Concepts of Rationality

This is really a "note to self." (Well, this entire blog is a note to self, I know.) It's an idea that I've been thinking for a long while and whose implications are, I think, potentially far-reaching. 

A few days ago I was teaching my seminar on "Rationality and Collective Action" and we got to the inevitable question of what is rationality. The answers I got were not surprising, or wrong. The odd thing was that they were the answers an economist would give, and this in a room where most students were not Economics majors. So, they would fall back to the standard definition of rationality in economics that equates it to maximizing behavior or, if you like "thinking outside the box", "bounded optimization" a la Herbert Simon.

Like I said, there's nothing wrong with this notion of rationality. The problem is that it is a recent historical creation and it is crowding out many others. Whatever happened to the definition of "rational" as "logical"? There used to be a time when we said that an argument was "rational" if it followed from the premises. Whatever happened to the definition of "rational" as "grounded on careful examination"? When we talk about an "irrational fear of spiders" we're not saying that there's anything suboptimal about running away from spiders if one is afraid of them. We're saying that the fear itself is not grounded on any realistic assessment of what spiders are.

I think none of this would be a problem if we were thinking about economic issues. But economic discourse keeps penetrating other spheres (and, for the record, I don't think that's entirely bad; I myself do it) so we should be mindful that in those other spheres it would be very limiting to equate rationality to efficiency. 

For example, in the seminar we were trying to make sense of what Hegel could mean about "rational laws" in his essay "On the English Reform Bill." He was clearly using the idiom of the XVIIIth Century enlightened thinkers in which rational laws are laws that derive from some process of reasoning that is transparent, open to scrutiny, not driven by fear of some hidden deity and so on. In that sense, a "rational law" is not necessarily efficient. Moreover, I can think of many laws that I would call rational that are inefficient. (Don't they always say that us socialists love screwing up the economy?)

If we want to understand politics and, more broadly, to build a "rationalist" social theory, something I'm committed to, we must start by addressing the fact that rationality is much more than efficiency. One place where this is particularly notorious is in the debate about deliberation in politics. Politics, like it or not, requires language. You don't have to agree with everything Habermas has ever said to recognize that. So, a rationalist research program of politics must be able to make sense of language as a rational activity. Which it is. Right now as you read these lines (well, no one is, but just pretending), you are trying to make sense of them using rationality. You're not optimizing anything in the process. You're simply trying to go from premises to conclusions in a way that makes sense. That is every bit as rational as maximizing a profit function.

I still don't have the faintest idea of the implications this might have. But it's been nagging me for long enough to put it here.

Random Thought of the Day (Consumption and Freedom)

This is really a propos nothing. It's just an idea that I've been having for a long time and never got around working through. So I guess a blog is the right place to test it.

A lot of the differences between ideological views boil down to differences about what does it mean to lead a "good" life. This much is pretty clear. But sometimes I feel as if we can get a lot of mileage in this direction by focusing on a surprisingly narrow set of elements. 

Take consumption, for example. The ability of individuals to make their consumption choices is, as far as I can tell, one of the key elements of the libertarian (and sometimes conservative) view of what a "good" life is. If you believe that, then you value institutions that preserve the scope of choice per se, regardless of the final outcome. 

Before I trash this (and, to some extent, I will), I want to pause to take it seriously. Conservatives think that socialism somehow infantilizes citizens by offering them a lot of goods and services without choice. I can see how this would be hurtful if you have to live on state-provided rations of everything including clothing and food. In that sense, yes, part of what it means to be a fully developed human being is the ability to make choices over consumption. That is an undeniable element of agency and, in a pinch, I would say that it belongs to the list of Rawlsian "bases of self-respect."

But I don't understand why this particular value ought to take precedence over everything else. All my professional life I've been working in American universities, typical big employers, which means that I don't get to choose my health plan, or have a very limited set of choices. It hasn't bothered me at all. Not that I am thrilled with my health plan (it could be better), but I don't feel demeaned in any serious way by having it handed down to me by the university's administration. In fact, I wouldn't know how to choose if they suddenly sent me out to the jungle of private competition. 

From a slightly more philosophical point of view, it is hard to see why consumption should be the central locus of individual freedom. If we decided to make a list of activities that elevate us and promote human flourishing, consumption would not be on the top of the list. It would be on the list, for sure. I, for one, consider myself a decent home cook and take pride on preparing a nice meal. You can say that, for me, cooking a good meal is one of those activities that help me reach my Aristotelian excellence. (I exaggerate, of course, I don't do it all the time, but you get the point.) But it is exceedingly reductionist to consider the agency involved in consumption as paramount, above and beyond, say, the agency involved in enjoying the products of high culture.

I know the objection: I am assuming that there is one definition of what it means to lead a good life and, therefore, I am already prejudging that consumption doesn't rise to the top whereas under other definitions it might. In that sense, I am a perfectionist (in the ethical sense of the word), unsuited to live in a pluralist society with different views of what the good life is. 

But not so fast. Isn't there a saying that an unexamined life is not worth living? I think people from different philosophical persuasions ought to be able to agree that, whatever else belongs to the definition of a "good" life, it would include a reflexive component whereas we not only form our own plans for a "good" life, but also can revise them and subject them to scrutiny. From that point of view, hitching our definition of a good life to a static end-product such as consumption seems too limited. 

In that regard, I think that the Aristotelian-Marxist view that work is the source of the highest form of human flourishing, whereas limited, is superior. Craftmanship is an open-ended process. Intuitively, there is a deeper sense of human excellence in a work than in consumption. I now have a more jaundiced view than I used to in this regard. Probably Marx was too upbeat in considering work (non-alienated work, that is) as the ultimate manifestation of human excellence. In that sense, a doses of pluralism is a good thing. Rather than try to find exactly what is it that makes us human, and therefore, what is the most authentic form of excellence, it might be better simply to admit that human beings will form all sorts of plans and will find excellence and flourishing in the most unexpected places.

But, although this may sound libertarian, it is a specific type of libertarianism: left-wing libertarianism. If you agree with what I just said, then you should conclude that maximizing opportunities for human flourishing is not the same as maximizing opportunities for consumption because consumption is itself only one particular site of self-realization, albeit a non-trivial one. So, a society that enables individuals to pursue a "good" life will sometimes limit their choice of consumption if it is the price to be paid for other types of opportunities. 

Nothing here is earth-shattering. It's been said a lot. I just think that it's nice to be able to restate all this starting from a serious consideration of what consumption is. We don't do that systematically, either from the left or from the right.