What I don't ''like'' about rationality.
Rationality is light, supposedly. It is associated with enlightement, wisdom, philosophy, science, blah blah blah. To find fault in rationality is simply impossible. You would have to be either mad or a fool or both to even think of painting rationality in a negative light.
However, there's this small thing that's been nagging me for some time. Every evil deed that has ever been committed has been done under the aegis of rationality. There's always a perfectly good ''reason'' to insult someone or hit someone ir even to kill him/her.
In contrast to that, goodness is associated with children and naivety. The former is a state of being unable to reason well and the latter is one of ignorance.
If you agree with the above then there's a problem with rationality. It's something that'll make you do evil things. I think this is one of the reasons why God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge.
I know what you'll say. That rationality leads to good deeds too. I agree but the point of my argument is that rationality isn't ALL good. It has, at least, this negative (which I described).
Perhaps I'm misplacing the blame - may be other things that are at fault.
It could be that I'm wrong in looking at rationality through a moral lens. A thing to note here is philosophical reason has, as of yet, failed to find a sound moral theory. To me this points to the flaw I'm talking about - sometimes we find the perfect ''reason'' to kill/hurt/lie, etc. Also, ethics is a part of all human activity. It is the only thing that stands in the way of complete chaos that's like a rock perched on the edge of a cliff waiting to drop on civilization. People, even me, hunger for power, fame and money and all that holds them back is morality.
What do you think? Is this the only flaw in rationality? Does rationality have other shortcomings?
However, there's this small thing that's been nagging me for some time. Every evil deed that has ever been committed has been done under the aegis of rationality. There's always a perfectly good ''reason'' to insult someone or hit someone ir even to kill him/her.
In contrast to that, goodness is associated with children and naivety. The former is a state of being unable to reason well and the latter is one of ignorance.
If you agree with the above then there's a problem with rationality. It's something that'll make you do evil things. I think this is one of the reasons why God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge.
I know what you'll say. That rationality leads to good deeds too. I agree but the point of my argument is that rationality isn't ALL good. It has, at least, this negative (which I described).
Perhaps I'm misplacing the blame - may be other things that are at fault.
It could be that I'm wrong in looking at rationality through a moral lens. A thing to note here is philosophical reason has, as of yet, failed to find a sound moral theory. To me this points to the flaw I'm talking about - sometimes we find the perfect ''reason'' to kill/hurt/lie, etc. Also, ethics is a part of all human activity. It is the only thing that stands in the way of complete chaos that's like a rock perched on the edge of a cliff waiting to drop on civilization. People, even me, hunger for power, fame and money and all that holds them back is morality.
What do you think? Is this the only flaw in rationality? Does rationality have other shortcomings?
Comments (81)
Reason has become instrumental to point where, somewhat like computers, human's can pick up threads of rational arguments, recombine them without thinking through what they are doing. Today reason is solely a means to an end where the only difference between ends lies in probability of outcome.
Objective reasoning is dead, as some might say the light went out.
Best,
PA
What you need here is a dose of Hume. Reason, logic, measurement, the whole of rationality is the servant of passion. Rationality can tell you what to do, if you want something; it cannot tell you what to want.
The way I see it rationality lives in the world of thought and is king of that world. But the whole world of thought is the servant of the passions which are what moves one in the world of things. Thus the moral neutrality and the lightness of rationality are simply the way it is. Many, many are those who pretend that rationality can dictate their actions, and all of them are mistaken. It can only guide action once the goal has been established. If you want to build an atomic bomb, make these calculations build this equipment, accumulate tis material construct it thus and so. But is it a good idea to build an atomic bomb? Reason is silent until you set some goal or other, and then and only then reason can recommend a bomb or no bomb, in the service of that passion.
There's a very simple answer to your dilemma: there exists both good and bad reasoning, and the fact that it is possible to reason badly does not provide justification for rejecting reasoning altogether, any more than the fact that there can be bad apples could be reason to stop eating them altogether. What are you doing in your OP if not reasoning?
