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To the participants in the Triangle Ethics Group:
I meant to give you a paper on an issue that lies more squarely within ethics.
Alas, it is not yet in the appropriate state. I hope this piece is of interest to you. I
would very much benefit from hearing your reactions, since I plan to convert it
into an introductory chapter of a book provisionally titled Practical Rationality,
Justification, and Values.
EVALUATIONS OF RATIONALITY*
Sigrún Svavarsdóttir
Ohio State University
1. We, humans, are subject to evaluation in terms of rationality: we can be
more or less rational or irrational. It is customary, at least among philosophers,
to draw a distinction between theoretical and practical rationality. Theoretical
rationality is displayed in regulating one’s beliefs and other cognitive states,
while practical rationality is displayed in regulating one’s intentions, plans, and
actions. I am mostly interested in practical rationality: how is it best to construe
that type of evaluation? However, I will approach this question through more
general reflections on assessments of rationality—indeed, paying initially more
attention to theoretical than practical rationality.1
2. It seems uncontroversial that only RATIONAL as opposed to arational beings
are subject to evaluation in terms of rationality or irrationality. (In order to avoid
confusion, I will use small capitals when using ‘rational’ to contrast with
‘arational’.) Now, a natural thought is that rationality is the excellence of a
being qua RATIONAL being. This will be my guiding idea. Notice that this
approach makes rationality out to be a virtue—a virtue of RATIONAL beings. Of
course, no one might instantiate this virtue perfectly. People are rational to a
greater or lesser extent. At some point they are not merely lacking in rationality,
but are downright irrational.
*
Since the Spindel Conference in October 2002, I have made some changes at the end of the paper.
However, these changes were not made in response to Russ Shafer-Landau’s excellent comments
and in no way undermine his comments. The footnotes have, for the most part, been added since the
conference and this should be born in mind when reading Russ Shafer-Landau’s comments. Some of
his minor points have been indirectly addressed in the footnotes, but I have not addressed his main
critical point. That is something I will have to do in the context of paying the promissory notes that I
issue at the end of the paper. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Russ for fair and
challenging comments. I also thank the audience for engaging questions, which have, indeed,
inspired some of the footnotes. The paper was written while I was a Fellow in residence at the
National Humanities Center.
1
We also evaluate actions, intentions, beliefs, and possibly some other propositional attitudes as
rational or irrational. These evaluations, I submit, are best understood as derivative evaluations. A
rational action or attitude is an action or an attitude that an agent would undertake or have if he were
rational.
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Perhaps we can make some headway in thinking about rationality as a form of
evaluation by getting clear on what it is to be a RATIONAL being. Minimally, it
consists in having well developed cognitive capacities—capacities for mental
representation and reasoning. I will not attempt here to specify fully what these
capacities must be like in order for their possessors to count as RATIONAL
beings. Suffice it to say that the representational capacity must go beyond a
mere disposition to register features of the environment in the way that a
shadow of a tree may indicate the time of the day. The representations must be
able to feed into thought processes that amount to sound reasoning—sequences
of mental states whose representational contents stand in relations such as
implies, is consistent with, explains, is a generalization of, is an instance of, etc.
There must also be room for failure: the representation may be inaccurate and
the reasoning faulty.
These normative properties of representations and reasoning invite the idea
that the excellence of a being qua RATIONAL being consists in representing and
reasoning well or correctly. But this does not give us a plausible conception of
rationality, not even theoretical rationality. We may represent something
incorrectly without being guilty of irrationality. This might happen when one is
so unfortunately situated in the world that one receives a misleading input into
one’s cognitive system and is not in a position to discover the error however
well one uses one’s cognitive capacities. One may also represents something
poorly, even if not strictly speaking incorrectly. This does not detract from the
rationality of the cognizer if due to poverty of the input available or the limits of
his cognitive powers. Indeed, it is rational to leave out details, when they are
irrelevant or distracting. Perhaps less obviously, we may be rational even if our
reasoning does not quite measure up to the standards of inductive and deductive
reasoning. As Gilbert Harman has noted, if it takes a genius to recognize that a
triad of propositions imply a fourth proposition, the average Joe is not irrational
in failing to draw the inference.2
These observations suggest that making an error and being irrational are not
quite the same thing, even in the theoretical arena. Rationality is less about
being free from error than about not making mistakes that one could avoid by
exercising one’s cognitive capacities well; thus, evaluations of rationality must
be sensitive to the limits of the cognitive powers of the subject evaluated as well
as the features of him or his external circumstances that affect his ability to
exercise these cognitive powers to the fullest. (From now on, I will refer to these
as his epistemic limits.) This leads to the suggestion that rationality—the
2
Gilbert Harman, Reasoning, Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18.
