Right Reason

Rationality as a Matter of Focal Standards

 

From Thomas C. Schelling’s chapter "The Retarted Science of International Strategy" in The Strategy of Conflict:

As a matter of fact, many of the critical elements that go into a model of rational behavior can be identified with particular types of rationality and irrationality. The value system, the communication system, the information system, the collective decision process, the parameter representing the probability of error or loss of control, can be viewed as an effort to formalize the study of ‘irrationality.’ Hitler, the French Parliament, the commander of a bomber, the radar operators at Pearl Harbor, Khrushchev, and the American electorate may all suffer from some kinds of ‘irrationality,’ but by no means the same kind (Schelling 1980, 16-17).

Earlier in the same article, Schelling speaks "an understanding of 'correct' play" which can "give us a bench mark for the study of action behavior" (Ibid, 3). Schelling’s wisdom is in identifying the standard of rationality, not as a set of transcendent normative criteria, being embedded within the particular circumstances facing each agent. Such an approach is worth following since it pays attention to the particular situations in which behavior occurs, and doesn't fall into the conceit as to think that what it means to be rational can be easily elucidated in a journal article. 

 

There is something to rational behavior which separates it from other behaviors. There are dimensions to decision making, like choosing what beliefs to to act upon or what motives to follow, which give reason for there to be a standard for fitting conduct like rationality. When talking about rationality, generally what we want to do is to discover a normative criteria and to figure out how actual behavior deviates from that criteria. Hitler, for instance, would certainly not have been rational if he decided to invade Russia if made that suggestion on the belief of the Wermacht's racial superiority, or if he had done so out of anger rather than a strategic calculus of whether the war was winnable. 

Earlier in the same article, Schelling speaks "an understanding of 'correct' play" which can "give us a bench mark for the study of action behavior" (Ibid, 3). Schelling’s wisdom is in identifying the standard of rationality, not as a set of transcendent normative criteria, being embedded within the particular circumstances facing each agent. Such an approach is worth following since it pays attention to the particular situations in which behavior occurs, and doesn't fall into the conceit as to think that what it means to be rational can be easily elucidated in a journal article. 

 

Etymology matters. In Cratylus, Plato’s argues that words are mortal gropings towards immortal meanings. In Essays on the First Formation of Language, Adam Smith’s arguesthat words are focal points for human conversation about the world, remembering the meanings of words is important for our comprehension of the ideas that are behind them. The word ‘rationality’ derives from the Latin word ‘ratio’ which, according to the ever reliable Wikitionary, is “1. A number representing a comparison between two things.” It cannot be described simply as ordinal preferences and transitivity, or as goal-orientated behavior; instead, rationality is a matter of focal standards which provided a bench mark for judging whether the behavior in question reached a standand which could be expected from it. When scholarship cannot make sense of ordinary language, it’s a sign that something has gone drastically wrong. Such is the case with rationality.

Collapsing rationality into little, or nothing, more than a description of all human action fails to live up to that conception that behavior can be judged according to standards and thereby judged rational or irrational. There are actually interesting questions intertwined with the word ‘rationality.’ In ordinary language, people use the word in ways that simply collapsing it to encompass all human behavior disappoints. There are such things that are used as focal standards for judging the rationality of human action. What those focal standards are is an interesting question which shines light upon the human condition, and which consequently shouldn't be defined out of existence. 

Moreover, what those focal standards are all too often cannot be understood outside of a deep understanding of the context in which they occur. Speaking of the irrationality of Hitler or the French Parliament requires an understanding of the context they made their decisions within so that one can talk about the standards which Hitler or the French Parliament are to be judged by. 

 

In the end, rationality is a matter of matching behavior with its focal standard, and what that focal standard is will depend on the situation each agent faces. There can be many ways in which different types of action and different types of plans can live up to rationality because they are judged by different focal standards. That something is rational within one circumstance and irrational is another is neither a contradiction, but rather a consequence of the fact that what it means to be rational depends on the factors at play within each circumstance. 

Liberty and the Anglosphere: Reflections on Hannan's _Inventing Liberty_

 

 

The nations, not so blest as thee,

Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

 

In his recent book, Inventing Liberty: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, MEP Daniel Hannan discusses how the ideas of a liberal society emerged within the British isles over a course of hundreds of years, and how their proliferation across the world happened within a distinctly English-speaking context. Hannan argues that it has been the ascendency of the Anglosphere in the past three hundred years, including nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, which has made possible the similar ascendency of liberal values over that same time period. Hannan argues that it was the culture of common law, of Magna Carta, and of representative government, not intellectual arguments, which made the free and open society possible. As intellectuals discussed (and eventually en masse rejected) the values which cultivated such a society, they were transported to and flowered in British colonies the world over,  even amongst the prisoners shipped to Australia.  