You are blaming the vehicle, when you ought to be focusing on the driver. If you decide to drive off a cliff it is not the fault of the vehicle.
A computer is wholly rational. Programers have a phrase bullshit in; bullshit out.
If you make an assumption that the Aryan race is superior and ought to rule the world, then it is a short step to rationalise that other races should be exterminated.
If you assume that disease is bad, then it is rational to fund research to find a cure.
If you now reflect on your own post. It is perfectly rational, in that you have taken rational steps at each step along the way. It is also rational to ask others for their input. When you have reasonable and various ideas, you can make a choice based on your personal position and motivation. But if you end up with rubbish it is not because of rationality , but because of how you FEEL about the information.
Hume was good on all this, insisting that it was the "passions" that we are ruled by.
The problem is not so much with rationality itself as with the set of presuppositions--i.e., the worldview--that serves as the starting point for any individual process of reasoning undertaken by a person or group of people. Deductive logic, just like a computer, conforms to the law of "garbage in, garbage out." A perfectly valid deductive argument that has even one false premise produces a false conclusion. I often say that the most valuable service the discipline of philosophy can provide is helping us recognize and critically evaluate our own presuppositions/worldview, which is no easy task.
The good and evil are how we tend to describe people's value systems - their general motivations. The goals they would be generally wanting to achieve.
The two come together because we can rationalise about good and evil. We can discuss a choice of views about the status of values.
Are good and evil moral absolutes or essentially meaningless human constructs? Or somewhere inbetween?
Of course, taking a natural philosophy perspective, I would seek the evolutionary optimality of "good vs evil". I would rationalise it as a natural and complementary opposition between competitive and co-operative social behaviour.
So that seems the most rational view of human intentionality in general.
But anyway, your OP confuses these two levels of questioning. Whatever our intentions or goals, it is thinking that fleshes out the possible courses of action. But then, metaphysically, if we want to ask about what are the "right" goals, then the conversation has to turn to what are the choices there, and what choice best fits the available evidence.
In any case, all that brings meaning to life is about feeling, not thinking, so it is if no matter what rational thinking may or may not be.
Quoting PossibleAaran
One can certainly build a rational foundation for mass murder, mass sterilization, etc. either prescriptively or retroactively. If, for instance, one understood that people with heritable diseases, a rational program could be devised to make sure they did not pass those abnormal genes on. They could be executed or sterilized.
IF one thought that the very nature of Jewishness, racially and religiously, was to practice ethics inimical to the interests of the German people, and IF one thought that communism was a natural outcome of Jewish ethics (communism also being inimical to the interests of the German people), or IF one thought that Jews were inherently racially inferior, THEN it would be rational to just kill them all.
The National Socialists of Germany went about murdering the Jews in a very well organized and rational manner.
There were physicists who were quite certain that developing an atomic bomb was most definitely a bad idea, not because 1 bomb would destroy the world, but because no one would ever stop with 1 bomb: Whoever could build atomic bombs would make sure they had as many as might be needed. Which, as it happens, is the way things worked out.
You might say, "well! Those are all bad arguments for doing anything. Sure, those are bad arguments, but people are flawed and bad arguments are good enough.
Which rationality?
It's interesting you say this, because this is something Levinas spends a lot of time discussing. Levinas interprets the history of western philosophy as being "egology", where the desire is to know things, for things to reveal themselves (similarly to what you said: knowledge is light). Ultimately everything is put under the totality of Same-ness, me-ness, for-me, etc. It is directed outwards, but comes from inside. This totality is hostile to anything not of itself. Violence, murder, genocide, all of these are enabled by a lack of recognition of the Other, or the decision to destroy it.
But there's trickles of alterity in the history as well. Descartes' argument for the existence of God by appealing to the concept of the infinite, philosophical discussions of death (the impossibility of possibility) and the erotic are not of the Same. More chiefly is the Other, and its trace, in which we encounter without understanding and which forms the primordial basis for ethics.