2
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excellence of a being qua RATIONAL being—consists in using one’s cognitive
capacities as well as possible given one’s epistemic limitations.3
new drugs? That does not seem like the appropriate kind of criticism in this
case.
3. Something seems still amiss. It is irrational to clutter one’s mind and waste
one’s time by teasing out all the trivial and uninteresting implications of one’s
beliefs or to weed out any inconsistency between them.4 It seems also irrational
to go endlessly off tangents and explore at length insignificant side issues rather
than continue a main line of inquiry, no matter how exquisitely one handles the
tidbits. In these cases, one need not be making avoidable errors in representation
or reasoning. One might, indeed, be using one’s cognitive capacities superbly, at
least in the sense that the reasoning is sound and the representation both subtle
and correct. So why is it a shortcoming of me qua RATIONAL being to spend my
days teasing out trivial implications of my beliefs? A first stab at an answer
focuses on my limitations: I have a finite mind and time. Spending them in this
way diminishes my opportunity to grapple with matters more important than
trivial implications of my beliefs. This raises the question whether the
excellence of a being qua RATIONAL being is in part constituted by not letting an
inquiry of less important matters detract from one’s inquiry of more important
matters. If so, we could even save the suggestion that rationality—the
excellence of a being qua RATIONAL being—consists in using one’s cognitive
capacities as well as possible given one’s limitations. We would only have to
add that it is possible to use one’s cognitive capacities poorly, not only by
falling into avoidable error, but also by using them on one subject matter at the
cost of another, more important, subject matter.
Now imagine that the genius starts obsessively to work out all the
implications of his beliefs. He gets to the point of tediously listing all the
disjunctions that follow from his belief that snow is white, an endless task
indeed. There are half-finished designs waiting on his drawing table, finished
designs that need to be forwarded to the production department, unpaid bills,
missed appointments. He looses touch with friends, looses sleep and most
meals. Calling him irrational is at best an understatement. This is a descent into
madness. But consider a slightly milder case of this disorder: the genius has a
tendency to break off his work on his intricate designs by starting to work out
the implications of his various beliefs, even if they do not bear on what he is
doing and even if they are of no interest to him beyond being implications of
what he already believes. These obsessive reflections seriously hold up his
projects from time to time, although they never take over completely.
Alternatively, imagine that the genius has a tendency to go off tangents.
Frequently, he explores thoroughly possible addendum to the equipments he is
designing, though it should be clear to him from the start that they have no good
use or do not fit with the overall design of the object. These become little side
projects that are abandoned as fruitless after holding up the main project for
hours on end, even when much rides on finishing the design quickly. These are,
I submit, clear cases of irrationality. Being a genius, the designer’s reasoning
and representations are beyond reproach even when he goes off tangents or
obsessively works out all the implications of his beliefs. So, what is his
shortcoming qua RATIONAL being?
I do not dispute that some subject matters are more important than others
and that we may be using our cognitive capacities poorly if we concentrate on
the less important at the cost of the more important subject matter. But it does
not seem like this in itself amounts to irrationality. It seems more important to
find the cure for cancer than design household equipments. Moreover, it seems a
shame if a genius decides to use his formidable mental powers on designing
household equipments rather than on finding the cure for cancer. Perhaps, it is
also a moral failing. Certainly, it is not the best use to which the genius can put
his cognitive capacities. But this hardly suffices for making the genius irrational.
Imagine encountering the genius in his lab excitedly explaining to you the
newest intricate design of the perfect bottle opener. You think of what he could
have accomplished as a medical researcher. Alas, he was never able to develop
interest in anything but complex design of silly household equipments. Do you
accuse him of irrationality for designing bottle openers rather than developing
Of course, the notion of an agent’s epistemic limitations needs to be clarified. I leave that for the
future.
4
This observation is borrowed from Gilbert Harman. See his Reasoning, Meaning and Mind, 18-19.