 

The main question, at least for me, which Inventing Liberty brings up is the question of how culture has made liberalism possible. A constant problem facing any order at the level of society at large is: How do people participate within them? As every angsty teenager has recognized, sometimes society can be an impersonal machine in which people can be but cogs, used as means rather than as ends in and of themselves. As Shakespeare wrote: All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players. What guides those players, and forms their collective patterns of behavior into what we know as as society are the institutions and norms of the societies which people find themselves surrounded by. The way that people participate in the social orders they live in is thus often merely a product of the culture they are surrounded by. 

Of course, we all know (and for the most part appreciate) that institutions matter. But there is something quite different between the argument which Hannan is making, and the arguments which many institution-matter theorists make is that Hannan argues, implicitly though, that we cannot simply replicate the institutions of the Anglosphere to non-Anglosphere countries. The necessary jump between Hannan’s main point in Inventing Liberty and an institutions-matter theorist like James Buchanan’s throughout his corpus is that Hannan’s vision is very much historically fatalistic whereas Buchahan looks at the problem from the point of view of social contract theory. For Buchahan, the question what can be done is a very real one, though in Hannan, what can be done is largely just a matter of preserving what is already there. In Hannan's history, institutions are determined by culture, and if a nation does not have the culture to support good institutions, then it is by and large doomed to go without them.

The British character of liberalism and of the commercial society it animates is corroborated by common language. When people are speaking about the core tenet of a liberal market, competition, people, especially in Continental Europe, often speak of “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” The view that it is that British variety which encourages “dog-eat-dog” competition whereas their more “cooperative” approach cultivated more moral outcomes. The use of such language is so wide that it has gotten its own page of Wikipedia: “The Anglo-Saxon Model.” The culturally English-speaking nature of the modern commercial society is thereby displayed by its identification with a certain cultural group, that of Great Britiain.

 

The question which I am naturally lead to is then: Why Britain? Why did the English-speaking population become the cradle of liberal ideas rather than, say the populations of Holland or Italy? The Dutch certainly went a long way towards the development of liberal ideas, and during the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam was a shining light in the world. There, the first modern stock market was established there by the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Levels of religious toleration were high compared to the rest of Europe, especially towards the Jews (though the Catholics suffered due to perceived political loyalties to the Habsburg empire that the Dutch Republic had succeeded from). Daniel Hannan even celebrates Dutch society in “I realised why I like the Dutch so much,” and claims that what he loves about Dutch society is found in the bourgeois values that the Dutch and British both share: “Only recently, though, was I able to put my finger on what I liked so much. It’s this: for centuries, the Dutch made the honest pursuit of self-betterment a supreme virtue.” The bourgeois virtues which Deirdre McCloskey celebrates in her aptly named book, The Bourgeois Virtues, were quickly coming to fruition within Amsterdam, and the Dutch Republic could therefore have seemed to be a viable candidate to be the cradle of liberalism for the Western world. 

That was not to be, though. One of the main reasons was that the Dutch Republic did not have Great Britain’s fortunate geography. Unlike Great Britain, which is an island separated from the Continent, the Netherlands is a low-lying plain, much of it reclaimed from the sea, close to the center of Europe. As such, the influenced of the bourgeois virtues in the Netherlands was vulnerable of being snuffed out by conquest, and that is one of the events which happened following the Dutch Golden Age. Whereas the British were able to survive and compete against the Continental powers by outdoing them on the seas, the Dutch Republic never had such an option, and like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was unable to assert its independence forever against the encroachments of illberal states very adept at waging war. Unlike those two, Great Britain was in the fateful position of being separated by the sea from the many wars which were waged on the Continent in the early modern period, and was thereby separated from the need of winning those wars, at the cost of its liberal values, in order to ensure its survival.

 

In the end, liberalism wasn’t discovered by the great powers of human reason; rather, it was cultivated in culture until finally being recognized by the mind. It is not a necessary outcome of progress. Rather, it is a historical accident. The ascendency of liberalism is thus not a matter, as it often is depicted to be, of the triumph of human reason over bigotry and superstition. Instead, the ascendency of liberalism is a matter of a historically contingent sequence of unique events in unique places; of infectous habits rather than explicit ideas. The lesson to be appreciated from Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Liberty is that the free and open society is a consequence not of human ideas, but of human history. 

 

On Agency and Identity

 

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

 -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote that the greatest good for human beings was to be found in their capabilities for reason, and that the most choiceworthy life for a human being was one dedicated to the enhancement of our understanding. We need not follow Aristotle in thinking that study is “the activity of (the) divine element” (1177b25, translation by Terence Irwin) to agree with him that the most excellent and praiseworthy traits of human life have to do with the life of the mind. Not only have those rational traits given our species the capability of bringing the challenge of Genesis 1:27 to completion, but it has also enabled each individual person agency, the capability to reflect back upon their lives, and to decide who they want to be.

 

Although surely encumbered by a wounded nature, human beings have, by their rational nature, a world of possibilities in front of them. Through reflection and erudition, they can expand those possibilities, and learn to differentiate the virtuous from that which is not. If rationality means anything, it means that the rational agent can do those two things. 

As for the former, in her lecture “Apollo and Dionysus,” Ayn Rand, ever the Apollonian, noted that it was “man's reason that brought him to the stars.” By virtue of their rationality, human beings can understand chains of concatenation within the world, and manipulate those causal nexus, as what occurs within a Saturn V rocket upon ignition, in order to better their position in the world.

As for the latter, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in Book III, Chapter 3 of his Summa Contra Gentiles (translation by Ralph McInerny) that the rational agent “acts for the sake of an end, determining itself to the end” and later that the rational agent “determines an end for itself only under the formality of the good...” Rationality was thus the part of the human being that enables her to be able to discern the good in the world, and to strive after it. 

 

It is here, in these two aspects that we find what is really commendable in human beings across the world: their ability, as ends in and of themselves (to throw Herr Kant into the mix), to make the world, both external and internal, according to their own decisions. Relating to the external world, our reason has enabled us to raise skyscrapers, and, even more amazingly when we actually ponder about it, to devise ways to feed around seven billion human beings who now call Earth home. Relating to the internal world, our reason has enabled us to envision our own virtue, to have a moral vision of what we ought to be, and to be able to give that vision chase with all of our human passion. This is what each person should take pride in, what deserves admiration from others, and what deserve to be the foundation of a truly human identity.

Emergent Order in the Parking Lot

A place of anarchy and disorder or of miraculous human cooperation?

 

 Leaving the GMU Fairfax Campus yesterday after a Workshop in Politics, Philosophy and Economics last week, I got stuck in a traffic jam in the parking lot I was in. As terrible as it may have been in my position at the very back of the lot waiting as the 5:00 traffic leaving the campus as both the traffic in the main lane of the parking lot as well as traffic in the street it flowed into ground to a halt, this situation provided a natural experiment I only slowly came to realize was happening.

The basic set-up. There was one main artery within the parking lot by which all drivers wanting to leave had to drive through. Into this artery, there were smaller lanes parking spaces were attached to; veins cars flowed from into the main artery. All of the veins were attached to themselves through other routes. The situation resulted in a massive line of traffic within the main artery that stretched back far across the parking lot, twisting into the back portion of the lot, and lines of a couple of cars each within the smaller veins. Once traffic got moving again, a car would stop at each of the veins and so that vein, or at least a couple of cars within it, would empty. And here is where the natural experiment is happening.

Assume that every driver is a perfect specimen of homo economicus who desires nothing else but to maximize his well-being by minimizing his time within the parking lot. Would such a time-minimizing driver take the strategy of waiting within the main artery? No. There is a much better strategy out there for the driver simply desiring to minimize their time: leave the artery, take a spot at the vein closest to the exit, and wait for another driver to stop for the cars in that vein. There were dollar bills on the floor just waiting for people to grab them, but yet no one took the strategy to do so. Instead, everyone got into the artery from the veins they parked in and meekly waited as their time in the lot ticked on and on. 

Does this mean that drivers, including myself, were acting irrationally? If drivers were really profit-maximizers would we not expect to see something like the veins being similarly crowded to ensure that no driver has an incentive to change their strategy for getting out of the lot as quickly as possible? Are there not then inefficiencies within the parking lot that put some doubt onto the theory that human beings are rational agents who are able to maximize their pay-offs?

Of course not. We cannot simultaneously assume that drivers are an ideal type aiming at maximizing their pay-offs by minimizing their time waiting and then decry that they are irrational when our chosen ideal does not completely square with reality. It's not the ideal type that shows the poverty of reality. It's reality that shows the poverty of our ideal types.

This is not a small lacuna in our analysis of the parking lot either. Rather, by not being able to address the other circumstances that form the environment of pay-offs, whether it be a natural human inclination towards fairness or accepted rules of conduct, we can completely miss how order emerges within society. And order does emerge. In the case of the parking lot, there was a line as well as rules of conduct for getting into that line that produced an environment in which there was an orderly line rather than a demolition derby. By taking those informal institutions for granted, we cannot know how the process of order emerging and thus cannot comprehend the social phenomena we investigate.

Even in the case of markets, there are informal institutions that underpin the entire process. Anybody can step in Target, handle their private property, take it half way around the store yet turn back and place the item back on its shelve, and ask an attendee what the price is for an item that does not have a price attached. A business model like target wouldn't work without those rules. However, try going into an acquaintance’s house, look at a lamp and then when it does not have a price-tag, ask him for how much he wants for it. The results would be much different than in Target.