When it comes to ethics, then, I think something could be said about how we approach other people and the world at large plays a large part in how we fare as human beings in general. Do we see people as instruments to be used, abused and discarded after their utility is exhausted, or do we respect them, give them distance, yet be prepared to help them when necessary? Do we take more than we give? Do we spit words at people, or do we let our language be one of many ways of gift-giving?
Quoting TheMadFool
I don't know if rationality itself is responsible for moral corruption. Surely Kant thought morality was grounded in rationality, and that someone not acting morally was not acting fully rationally, even if they are capable of rational thought. In other words, the means may be rational but the ends are not. It is not until an action is done from a sense of duty out of a rational understanding of human dignity that it becomes truly a morally praiseworthy action. At least, so Kant thought.
If there is a flaw to rationality I would have to say that it has destroyed illusions and has retroactively attempted and systematically failed to construct suitable replacements.
Objective reasoning is difficult. That's why there's a dearth of it. I don't know if that's a good thing but objective reasoning can lead to situations like killing = the solution. That I find disconcerting to say the least.
I just have this vague doubt concerning rationality. You won't see one person utter a bad word against it. It's just too good to be true. This got me thinking and the only significant shortcoming I found is in moral domain - it needs brains to be bad. [B]We can be good without being rational but we can't be bad without being rational.[/b]
Quoting Bitter Crank
[B]We can be good without rationality but we can't be bad without being rational[/b]. Murder needs a strategy but to make someone happy all you need to do is smile. See?
Quoting Rich
Yes, it's about feelings rather than [/i]rationality[/i].
[B]Murder needs strategy but to do good one can just smile[/b]
Quoting darthbarracuda
Thank you for the post. All I'm looking for is a flaw in the undisputed Champion of the human mind.
That is exactly what I would say. I agree that in a sense, IF you believe that the Jews possess all of those negative qualities, and IF you believe that it would be worth killing them all to get rid of these qualities, then it is rational to kill all of the Jews. But the fact is that it isn't rational to believe any of those things and so, all things considered, it isn't rational to kill all of the Jews. To say that Rationality itself is flawed because sometimes people do things which are, all things considered, irrational is like saying that a cooking knife is flawed because some times people use them to stab other people.
Best,
PA
Captain Kirk use to rail against it all the time.
This is obviously false. People rationally do good things and irrationally do bad things all the time.
No to both sides. "All you need to do is smile" is, in a word, imbecilic.
I readily agree that rationality is limited, in that it can devise plans, design parts, and lay out elaborate proposals. In itself, rationality tends neither to goodness nor evil. The mainspring of behavior isn't the pre-frontal cortex, it's the limbic system -- the emotions. Wishes, wants, desires, urges, rages, love, hate, hot, cold, and all that are not opposed to rationality, they drive rationality.
Performing 'good' requires as much rationality as performing evil. As Jesus put it, be as subtle as serpents but as gentle as doves. Good ideas badly executed will at least result in waste, fraud, and abuse. To do good well requires rationality.
The flaw in "rational human" isn't that rationality produces evil, it's that alone it doesn't produce much of anything. Again: emotion, not rationality, is the mainspring of behavior.
Well organized hate as opposed to badly organized love, is a cliché--which may be true in some instances, but in general isn't true. International aid programs, social service programs, and all sorts of good works require the same high level organization that wickedness requires.
You are absolutely honest here: you have a vague doubt.
One never knows outcomes before actions. We make choices based upon some inner feeling. How it all turns out? Know I've knows. Maybe OK for some, not OK for others. Maybe starts OK and then turns unpleasant. Maybe the other way around. It's all continuously evolving and changing.
One needs a heart to live and pump blood. It's got bugger all to do with being good, you still need a brain for that too.
And what makes the brain so special? Neurons? Neurons just transmit. It is a relay center. The Mind permeates the body.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/
"The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, Gershon says. This multitude of neurons in the enteric nervous system enables us to "feel" the inner world of our gut and its contents."
"The second brain informs our state of mind in other more obscure ways, as well. "A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut,"
There is a sense in which I can agree with this, but I can't see what relevance it has to your questioning of rationality.