4. The key to understanding this form of irrationality is to appreciate that
evaluations of rationality apply only if the subject is using his cognitive
capacities purposefully. Imagine a machine that at least closely simulates our
powers of representation and reasoning. Like us, it can fall into error and we
may even imagine that it can in some cases detect and correct its mistakes much
like we do. Say that this machine replaces field-workers who gather and analyze
data about various features of the physical environment in remote regions of this
world. Now, compare this machine to a field worker whom the machine has
replaced. The representation and reasoning they use may be very similar. We
may even assume that the machine and the field worker can be misled in a
similar way by an input from the environment, but they both have the ability to
catch the mistake and correct it. When the machine fails to correct the mistake,
it is malfunctioning, whereas the field worker is being sloppy, dense, or
irrational. Also, imagine that some input triggers the machine to spend
inordinate time on recording data of little interest given the main line of
research. It goes off a tangent so to speak. If a similar thing happens to the field
worker, we deem her irrational. But such an evaluation does not apply to the
3
4
3
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machine. It is neither rational when it functions well nor irrational when it
functions badly.
The field worker’s activity of representation and reasoning is embedded in a
web of propositional attitudes. She takes various cognitive and conative
attitudes towards the representations that she computes. She believes some of
them, doubts others, presupposes some for the sake of argument, entertains them
as explanations or perhaps as mere theoretical possibilities. She would like to
know whether or why some of them are true. In the absence of such
propositional attitudes that motivate the next step in the research, we do not
have an agent trying to figure out what is the case or how to understand
something. I do not know how to render explicit the ascription-conditions for
propositional attitudes, but clearly the machine does not meet them. The
machine is merely a sophisticated tool used in research. If the machine
continues to record and analyze data long after it has been abandoned as a
research tool, its operations are not involved in any research. There is no agent
trying to figure out one thing or another, even if the machine keeps cranking out
representations of its environment.
These two observations—that the machine is not subject to evaluations of
rationality and that the machine is not an agent—are closely related. Evaluations
of rationality, whether practical or theoretical, apply only to agents—to agents
qua RATIONAL beings. When engaging in an inquiry, however theoretical it may
be, we are exercising our agency. We are not simply crunching out
representations or drawing inferences willy-nilly, but rather engaging in goal
directed pursuit. We are attempting to figure out one thing or another.
Theoretical rationality is displayed in the course of inquiry. If I let my mind
aimlessly wonder one lazy afternoon, I am not guilty of irrationality though I
ride roughshod over inductive and deductive relations in my transitions from
one thought to another. There is no room for assessments of theoretical
rationality unless the agent is trying to figure out whether something is the case
or how it is best understood. It is against the background of such cognitive goals
that we assess whether she is rational in forming the beliefs she forms, drawing
the inferences she draws, making the correction she does, accepting the
hypothesis she does, etc.
EVALUATIONS OF RATIONALITY
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nevertheless fail at times to catch them or correct.5 So, the machine does
something that is at least awfully close to using its cognitive capacities well or
badly given its limitations. But that does not suffice for making it subject (or
even sort of subject) to evaluations of rationality. The reason, I submit, is that
evaluations of rationality, even theoretical rationality, do not get any hold unless
the cognitive capacities are being used purposefully. It is only the agent who is
using the cognitive capacities purposefully that is subjected to the evaluation.6
There has to be room for two types of shortcomings: first, avoidable inaccuracy
in representation or reasoning and, second, inappropriate use given the purpose
for which the cognitive capacities are enlisted. When the genius interrupts his
main line of inquiry by teasing out the trivial implications of his beliefs or by
going off tangents, he is falling short in the second way. His failure to neutralize
the impact of his cognitive quirks on his inquiry, assuming he can do so, is a
failure of theoretical rationality. It is also a failure of practical rationality, given
the assumption that designing the equipment, staying alive and well,
maintaining friendships, etc., are ends that matter more to the genius than
having a deductively closed doxastic system or exploring fruitless side-projects.
