. In the above case of the agent who has an interest in raping underage girls, I am tempted to argue that the rational thing to do, assuming practical rationality is true, is not the moral thing to do. But what reason do I have for believing this? It is possible that this view is simply a reflection of my moral education, or an emotional response based on sympathy for this agent’s potential victims, or a sense of basic human rights that trump agent interests in certain instances. Whatever the case, it appears that doing what my interests dictate is not a full picture of what I ought to do, though there may be some degree of defense for such behavior based on practical rationality.
The other side of this dilemma is that, if the agent follows his moral instincts or his sense of duty to respect human rights, he finds himself acting in a way that is not consistent with his own interests. In fact, avoiding an opportunity to rape an underage girl for the discussed reasons would qualify as a moral, but irrational choice. The agent would have to avoid seemingly good reasons for acting in favor of other, more compelling reasons not to follow through with his desire. Why should the agent do this, and how do we decide which reasons to act on and which ones to ignore?
The point here is that much like morality, theories of rationality are not cut-and-dry. Rather, agents and real people have a host of compelling reasons for doing certain things and not doing other things. My own interests or some idealized notion of human reasoning are not sufficient for telling me what I ought to do in particular cases. While it is certainly helpful to be able to cite reasons for acting in a particular way, there are often other significant factors that motivate our actions, and rationality cannot fully account for them. There is something to be said for “listening to your heart”, and though we should not simply let our emotions take us wherever they may wish to, it is important that we strike a balance between what our reason says we ought to do and what our heart is urging us to do.
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