This is just intellectual laziness. Most, if not all, the mass shootings in the U.S. were the result of the perpetrator having a history of mental illness. They behaved irrationally and caused a lot of harm to others. I'm not going to use the term, "evil" because that is a subjective term and there are no objective moral laws.
It is just as likely that irrationality can cause harm, so it cannot be rationality or irrationality that causes harm to others. It must be something else. What do you think it could be?
Maybe money? I figure that may be the reason why opioids are still "rationally" being prescribed even though they are killing 10s of thousands of people each year. I suppose there is a rational reason to explain this all.
Yep, I'll put my money in money as the single biggest reason for killing throughout history. I guess for some, this is quite rational.
You can cut off your legs, arms; remove various parts of the body such as the spleen and kidneys; several feet of intestine; you can even gat a machine to do your breathing and pumping blood - all miraculously WITHOUT affecting the functioning of the mind.
If you do ANYTHING to the brain, you change the mind is profound ways.
QED: You are being silly.
The second brain theory accounts for only 1/1000 of known neurones - all of which are expendable, and NOT "throughout the body" as you amusingly suggest.
Your statement about "having a heart" is just childish mysticism of the medieval period .
If you knock out the main transmission station, things go blank. So? Says nothing. As for your pumping stations, they too will die out. People die.
With a blunt spoon I can remove your ability to recognise your own mother.
With a short swipe I can remove your ability to either read or speak.
"When your brain tries to heal itself, functions that were once held in damaged parts of the brain are then transferred to new, healthy parts of the brain through the process of neuroplasticity. This process is what allows you to regain lost movement, speech function, and other abilities after experiencing a stroke."
The brain is living and tries to heal like every other part of the body.
Can you direct your kindergarten understanding of Life to someone else who can really appreciate it?
This proves my point, not yours.
I think you might be a waste of time.
ROTFLMFHO
Here's one thing you seem to get right.
This explains much about you.
I don't know. Some here have mentioned that rationality is a tool and, therefore, has no moral status.
That's right but it's a tool that works better at the hands of the unscrupulous. Consider the adage "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". It tells of the failure of goodness to wield rationality effectively. Then take the phrase "a sucker is born every minute". It tells of how easy it is to fool people using clever tricks.
On the whole I think rationality serves evil much better than good.
Rationality serves evil better than good. A very simple example. Rationality claims there is no God (Atheism) or, at least, that we can't be sure of God's existence. What follows from that?
It's a very common metaphor. I don't know why you don't get it. Just see the movies. Villains are always depicted with high IQ. Get the hint?
X-)
I was thinking about this and I realized that it takes more brains to be good in this world which isn't deficient of evil. It takes tact, patience, wisdom, etc. to do good in our world. So, yes one could say that rationality favors the good and not the bad as I thought.
But look at it this way...
First do no harm is a well known maxim of morality, am I right?
To do no harm one doesn't need intelligence do we? A stone or tree is good in that respect because they can do no harm.
However, to harm one needs high IQ. Look at how Hollywood depicts villains - all high IQ individuals.
But rationality has questioned God's existence and where does that lead to? A moral vacuum that can't and hasn't been filled since God was put on the stand.
X-)
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.
But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!
So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.
Elizabeth Wordsworth
This is patent nonsense. The number of self-declared atheists in the world has grown rapidly over the last 200 years. A time when we've seen the abolition of slavery, the end of oppressive colonisation, the universal declaration of human rights, emancipation of women... The list goes on. Where on earth are you getting this rubbish that morality had gone out of the window with the abandonment of religion?
What you don't seem to recognize is that you are attempting to be rational in pointing out a "connection" between rationality and "evil". It's just that you aren't taking into account that irrationality has caused harm, if not more harm, than rationality has. Rationality has given you a better standard of living and longer lifespan. Irrationality leads to ignorance, the greatest "evil" (according to Socrates).
Tho I'd add that some kinds of moral goodness require rationality in planning one's own actions. But no rationality requires goodness.