5. It is common to draw the distinction between theoretical and practical
rationality along the following lines: theoretical rationality is displayed in
regulating one’s cognitive states while practical rationality is displayed in
regulating one’s intentions, plans, or actions. This will not do. Consider the case
of making an assumption,7 when the subjective probability of the proposition
assumed is only 50%. On first encounter, this may seem a clear case of
theoretical irrationality. Nevertheless, it entirely depends on what the agent is up
to whether this is a case of rationality or irrationality and whether it is of the
practical or the theoretical kind. If the agent is, during the course of inquiry,
making a working assumption for the purpose of gathering more evidence for or
against it, this is a case of theoretical rationality rather than irrationality. The
following case illustrates how this can be a case of practical rationality or
irrationality.
A friend of yours has been accused of sexual harassment. You have a hard time
believing that he could be guilty of such conduct, but you also know that
5
We are subject to assessments of theoretical rationality only when we are using
our cognitive capacities for the purpose of discovery or understanding. This is
why it is inadequate to conceive of rationality, even theoretical rationality, as
using one’s cognitive capacities as well as possible given one’s epistemic
limitations. The imagined machine has capacities that at least closely resemble
our capacities for representation and reasoning. I have also stipulated that the
machine is designed to control for mistakes of a certain kind, but may
Am I imagining something that is at least metaphysically impossible? I just might. Perhaps an
adequate theory of our representational and reasoning capacities will reveal that nothing like them
could exist outside of a nexus of propositional attitudes. However, that would strengthen rather than
weaken my ultimate point.
6
What if an agent is relying on the cognitive capacities of a machine (or another agent) in a
purposeful manner? Is he being irrational when the machine (or the other agent) does not exercise its
cognitive capacities as well as it could? I think that the agent is being irrational only if he should be
able to foresee, given his cognitive capacities, that it is not worth the risk of going awry to rely on
the machine (or the other agent) in the task he is undertaking.
7
I am assuming that making an assumption involves being or entering into a cognitive state and,
hence, that one may display theoretical rationality or irrationality in making an assumption.
5
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sometimes those you least suspect can turn abusive in one way or another. You
also believe that the ratio of wrongful accusations to rightful accusations is low
in sexual harassment cases. However, the information you get about the
interactions between your friend and the alleged victim is highly ambiguous.
You have some grounds for distrusting the alleged victim, but at the same time
you worry about the effects of self-deception on your trusted friend. You really
want to know what happened and have tried your best to figure it out. But you
are completely unsure about what to think. The case is settled, by the relevant
authorities, in favor of your friend. The evidence is deemed insufficient for
establishing that sexual harassment has taken place. You still feel completely
unsure about what actually happened. Nevertheless, you decide to set this
behind you and relate to your friend on the assumption that he is a victim of a
wrongful accusation. After all, you firmly belief that people should be presumed
innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Moreover, this friendship
is important to you and you care about your friend. It proves psychologically
easier than you expected to relate to your friend on this assumption. It is,
indeed, as if you believe him innocent. However, on the few occasion that you
revisit the matter, you have to admit to yourself that you are completely unsure
about what happened.
understand something. In contrast, there is no such restriction on the types of
goals against which an agent’s practical rationality is assessed. Practical
rationality is assessed against the background of all the agent’s goals, whatever
they are. This is, I submit, the crucial difference between assessments of
theoretical and practical rationality. This calls for a sharpening of my guiding
idea that rationality is the excellence of a being qua RATIONAL being.
Theoretical rationality is the excellence of an agent qua RATIONAL being
engaged in inquiry,9 while practical rationality is the excellence of an agent qua
RATIONAL being, no matter what he is up to.
Are you rational or irrational in adopting your working assumption? Whatever
the answer to that question may be, it seems clear that the rationality at stake is
practical rationality so long as you are adopting the assumption, not in order to
gather more evidence to settle the case, but rather in order to maintain a valued
friendship. In so far as your theoretical rationality is at stake, it has to do with
whether your uncertainty is really warranted given the information you have
about the case. Given your relation to one of the parties to the dispute, you
might be subject to bias in your assessment of the evidence. Perhaps you are
guilty of wishful thinking: Hoping for your friend’s innocence, you are not
using your cognitive capacities as well as you could when assessing the
reliability of his testimony. Or, perhaps you are perversely biased against your
friend as a result of overcompensating for an initial bias in his favor. Theoretical
rationality has much to do with neutralizing the impact on inquiry of concerns
that are likely to undermine one’s pursuit of truth and understanding, provided
that one is in a position both to appreciate the danger and combat it.8 This is
because assessments of theoretical rationality take place against the background
of only such cognitive goals as figuring out what is the case or how to
6. You must suspect by now that I am going to propose that evaluations of
rationality, both theoretical and practical, are relativized to the agents’ ends.
