Rationalizing (Vernünfteln)

Kant was a keen psychological observer and theorist of the forms, mechanisms and sources of self-deception. In this Element, the author discusses the role of rationalizing/Vernünfteln for Kant's moral psychology, normative ethics and philosophical methodology. By drawing on the full breadth of examples of rationalizing Kant discusses, the author shows how rationalizing can extend to general features of morality and corrupt rational agents thoroughly (albeit not completely and not irreversibly). Furthermore, the author explains the often-overlooked roles common human reason, empirical practical reason and even pure practical reason play for rationalizing. Kant is aware that rationality is a double-edged sword; reason is the source of morality and of our dignity, but it also enables us to seemingly justify moral transgressions to ourselves, and it creates an interest in this justification in the first place. Finally, this Element discusses whether Kant's ethical theory itself can be criticised as a product of rationalizing.

Concluding Thoughts

This brief concluding chapter draws the threads of the previous chapters together. Previous work on human decision-making has tended to conclude that rationality is a scarce resource and most cognition is arational or irrational. Pushback against this view has come from proponents of ecological rationality. They concede, in effect, that our decision-making is irrational, inasmuch as it fails to respond to good information, but argue that it is rational in a broader sense: we better achieve our epistemic goals by believing arationally. This chapter argues that the evidence surveyed in the previous chapters shows that this is false: we respond rationally to the higher-order evidence we’re presented with, and there’s therefore no need to appeal to ecological rationality to defend our self-image as rational agents. Once we recognize the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence, we can vindicate something very like the Enlightenment picture of ourselves as rational animals.

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency.

Theoretical evaluation of partial credit scoring of the multiple-response test item

We compute and compare statistics of five different scoring rules for the selected-response type of test items where the number of keys is an arbitrary integer and the test-takers are perfectly rational agents. We consider a hypothetical test of factual recognition, in which the underlying ability that we seek to measure is the fraction of the item options that the test-taker truly recognizes (and not only guesses correctly), assumed directly proportional the test-taker’s domain knowledge. From these comparisons, two of these scoring rules are singled out as superior to the others.

Rationality and reasonableness are central tenets of folk theories of sound judgment

We explore folk theories of sound judgment across two cultures, with a particular focus on the distinction between rationality and reasonableness and how people apply these concepts in a range of social and non-social contexts. Four studies using English-speaking samples in North America (Studies 1-3; N=1,826) and a Mandarin-speaking sample in China (Study 4; N=659) examine spontaneous descriptions of characteristics of sound judgment, preferences for and perception of agents in different social contexts (varying in demands for rule-based vs. holistic approaches to decision-making), and categorization of non-social objects. People spontaneously considered both rationality and reasonableness as central features of sound judgment and yet assigned unique attributes to these standards when mapping concept networks. In experiments, people favored rational agents for contexts demanding analytic reasoning and reasonable agents for contexts demanding interpretive/holistic reasoning. Moreover, across cultures, people used rule-based categorization for rational judgment and overall-similarity categorization for reasonable judgment of non-social objects.

The Groundwork

This essay notes background in Kant’s first Critique, reviews the aims and arguments of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals section by section, and calls attention to several remaining questions and controversies. The Preface states the overall aim to identify the supreme principle of morality and to defend its claim to be rationally necessary. Section one uses common moral thought about duty and moral worth to identify the basic principle of a good will. Section two argues from the common idea of duty that this same principle is the supreme moral principle, that its requirements are expressed in several formulations, that this is the only possible Categorical Imperative, and that it presupposes that moral agents have autonomy of the will. The third section argues from a practical standpoint that we must take ourselves to be rational agents with autonomy of the will and therefore subject to the Categorical Imperative.

Rationality in games and institutions

Against the orthodox view of the Nash equilibrium as “the embodiment of the idea that economic agents are rational” (Aumann, 1985, p 43), some theorists have proposed ‘non-classical’ concepts of rationality in games, arguing that rational agents should be capable of improving upon inefficient equilibrium outcomes. This paper considers some implications of these proposals for economic theory, by focusing on institutional design. I argue that revisionist concepts of rationality conflict with the constraint that institutions should be designed to be incentive-compatible, that is, that they should implement social goals in equilibrium. To resolve this conflict, proponents of revisionist concepts face a choice between three options: (1) reject incentive compatibility as a general constraint, (2) deny that individuals interacting through the designed institutions are rational, or (3) accept that their concepts do not cover institutional design. I critically discuss these options and I argue that a more inclusive concept of rationality, e.g. the one provided by Robert Sugden’s version of team reasoning, holds the most promise for the non-classical project, yielding a novel argument for incentive compatibility as a general constraint.

Comparative analysis of the todim method adherence to prospect theory

Prospect Theory provides a broad and solid frame of reference for modeling the decision making of rational agents. In the early 1990s, the structure of Prospect Theory was used to propose a method to aid a multicriteria decision based on the process of paired comparison. The research reported in this article has empirically assessed the adherence of the mathematical model of the original TODIM method, together with its variations available in the literature, to Prospect Theory and compared them with a multicriteria method that does not use that theory. From a comparative analysis, it was realized that the different variations of the TODIM method regarding the incorporation of Prospect Theory’s rationality within the context of Multicriteria Decision Aid still do not bring the benefits of an already consolidated theory to the context of decision-making aid. Thus, it is suggested that further studies be conducted to improve the adherence of Prospect Theory within the structure of the TODIM method, so that the benefits of a consolidated theory of decision lead to better results, notably from the perspective of using the method for the purposes of forecast.