Monday, August 4, 2014


157. What is rational?

 Is being rational using reason, calculating optimum utility, giving reasons, or being reasonable?

 Using reason is associated with logic, being consistent, making valid inferences, using argument, seeking truth, and respecting facts.

However, logic does not always have a grip. It builds on assumptions that are not always clear. It takes things for granted that perhaps should not be. Some situations are undecidable. Inconsistencies may be built into options or actions.

Facts are subject to interpretation and may be in dispute. As I argued in this blog, truth cannot be much better than warranted assertability.

Aristotle distinguished between theoretical reason, as in science, and practical reason, as in morality. However, he considered the first to be the highest of a range of virtues, and able to reconcile all virtues in one harmonious whole. I think that good things may be difficult to reconcile, may be incommensurable. 

In utilitarian ethics, as in economics, rationality means the choice of an optimal solution, for an individual or group, given desires and limited means. The underlying assumption is that all ideas, ideals, convictions, and desires are commensurable, can be brought together in a one consistent system of preferences.

Utilitarianism does not do justice to certain convictions. To adopt an example from Bernard Williams: racial discrimination may then be allowed, if it causes only limited damage to a few victims and great satisfaction to a large number of perpetrators. One may also, for reasons of conviction, go against one’s self-interest.

Also, the best choice is not always a good choice. One may have to choose between two bads. As Bernard Williams put it: ‘For utilitarianism tragedy is impossible[1]

Alternatively, reason is taken as giving reasons, based on the idea is that every act must have a specifiable reason, standing apart from the act, outside it, hovering above it, so to speak. That is foundationalism. As Bernard Williams noted, the fundamental underlying idea is that the goings on of the world must and can be made transparent.[2]

Foundationalism has gradually lost its credibility. The world, and certainly actions, are not always transparent. People do many things for which reasons cannot be specified. Judgements are based on assumptions that are often tacit, or taken for granted, and an outcome of one’s socialization into a culture. Often, as Wittgenstein said, we cannot give better reasons that ‘That is just how it is done’.

That does not mean that one cannot give reasons, but they are to be accepted as partial, tentative, and subject to revision. The crux of rationality then lies in debate, putting reasons up for discussion, not in indubitable foundations. That is reason as being reasonable.

Look around in the world. People indulge in blind ideologies and murder each other for it. This is fed by two things. First, the delusion that since values and views must be universal, only one’s own are valid and the rest are to be annihilated. Second, surrender to emotion, to the neglect of argument and facts.

Philosophy had to learn that the ideal of simple, abstract, universal and fixed foundations, to regulate thought and action, is not viable and human, is even authoritarian, imperialistic. It cannot cover life, society and humanity in all its complexity, variety and variability. What remains is practical reason, being reasonable, willing to give reasons, debate, listen, be open to opposition, and be as truthful as possible. We now seem to need that more than ever.

Giving reasons when possible, putting them up for discussion, trying to be logical and consistent, respecting facts whenever available, choosing an optimal solution when it does not violate ethical principles and is not otherwise hampered by incommensurability, and empathy for the other while keeping an eye on one’s self-interest.





[1] Bernard Williams, Morality; An introduction to ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1993[1972], p. 86.
[2] Bernard Wiiliams, Ethics and the limits of philosophy, London: Routledge, 2011[198], p.112.

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