Whereas theoretical rationality is relativized solely to the agent’s cognitive
goals, practical rationality is relativized to all his ends, taken as a whole.10 This
suggestion is, of course, neo-Humean in spirit. However, I am not proposing
that rationality is a matter of maximally advancing one’s ends like neo-Humeans
are wont to characterize at least practical rationality. It need not be irrational to
act such as to undermine overall one’s ends. For the agent may not be in a
position to anticipate this outcome. Such an agent is unfortunate rather than
irrational. He is not falling short qua RATIONAL being. Evaluations of rationality
need to be relativized not only to the agent’s ends but also to his epistemic
position. Indeed, they are best seen as evaluations of how well the agent has
used his cognitive capacities, given his epistemic limitations, in the service of
his ends. Practical rationality consists in an excellent use of one’s cognitive
capacities, given one’s epistemic limitations, in the service of one’s ends. This is
how I propose to develop, for now, my guiding idea that rationality is the
excellence of an agent qua RATIONAL being or, more specifically, that practical
rationality is the excellence of an agent qua RATIONAL being, no matter what he
is up to. The idea that theoretical rationality is the excellence of an agent qua
RATIONAL being engaged in an inquiry can, in a similar vein, be developed into
a conception of theoretical rationality according to which it consists in an
excellent use of one’s cognitive capacities, given one’s epistemic limitations, in
the service of one’s cognitive goals.
8
If your evidence indicates that some of your concerns or biases enable you to understand your
subject matter better or figure out things that you would have otherwise overlooked, it is not
theoretically irrational of you to leave your inquiry open to influence from these concerns or biases.
What if you do not have any evidence for this, but this is still the case? In that case, your theoretical
rationality is, I submit, undermined, even if you might end up knowing and understanding more than
your more theoretically rational colleague. You are being lucky rather than rational.
9
‘Engaged in inquiry’ should be construed broadly. Anyone who is trying to understand something
or someone is subject to evaluations of theoretical rationality.
10
Richard Foley has also proposed that evaluations of theoretical (or epistemic) rationality are
relativized to a cognitive goal. However, Foley identifies a unique and a very general goal as
anchoring evaluations of theoretical rationality, namely the goal of now having true beliefs and now
not having false beliefs. Richard Foley, The Theory of Epistemic Rationality (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1987). In contrast, I am suggesting that evaluations of theoretical
rationality need to be relativized to the specific cognitive goals of the agent evaluated: goals of
understanding or discovering some specific phenomena.
7
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The observation that evaluations of rationality apply only to those who use
their cognitive capacities purposefully does not, on its own, imply a
relativization of such evaluations to the purposes of the agent evaluated. Take,
for example, the recognitional view of rationality, sometimes associated with
Aristotles11 or with Plato.12 This view construes the excellence of an agent qua
RATIONAL being as a matter both of using one’s cognitive capacities well in
discovering reasons for belief and action and of basing one’s beliefs and actions
on these reasons. This view makes perfect sense of why evaluations of
rationality apply only to agents engaged in purposeful activity. However, it does
not relativize these assessments to the purposes of the agent. For an essential
ingredient of the recognitional view is that reasons for action and belief are not
fixed by the agent’s purposes. Rather, whether a consideration is a reason for
belief or action is determined by whether and how it bears on the truth of the
belief or the value of the action (or its outcome), when both truth and value are
objective in the sense of not being fixed by anyone’s mental stance on the
matter at hand.
of rationality to understand appropriate use in fulfilling one’s purpose as use
conducive, as far as one can tell, to fulfilling one’s purpose. Still, this does not
amount to a naturalistic reduction of rationality, given the first condition on
excellent use. Moreover, I suspect that the second condition, when more
carefully formulated, will appeal to some idealized conditions that cannot be
easily captured in naturalistic terms.15 In any case, my proposal is not motivated
by reductive ambitions, even if it might take us a few steps towards an
understanding of rationality that can be incorporated into a naturalistic
conception of ourselves and our surroundings.
It is the commitment to objective values that has deterred many from
embracing the recognitional view of practical rationality. Metaphysical and
epistemological worries are frequently cited as motivations for rejecting the
view.13 These are not my motivations. By relativizing assessments of rationality
to the purposes of the agent evaluated, I am not attempting a naturalistic
reduction of rationality. In my characterization of rationality so far, I have relied
on the notion of excellent use of one’s cognitive capacities in the service of one
thing or another, and I have not made any promise that this notion can be
unpacked in naturalistic terms. Let me add now that such excellent use requires
two things: first, that the agent represent and reason as well as feasible, given his
epistemic limitations, when figuring out whatever is relevant to the purpose for
which he reasons; and, second, that the agent put his conclusions to an
appropriate use in fulfilling his purpose.14 Now, it is in line with my conception
It is not that I am a fan of extravagant ontologies or a fiend of naturalism.
Rather, the relativization issue is not a metaphysical issue and does not have any
obvious metaphysical implications. This can be best appreciated by seeing that
even emotivists about evaluative discourse can acknowledge both relativized
and non-relativized evaluations. According to them, evaluations that are
relativized to the ends of the evaluated agent express attitudes, on part of the
evaluating agent, conditioned on the assumption that the evaluated agent has
certain ends, whereas evaluations that are not thus relativized express attitudes
towards the evaluated agent that are in no way conditioned by what sort of ends
he has. I am not advocating the emotivist account of what is going on when we
make evaluations that are or are not relativized to the ends of the evaluated
agent. What I am highlighting is that this contrast between relativized and nonrelativized evaluations pertains, first and foremost, to the nature of the mental
act of evaluating or the concepts employed in that act. It is a mistake to run that
issue together with the metaphysical issue concerning whether the value of an
object obtains independently of our evaluation of the object.16 Of course, once
we start to ask about the nature of the act of evaluating, metaphysical issues
about the mind-independence of values may arise. I would have to be convinced
G. Cullity and B. Gaut, Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13.
O. O’Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13.
G. Cullity and B. Gaut, Ethics and Practical Reason, 15-18; O’Neill, Bounds of Justice,13-14.
14
These two conditions should call to mind the two types of shortcomings for which there must be
room for evaluations of rationality to apply: first, avoidable inaccuracy in representation and
reasoning; second, inappropriate use given the purpose for which the cognitive capacities are
enlisted (see p. ? above). Notice that given the second condition, rationality requires something more
than using one’s cognitive capacities well in figuring out how to fulfill one’s purposes. It also
requires that one put this conclusion to use in fulfilling one’s purposes. Thus, “true irrationality” in
Christine Korsgaard’s sense is possible on my neo-Humean conception of practical rationality. See
her “Skepticism about Practical Reason” reprinted in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 318-325. I believe this opens up a way to understand the
irrationality of the incontinent person as well as of the depressive, although I will not spell out the
account here. When I speak of requirements of rationality, I am simply speaking of necessary
conditions for counting as rational. I reject imperatival and legal models for understanding such talk.
There is no mental faculty or more abstract normative authority—called reason or rationality—that
dictates how to think, feel, or behave. I conceive of practical rationality as a virtue. In failing to use
our cognitive capacities in the service of our ends, we fail to display this virtue rather than violate a
command or a law.
15
Unlike many contemporary neo-Humeans, I think that the relativization has to be to the agent’s
actual ends or ends that bear a close relation to the agent’s actual ends rather than to highly idealized
ends (e.g., ends that the agent would have under full information). However, some idealization might
be warranted. Also, the epistemic condition in the requirement has undoubtedly to involve some
idealization.
16
There are, of course, notorious questions about how to construe this metaphysical issue or whether
there is a genuine metaphysical issue here. See, for example, Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 217-220; Ronald Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth: You’d
Better Believe It,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 25 (1996); Gideon Rosen, “Objectivity and Modern
Idealism: What Is the Question?” in M. Michael and J.O’Leary-Hawthorne (eds.), Philosophy in
Mind (Dodrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994); Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, “Objective Values:
Does Metaethics Rest on a Mistake?” in B. Leiter (ed.), Objectivity in Law and Morals (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
9
10
11
12
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that these issues are more pressing or less tractable if the evaluations are nonrelativized rather than relativized.
beliefs as a servant brings him sustenance. He passes his days in euphoria, going
through one trivial implication after another until sleep overtakes him. Do we
have an irrational agent or simply a nutcase? I would not let my understanding
of rationality hinge on the intuition triggered by this case or similarly farfetched
cases.