Rationality has also contemplated the reality of God by interpreting how He has revealed Himself in nature, Scripture, etc. Again, the problem is not rationality itself, but the (non-rational) assumptions that serve as our first premises.
"Primum non nocere, first do no harm" is a maxim in bioethics and a good one. But in medicine and and in many other settings, not doing harm is more difficult than it appears. For instance, prescribing too many antibiotics, too many addictive pain medicines, or doing too many invasive procedures has resulted in bad consequences rather than good ones. The bad results stemming from good intentions and doctor's desires to cure, reduce pain, or remove very slow growing cancers has resulted in less effective antibiotics, addiction, and unnecessary consequences from surgery. At first, these actions looked good and benign.
Examples of the difficulty of "first, do no harm" being difficult to fulfill can be heaped up from all sorts of settings--caught in the phrase, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." Most energetic well-intentioned people have screwed things up at one time or another (I certainly have) by "fixing" things that "weren't broke".
This has no bearing on the thread. If you can't see 'why I don't get it", I think the fault lies with you, ot me.
I mean really what the fuck are you babbling on about?
Rationality does not claim there is no God; but self-reflexively comes to understand that there can be no purely rational (or empirical) way of knowing that God exists or does not exist. This is (as Kant said) recognizing the limits of reason to make way for faith. I don't think it is true to say that rationality serves evil more than good.
I think what we would call a rational person is one who has a balanced view of life, a balanced view of self and other, and will not be an evil person. Evil is driven by selfish desires; a rational person is more likely to see why such desires should be controlled, which is the first step towards actually being able to bring them under control.
My main goal is to find a flaw in rationality. Rationality seems to have acquired a reputation that is impeccable. It is beyond criticism, much like God was. I'm not saying that this is so without good reason. Rationality has been the driving force of human civilization. We are better off than before because of R. There's no question about that.
However, if experience teaches us anything then it is that there's always a danger in an infallible authority. Look at what some believers do in the name of God, the quintessential infallible authority.
Add to that the well established folk wisdom that everything has pros AND cons. Even the most perfect being, God, has been criticized.
So, that begs the question "Does rationality have a flaw too?"
The answer, if you agree with what I've said above, seems to lean towards a resounding "YES"
So, what could this flaw be?
There are many perspectives we can take and one that is important for humans - a perspective that concerns all life itself despite its own flaws - is ethics. Ethics is a necessary aspect of all human activity. We may not be clear on the details but all of us, barring the psychopath, function with our own version of moral values.
Let's look at rationality from a moral perspective then. As you all have pointed out rationality is only a tool. It guides thinking and if it has anything to do with morality then it is that we should apply rationality to ethics. I believe this too because rationality, as a system of thinking, has proven itself with flying colors.
But...
Look at how good and evil are depicted in media and literature. I don't want to use stereotypes of people but I also believe in the wisdom of the masses. Evil is associated with genius and I think this rightly so. One has to be intelligent to be fool/trick people - something that is necessary to be evil.
On the other hand one doesn't have to think much to be good. One might even have to be a fool to be good - disregard personal safety for instance.
So, it does look like rationality serves evil better than good.
True, but rationality isn't an authority and it isn't infallible. If it was, then we would only need one rational person around at any given time. We have found that several people applying reason is better than depending on 1 person alone.
Quoting TheMadFool
B U L L S H I T ! ! !
No, everything doesn't have a pro and a con, and it's not rational to think there is. There was no "pro" side to the Holocaust. There is no "pro" side to the various mass murders we have witnessed. There is mo "pro" side to nuclear war. Would you say, "Ok, 6 million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust. Now let's look at the positive aspects of genocide." ???
Quoting TheMadFool
The flaw in rationality is when people don't try very hard to do it.
Quoting TheMadFool
Do you really believe in the wisdom of the masses? What, exactly, is the wisdom of the masses? How do masses of people with various opinions -- all over the place, up one side and down the other, manage to have "wisdom"?
Well, evil is associated with genius in some literature (literature which features evil geniuses) but geniuses are not always evil and evil isn't always operating at the genius level. Quite often evil is as stupid as it can get.
