tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (06/11/85)
In article <454@qantel.UUCP>, gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642) writes: > There are plenty of human impulses besides self- > interest; I am sure you can detect some of them in yourself and those around > you. I want to echo this. Just recently I began reading a fine book by Bernard Williams, an analytic philosopher, on "Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy". He has a very cogent passage on rationality: "There is one motive for reductivism that does not operate simply on the ethical, or on the nonethical, but tends to reduce every consideration to one basic kind. This rests on an assumption about rationality, to the effect that two considerations cannot be rationally weighed against each other unless there is a common consideration in terms of which they can be compared. This assumption is at once very powerful and utterly baseless. Quite apart from the ethical, aesthetic considerations can be weighed against economic ones (for instance) without being an application of them, and without their both being an example of a third kind of consideration. Politicians know that political considerations are not all made out of the same material as considerations against which they are weighed; even different political considerations can be made out of different material. If one compares one job, holiday, or companion with another, judgment does not need a particular set of weights. This is not merely a matter of intellectual error. If it were that, it could not survive the fact that people's experience contradicts it, that they regularly arrive at conclusions they regard as rational, or at least as reasonable, without using one currency of comparison. The drive toward a *RATIONALISTIC CONCEPTION OF RATIONALITY* comes instead from social features of the modern world, which impose on personal deliberation and on the idea of practical reason itself a model drawn from a particular understanding of public rationality. This understanding requires in principle every decision to be based on grounds that can be discursively explained. The requirement is not in fact met, and it probably does little for the aim that authority should be genuinely answerable. But it is an influential ideal and, by a reversal of the order of causes, it can look as if it were the result of applying to the public world an independent ideal of rationality." (p. 17-18) Later on Williams goes after this "independent ideal" and beats it down, but I won't go into that here ... I would claim that any political or social philosophy that sticks to a rigidly reductivist definition of rational behavior will not adapt to (that is, won't see or will deny) modes of rationality that don't fit the reductionist model. Were it to take power, it might try to suppress other rational methods or strip them of power. I would further suggest that the requirement that every decision should be based on grounds which can be discursively explained is a rule of bureaucratic rationality. I think Williams suggests this later on in his book. A big mistake often made by political and old organizational theorists is to make judgments that a state or an organization must be built to guarantee bureaucratic rationality in all of its relations with citizens or clients, just to fit the theorist's ideal criteria. (the reversal of causes fallacy) I also suggest that libertarianism is a stellar example of a political philosophy that fulfills both the above anti-goals: it justifies itself via a reductivist definition of rational and ethical behavior, and it defends its ideal state in practical matters via bureaucratic rational arguments. Its solutions are "simple" and hence good because they embody bureaucratic ideals. Tony Wuersch {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw