A Simple Way to Understand Rationality … and Irrationality
“Rationality,” like any other word, can be used to mean different things.[1] But one meaning in particular appeals to me because it sheds light on a couple of mysteries about rationality. One of the mysteries is that rationality, which often prides itself on being the mode of justification par excellence, cannot itself be justified, that is, in its own terms as rational, without begging the question. The other mystery is how some human beings, including fully functional human beings, can nevertheless profess irrationality and even in fact be irrational.
I propose that the solution of both mysteries lies in understanding rationality very simply as a tool, and in particular as a tool for accomplishing things or achieving goals with maximal efficiency and efficacy. By efficiency I mean in the swiftest and most economical manner and by efficacy I mean accomplishing them at all.
Given this understanding of what it means to be rational, it is easy enough to understand why some people (such as myself) would value rationality highly. Indeed, if you work with it long enough you are likely to come to love it “for its own sake,” i.e., intrinsically and not just instrumentally as a tool for achieving other things. But that is only a side effect. If rationality were not also a great tool, loving it for its own sake might be accommodated as a pleasant feature of life, like solving crossword puzzles, but not something essential to human thriving, and might even be detrimental if it took up too much of one’s time at the expense of getting other things done ... or at least if it took up too many people’s time. After all, there are many things that we do enjoy for their own sake and that may otherwise have little value – might creating art be a shining example? – which we nevertheless want some people to devote themselves to unstintingly. Perhaps you could even say that this means they do have instrumental value after all, such as, in the case of art, giving so many other people pleasure. But I doubt that people engaging in reasoning, if it had no great utility, would give a lot of non-reasoners much pleasure.
But back to my thesis. So how does rationality conceived as a promoter of efficiency and efficacy help to unravel the mystery of rationality’s unjustifiability? I think the answer becomes very simple. Rationality is justified because most of us usually desire to achieve our goals and to do so efficiently.
And this then unravels the second mystery as well. For it is a mere empirical fact that there are, nevertheless, some people – indeed, maybe a lot of people – who care more about living each moment of life than about achieving goals or achieving them with maximal efficiency. Such people are therefore, by this analysis of rationality, irrational.
So it is now clear that this does not mean that irrational people are necessarily incapable of reasoning. Rather this is a matter of what people value. Just as someone might be perfectly capable of solving crossword puzzles but choose to engage in other things instead, so one might be perfectly capable of reasoning (and so be rational in that sense) and yet, with regard to many aspects or moments of life, choose not to engage in it.
This could be for any of several sorts of reasons. Indeed, sometimes it might not even be a choice so much as a debility; for example, someone suffering from ADHD may simply not be able to maintain sufficient attention consistently enough to conduct their life in a rational manner. So then we would not say the person disvalues rationality. But more interesting are the cases where a person genuinely does prefer (if not always to the point of making a conscious choice) a life of smelling the roses, or not rushing, or the like, to being mainly focused on setting goals and achieving goals and reaching them cheaply and quickly.
Such people may nevertheless suffer many ill and, in this way, self-imposed consequences. I know such people, who are never able to achieve their goals or not by a route that is without undue hardships. I also believe they are missing out on the pleasure of having things go more smoothly in one’s life from habitually figuring out what it is rational to do and then doing it.
But the person who is highly rational in the way I am characterizing it could also suffer various ill consequences … precisely from failing to smell the roses, etc.
Therefore we might suppose that the truly rational course of action would be to apportion being rational and irrational wisely. So, curiously, being irrational to the right degree could itself become a goal of rationality. But, again, if done too rationally, i.e., efficiently, we could imagine someone becoming a nervous wreck in their efforts to set aside enough of their life for smelling the roses. Even if they succeeded, so that their efforts had been both efficient and effective and hence fully rational in those terms, they would have failed in their achievement of the good life. Hence their pursuit of that goal would turn out to have been irrational.
The solution would therefore seem to be that the ideal, and indeed rational, way to combine rationality and irrationality in one’s life is to pursue one’s goals efficiently and effectively but only to the point that the pursuit, including of this goal, can itself be enjoyed for its own sake to the degree that this is practicable given one’s circumstances.
[1] I
have suggested a number of them in “What
Is It to be Rational?”