One might have to be intelligent to fool or trick people, but being intelligent doesn't lead to fooling and tricking people. Lots of very intelligent people, geniuses even, don't attempt to fool or trick people.
Quoting TheMadFool
You say this as if no one had demonstrated to you that doing good requires intelligence, wisdom, and insight. Consider the people who discovered the various drugs which are successful in controlling diabetes, a number of cancers, AIDS, infections and so on. These people did immense good, and it required immense rationality, careful thinking, and so on -- not by a few people, but by scores of thousands of people who worked on the various drug development programs.
Consider therapists who provide therapy for the victims of torture: This is a very complex kind of therapy that requires great intelligence, enormous sensitivity, perceptiveness, and so on. Your average dull-normal do-gooder can't begin to help.
Consider the managers of projects like The Big Dig in Boston, or the people at NASA. They did/are doing great good, and it requires an extraordinary intelligence. the list of great works which need great intelligence is a long, long one.
In fact, you have been surrounded all your life by people doing good things very intelligently. You aren't aware of much of this because a) they are good at it, and b) because they are good at it things don't go wrong most of the time. This past year there were no crashes of large planes -- the first time in a very long time. Why? Because the people who design, fly, and manage all the planes in the air are good at it. And it's a very good thing that they are.
Evil is quite often very stupid, stumbles over itself on its way to perform wicked deeds, and in the end is quite frequently too stupid to escape capture and punishment.
Rationality serves whoever wields it, and far more people are good than evil. We know this because the world, by and large, is a fairly pleasant place most of the time in most places for most people. If rationality and evil were such a good match, life would be ruined most of the time just about everywhere for everyone almost all the time. That isn't the case.
Rationality doesn't cause evil. It's a tool. Rationality doesn't seek out evil people to get them to be better at being evil. It can't. It's a process, not a thing with volition. We can just be thankful that there are not more bright wicked people out there applying rationality to their evil deeds. And we can be thankful that there are so many good people out there applying rationality to the good stuff they do.
You are stumbling over the bias which makes the bad act seem more common than the good act because we remember bad acts more. Evil acts stand out against the background of much more common good.
For some weird reason you want to hang evil around the neck of rationality. I don't understand why you want to do this, but it is very annoying. STOP IT or I will have to think of a fiendishly creative and a perversely wicked means of making you want to cease and desist (since good arguments clearly are not good enough for you).
X-)
I think I see your point. It takes intelligence to do both good AND bad. Is this what you're talking about?
If you are then that's what I want to say also. Rationality can be used to do evil. I've taken one step back but it becomes a fact that rationality has a flaw in that it can be used to do evil.
The problem is that you haven't defined 'Rationality' in a way that is consistent. In the first part of your claim you seem to class rationality as that thing which has replaced religion, the authority of God, the thing that drives the move towards materialism. In the second half (the evidence) you seem to equate it entirely with intelligence - the ability to choose a course of action which will accurately produce the desired result.
These are two different definitions so your argument that one is evidence for a flaw in the other fails.
Rationality in philosophy (as opposed to Rationalism, which is even more unrelated to what you're citing as evidence), is having reason behind opinion or action. It's simply being able to justify one thought by logical consequence of a prior thought. Intelligence then becomes merely a 'tool' of rationality. Those with greater intelligence will be more able to link one thought to another with logical inference.
Your archetypal villains (lets presume they even exist), have high levels of intelligence which they apply to do evil things. They have an evil intention, and they are intelligent enough to see a course of action that will bring that intention about, they are using intelligence to do evil. They are not necessarily using rationality to do evil, we are as yet uninformed as to their chain of reasoning. No-one has given us any insight whatsoever into how they justify their actions by some logical inference from previous thoughts (which in turn are derived logically from thoughts prior to those...).
All I can see that you're actually arguing is that intelligence is a double-edged sword because, like any powerful tool, it can be used to do good or harm. The same argument could be made about Guns or Electricity. Rationality has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Philosophers have a way of distilling from reality and praxis, ideals. Such is the case with what we like to call 'rationality', which is not actually evident, but an idealised extrapolation; as if to say; "if only we could think with purity we would achieve a purity of rationality."
It is true to say that there is nothing wrong with rational thinking; it is a means by which totally reliable and replicable results can be shared throughout our language community, where the evidence and assumptions are also correct. We can agree formal, even objective, criteria and methods to take what is evident and offer universal and agreeable results.
Obviously no such state of affairs can really exist. It is not possible to completely share the same point of view, it is not always possible to agree upon what makes reliable or applicable evidence. And so our ideal of rationality often fails to produce the expected results.
I don't think I'm wrong in defining an equivalence between intelligence and rationality. What is the basic structure of an IQ test? Logical ability right?
I agree with you that everything is a double-edged sword and saying that rationality has a flaw isn't that big a deal. I think @Bitter Crank will disagree with you.
Anyway, I've never seen rationality put in the dock anywhere on this forum. No one has actually found a flaw in our tool. Here your claim of double-edgedness of everything comes in handy. From a moral perspective, at a minimum, rationality has a flaw.
(Y)
See! Rationality has a moral shortcoming. Of course one may say that of anything. After all tools are only as good as the craftsman.
I'm just a bit concerned about rationality. It seems to have acquired a reputation in the last 2 millenia that I feel is too good to be true. You know that feeling right?
Perfection is impossible. We all know that. So, isn't it natural for me to question rationality's role as the utlimate judge of all under the sun.
Surely, rationality has a flaw and I found one if we take a moral perspective (as your quote so eloquently proves).
Do you see other flaws in rationality?
Ok.
What is the flaw in rationality then? Can you think of anything? If you can't then it implies you think rationality is perfect. Are you willing to take that stand?
You definitely are wrong. As I've said, rationality is the ability to derive one thought logically from another. Intelligence is the ability to see a successful path to a particular goal. I gather from your previous postings that you seem to take little notice of actual evidence when you have an idea (why let evidence get in the way of a good theory, right?). But with a resigned sigh. Here are the results of the famous Stanovich experiments
Professor Stanovich and colleagues had large samples of subjects complete judgement tests (tests which show their susceptibility to irrational thinking - cognitive biases, in this case the conjunction fallacy), as well as an IQ test. What they found was that a person with a high IQ is about as likely to suffer from irrational behaviour as a person with a low IQ i.e Intelligence does not correlate at all with rationality.
Later studies, repeating the same set up have actually found that people with higher IQs are slightly more prone to irrational thinking.
So there's good evidence that rational thinking is actually reducing the sort of 'evil' behaviour you're describing, by making people more able to see both sides and less likely to come to prejudiced or biased conclusions.
Was it something that happened in early childhood? Were you bullied in a high school philosophy class? Did a philosopher make unwanted sexual overtures to you (which was OK as far as you were concerned, except it was not the philosopher from whom you were hoping for unwanted sexual overtures)? What? Why? How? Where? When did it all go so wrong?
Are mathematicians/scientists/philosophers dumber than the average person you walk into on the streets?
What was Socrates doing? Being rational or intelligent?
I like to try the impossible. Rationality has this perfect reputation that I think needs examination. That's all. Thanks for your replies though. They were great.
No, it doesn't. It implies that that the entire question is bogus and irrelevant, and that perfection or imperfection is a stupid criteria by which to judge rationality. To say that a smell is not round is not to imply that it is not-round. It implies that asking wheater a smell is round or not is a dumb question. So too with the question of 'perfection' with respect to reason.
Why are you walking into all these people?
How should I know? I don't have IQ results, nor the results from any cognitive bias tests. What's the point of the question? Perhaps you could rephrase it to something I could answer.
Ok. I'll ask you this...
Is rationality perfect in every sense of the word?
Yes. Prove it.
No. Prove it. (My OP is proof that rationality isn't perfect)
Am I? I just have a few questions more. Thanks.
Prove to me that rationality is the best thinking tool.
Why?