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Rationality and the Human Good

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Warren Quinn
Warren Quinn
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

In this essay I want to look at some questions concerning the relation between morality and rationality in the recommendations they make about the best way to live our lives and achieve our good. Specifically, I want to examine ways in which the virtue of practical rationality (conceived in neo-Humean terms as the most authoritative practical excellence) and the various moral virtues might be thought to part company, giving an agent conflicting directives regarding how best to live his (or her) life. In conducting this enquiry, I shall at some crucial points be presupposing something of an Aristotelian perspective, but only in the most general way.

I

In what follows, I shall distinguish reason, the faculty or power, from rationality, the excellence or virtue (taken in the broadest sense) of that faculty. By practical reason I mean that part of reason that tells us what to do and how to live. By practical rationality (or, henceforth, rationality) I mean the excellence of that part of reason in virtue of which an agent is practically rational as opposed to irrational. By a neo-Humean conception of rationality I mean one that makes the goal of practical reason the maximal satisfaction of an agent's desires and preferences, suitably corrected for the effects of misinformation, wishful thinking, and the like. There are various versions of neo-Humean theory, and I shall not here be concerned with their specific differences. Their common essence lies in an appeal (1) to a notion of basic desires or preferences, which are not subject to intrinsic criticism as irrational and are subject to extrinsic criticism only by ways in which their joint satisfaction may not be possible, and (2) to a notion of derived desires or preferences, which are criticizable only instrumentally.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 81 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1992

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References

1 I will also be indebted to Philippa Foot's recent unpublished development of that perspective in The Princeton Lectures (“Human Desires”, “Miklukho-Maklay and His Servant”, and a third, untitled lecture), and also in her later “Virtue and Happiness”, and “Happiness II”.

2 Although the latter could perhaps be defended on other grounds.

3 , Plato, Republic, 348C–349A.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 348D.

5 Hume is the maverick here, denying that there is any such thing as practical reason or rationality — any way in which actions or desires can, “except in a figurative and improper way of speaking”, be reasonable or unreasonable and, therefore, any way in which reason can pronounce them to be so. See Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 459.Google Scholar The neo-Humeans I have in mind do not follow Hume in this radical conclusion, supposing instead (and rightly, I think) that there is a proper and important way of speaking of actions, and at least derivative preferences, as reasonable or unreasonable.

6 Different neo-Humeans have different ways of indicating the way in which they take their theories of rationality to be normatively central. The clearest and least technical recent statement of neo-Humean rationality is by Gauthier, David in Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar, ch. 2. Gauthier shows the significance he attaches to the theory in his defense of a neo-Humean theory of value which, in accordance with his theory of rationality, is subjective, relative, and dependent on preferences that can be criticized only in respect of their mathematical coherence and the extent to which they are well informed. It must be noted that Gauthier is not a complete neo-Humean, since he argues (in ch. 6) that in situations involving the keeping of agreements, instrumental rationality may be constrained. In The Foundations of Statistics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1954), Savage, Leonard J.Google Scholar, after putting “rational” in quotes, as if it were too hot to handle, immediately explains that the suggested criteria and maxims of rationality will have to be judged by the reader according to whether the latter would try to behave in accordance with them. Jeffrey, Richard, in The Logic of Decision, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar, presents his theory of rational choice as a theory about desirabilities of choice. And what could be more important than the most desirable choice?

7 That is, I assume that someone who denies a judgment of this sort could simply be mistaken, in the way that someone who denied that Hume was intelligent would simply be mistaken.

8 Foot's example in “Virtue and Happiness” is Gustav Wagner, a Nazi deputy commander of one of Hitler's death camps. According to Foot (p. 2), Wagner “said when he was finally apprehended at the age of 68, that whatever happened next he would not be ‘the real loser’”. He is reported to have added: “I thoroughly enjoyed Brazil, and I didn't think about the past”.

9 Naturally, I am assuming in all these cases that the pleasures are objects of basic desire and preference.

10 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, part III, section III, p. 416.

11 Of course, I am thinking of sane adults here.

12 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1110b27–32.

13 Foot, “Virtue and Happiness” and “Happiness II”.

14 Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, “Truth And Probability”, in The Foundations of Mathematics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1931), p. 174.Google Scholar

15 Some — including most notably James Griffin, who has written with uncommon insight and good sense about human good in Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) — find this line of argument particularly implausible in cases where the shameful deed is done to preserve one's life, which then goes on to contain many prudentially good things (see ibid., ch. 4, esp. p. 69). Perhaps many will agree that a life-segment composed of, say, stealing a car and then enjoying its use cannot, because of its shamefulness, make the life to which it belongs more worth living. Perhaps the same is true of the life of the wrongful usurper, despite its prizes of power and control. It is often possible to restore the worthwhile status of such lives by simply giving up the illicit gain, but this may not be a morally acceptable option where life itself was wrongly purchased. And this may make our thinking about these cases special. For in all cases where we have brought shame upon ourselves, including these, we want there to be some way of restoring our lives (or some particular element of them) as worth having. Where the illgotten gain is life itself, most of us think that this restoration can be brought about by a combination of sincere regret (which seems, by the way, compatible with the disturbing thought that we would again succumb to the temptation), good works expressive of that regret, and, finally, the simple passage of time prudentially well spent.