I reject the recognitional view because it does not relativize evaluations of
rationality to the purposes of the agent evaluated irrespective of whether this
will lead us into a metaphysical quagmire. Earlier I considered and rejected the
proposal that the excellence of a being qua RATIONAL being is in part
constituted by not letting an inquiry of less important matters detract from one’s
inquiry of more important matters. This was not driven by metaphysical worries
about objective measures of importance or value, but rather by an intuition
about when charges of irrationality are appropriate. Moreover, we were able to
understand the theoretical irrationality of teasing out the trivial consequences of
one’s beliefs and going off tangents only against the background of the agent’s
cognitive goals. Typically, our cognitive goals are relatively specific: our goal is
to discover or understand some specific phenomenon rather than to discover any
old truth or understand whatever there is to be understood. It is only because of
this that it is irrational to waste one’s energies on discovering or understanding
certain facts at the expense of discovering and understanding some other facts.
Thus, my motivations for relativizing evaluations of theoretical rationality to the
purposes of the evaluated agent has rested on intuitions about when charges of
irrationality are appropriate as well as assessment of how these intuitions are
best explained. I have been hoping that this makes my readers more receptive to
a controversial idea that I happen to find intuitively compelling, namely that
assessments of practical rationality are anchored in the purposes of the agent
evaluated.
I would be satisfied if my conception of rationality matched and made sense of
intuitions about relatively realistic cases. However, the prospects for this are
grim, especially when it comes to intuitions about practical rationality. Our
intuitions conflict. For example, many find it counterintuitive to think that an
agent with awfully silly endeavors be rational. 17 Imagine a person who sets out
to discover how many Johns live in Durham, North Carolina. Admittedly, I
would suspect him of irrationality, both theoretical and practical. For it is
difficult to believe that his life is so impoverished that spending his intellectual
resources in this way does not detract from cognitive goals and other endeavors
closer to his heart. But if I am wrong on this score, I don’t see that his
shortcoming is that of irrationality, especially if he pursues the matter in the
most ingenuous way. The man is just silly and shallow—an awfully
uninteresting person, indeed. My intuition here is strong and plays a crucial role
in motivating me to advance a neo-Humean conception of rationality. But
apparently the intuition is not widely enough shared to provide solid grounds for
defending my conception of rationality. What is needed, I believe, are
theoretical considerations in favor of understanding evaluations of rationality in
the way I have proposed. I will not have time to develop the theoretical
considerations here, but let me explain how I conceive of that project.
Motivating my proposal by appealing to intuitions may seem dubious. Even
intuitions to which I have already appealed may be turned against me. Imagine
an agent whose sole aim in life is to have a deductively closed system of beliefs.
My proposal has the consequent that it is rational for such an agent to work out
all the implications of his beliefs. This seems to go against the intuition about
irrationality on which I have been relying, namely the intuition that it is
irrational to spend one’s days teasing out all the implications of one’s beliefs.
Nevertheless, I accept this consequence of my view. I am not sure that the
intuition, on which I have been relying, is triggered by the purported
counterexample when properly understood and, in any case, I would not want to
rely on an intuition triggered by this imagined scenario. It is difficult to get an
imaginative fix on an agent whose only aim is to have a deductively closed
system of beliefs. You have to imagine an agent who does not aim to understand
anything but the implications of his current beliefs, and who does not even aim
to stay alive and well. Otherwise it is doubtful that we have an agent whose ends
are overall well served by working out all the implications of his beliefs. Well,
perhaps we can imagine such a guy. Conjecture up the image of an
independently rich guy sitting in his study teasing out all the implications of his
There are two main questions that need to be addressed: First, are there genuine
evaluations that pertain to how well people use, given their epistemic position,
their cognitive capacities in the service of their ends? Second, assuming that
these are genuine evaluations, why is rationality best understood as the virtue
epitomized in this type of evaluation? Both questions need some clarification. It
is far from obvious what would constitute adequate answers to them. The first
question, I submit, requires that we be given a good sense of why it matters that
people use their cognitive capacities well in the service of their ends—matters in
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17
Perhaps the most difficult cases for me involve self-destructive agents. Consider a severely
depressed agent whose only aim is to find a way to end his life, even if he has been informed that
with proper medical treatment he will get out of the depressive state and enjoy life again. Is he
rational when he uses his cognitive capacities, in the most ingenuous way, to fool the person who
stands a suicide guard over him and to find the means to end his own life? If he fails to do this, is he
failing to display the virtue of rationality? My intuition is shaky about this case and I am weary of
resting my conception of rationality on the intuition that it triggers (in me or others). I would like to
come back to this case, once I have provided a deeper and more theoretical understanding of why the
virtue of rationality is best regarded as an excellence in the use of one’s cognitive capacities in the
service of one’s ends—the sort of understanding for which I call below. –Thanks are due to Walter
Sinnott-Armstrong for pressing the case of the suicidal depressive on me.
