Will comments on a post by Matthew Yglesias in which Matthew wonders why libertarians so often promote their ideas as especially “rational” when, after all, we’re supposed to be concerned with what is the moral policy, not merely what’s “rational” for a particular person in the sense of “promoting their self-interest.”
Well, first, I think Will’s certainly right that this is partially a legacy from Rand, who believed that morality just was rational self-interest, properly understood. I doubt that’s right, but as an explanation of the linguistic practice, it makes sense. There’s another reading, though, based on Thomas Sowell’s frequent arguments to the effect that for many on the left (and the right too, but Sowell doesn’t mention that often), the instrumental effects of their favored policies (which is to say, their instrumental rationality at fitting means to end) aren’t too important. The charge is something like: “people who support policy X are so committed to the idea of symbolically affirming a commitment in the public sphere to the value advanced by X that they don’t seem too interested in whether their policy actually advances that value.” In debates over public schooling and vouchers, for example, I’m often reminded of Santayana’s quip that “fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” That’s not to say there aren’t some reasonable arguments against school choice programs, but all too often it seems as though partisans have grown so attached to the public system of schooling that they care more about preserving it than about the purported goal of that system: educating children. I’ve made similar comments elsewhere with respect to social security. So we can read the “rationality” claim in some instances as a way of saying: “whereas you want some state program to acknowledge the value of your goal, we’re looking at what will most effectively promote it, and it ain’t state action.” Again, whether that’s true in any given case requires an argument, but that’s one way to understand the claim.
Pace both Rand and Matthew, though, I wonder whether there isn’t another, broader way to use the word “rational” that would make sense. To say that someone morally ought to do something is just to allege that there exists a particularly powerful kind of reason to do something. The instrumental, economic sense of rationality just assumes that what you have reason to do is given by your preferences and desires, and rationality consists in maximizing the satisfaction of these. Now, however useful that economic sense may be for modelling purposes, I think we can raise questions about at least two points here.
The first is that all rationality is concerned with maximization of some desiderata: that seems to stand in need of justification. Lots of work has been done on “satisficing” rationality, and in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick contrasts maximizing, teleological ethics with his own “side-constraints” version. I think Tom Scanlon also has some interesting stuff in What We Owe to Each Other concerning whether “promoting” is the uniquely appropriate response to all values, as opposed to otherwise “respecting” them in various ways. You can always, of course, jigger up an ad-hoc maximand such that a side-constraints view becomes a maximizing view. In the case of rights, it might be something like “minimize present first-person rights violations,” but I doubt anyone would regard that as a useful move.
The other, and to me the more interesting, is whether reasons for action are provided by desires and preferences—whether they are uniquely so provided and, indeed, whether reasons are directly given by desires at all. Scanlon takes this up, as does Derek Parfit in a book he’s been working on for some time. In his previous book Reasons and Persons he makes a more modest start by suggesting that there are more constraints on patterns of preferences than the traditional economic ones like transitivity (e.g. if you prefer A to B, and B to C, you prefer A to C). He offers the example of “Future Tuesday Indifference.” A person cares about his own future suffering and pleasure as most of us do, except that he’s indifferent to pain that occurs on future Tuesdays. He will act to guarantee himself huge agony on Tuesday a month hence if it means he will be spared some minor pain on the following Wednesday. This is just a raw time preference: it isn’t grounded in any unusual beliefs about future Tuesdays, and he acknowledges that he will find the pain come Tuesday just as awful and intolerable as he would on any other day. Isn’t this, Parfit wants to know, irrational? He goes on to tackle the somewhat thornier question of whether it makes sense to discount future benefits or harms beyond what would be required to account for the greater uncertainty or future events, and then asks whether we have rational grounds for caring about our own pain, but not the pain of others.
If this approach is right, and on alternate Tuesdays I’m inclined to it, then anyone advancing a moral theory will want to describe it as “rational.” This is, in a sense, an not that different from Rand: like her view, it denies that there are two kinds of “ought,” one moral and the other rational (in the sense of “self-interested”). She would even agree that reasons are not directly provided by our desires, a view she famously derided as “whim-worship.” It would differ in that, unlike Rand, it would not be wedded to the idea that what does uniquely provide reasons for action is our own happiness.
But of course, on this account, calling your view “rational” is just one way of saying you think you’ve got the right ethical ideas, which seems a little redundant. But then, it did look like the blogger Matthew originally quoted was just flaming, so maybe that’s all that was going on.