EVALUATIONS OF RATIONALITY
DRAFT
EVALUATIONS OF RATIONALITY
DRAFT
such a way that this can be considered a virtue. The second question, I submit,
requires that we be given a good sense of why an excellence in the use of one’s
cognitive capacities in the service of one’s ends is the virtue of agents qua
RATIONAL beings. Moreover, it must be elucidated why the verdict that someone
uses his cognitive capacities well in this way has a justificatory force, while the
opposite verdict has a critical force—the sort of justificatory and critical force
that verdicts of rationality and irrationality are commonly understood as having.
credible justificatory or critical force, even if they are relativized to the agent’s
mental states in such a way that there is no guarantee that rationality will serve
truth and value. It will also cast light on why rationality, as understood here,
matters in such a way that full justice can be done to my guiding idea: namely,
that rationality is the virtue of agents qua RATIONAL beings. At the same time, it
will require that my conception of practical rationality be further developed. An
agent can display practical rationality not only in acting one way rather than
another, but also in forming and revising intentions, plans, and other
commitments. Moreover, evaluations of practical rationality need to take
account not only of the agent’s goals, but also of his various attitudes regardless
of whether they are reflected in his current aims. Alas, I have issued a lot of
promissory notes. Let me stop before I sink further into debt.
It is far from trivial to meet these requirements. This can be best appreciated by
imagining an evil or a silly person who uses his cognitive capacities superbly in
advancing his evil or silly ends.18 Can we really think of him as justified in his
evil or foolish ways just because they result from an excellent use of his
cognitive capacities in the service of his ends? Don’t his ends have to be worthy
as well? Can we really think of the excellence of this person’s use of his
cognitive capacities as mattering in the way that virtues matter? Can we think of
it as the virtue of agents qua RATIONAL beings? Does that virtue not also consist
in having worthy ends—or least ends which are such that there is a reliable
connection between using one’s cognitive capacities well in the service of them
and ending up having true beliefs and doing valuable things. Isn’t that required
for verdicts of rationality to have the justificatory or critical force that they are
commonly understood as having?
These challenges assume that the justificatory force of verdicts of rationality
and the status of rationality as a virtue cannot be elucidated unless rationality is
shown to serve truth and value. This is an assumption that I want to challenge,
even if I believe that as a matter of fact rationality tends to serve truth and value.
Understanding why rationality is a virtue and, in particular, why verdicts of
rationality have justificatory force requires that we probe deeper into the nature
of the type of agents—RATIONAL agents—that are subject to evaluation of
rationality. What sort of agents can be justified in or criticized for forming a
belief or an intention to act? It seems that the ability to use one’s cognitive
capacities purposeful does not suffice. What is required is that one has the
ability to reflectively assess and revise one’s beliefs and intentions. Such
reflections can only take place against the background of other beliefs and
concerns. There is no way of stepping outside of one’s mental stance to figure
out what to believe or do. However, one may use one’s cognitive capacities
better or worse in the course of reassessing and regulating one’s beliefs and
intentions. Here evaluative notions such as responsibility, conscientiousness,
and integrity find their natural niche and, I want to argue, the notion that an
agent can be more or less justified in forming a belief or an intention. This is, I
contend, the key for understanding why evaluations of rationality have a
18
Compare Warren Quinn’s challenge to neo-Humean’s in “Rationality and the Human Good”
reprinted in his Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
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