Abstract
It is hard for me to decide whether I should be elated or depressed by the fact that over 2000 years ago, Aristotle had already thought about the problem that I am addressing now, which is more or less the relationship of rationality and ethics. He not only thought about it but also achieved insights to which we have found it difficult to add. In his analysis he separated ethics from politics in explicit recognition of the dialectic tension between the man and the citizen—between the particular and the universal. In Aristotle’s own words (or rather in W.D. Ross’ translation):
If the state cannot be entirely composed of good men, and yet each citizen is expected to do his own business well, and must therefore have virtue, still, inasmuch as all citizens cannot be alike, the virtue of the citizen and the good man cannot coincide. All must have the virtue of the good citizen—thus, and thus only, can the state be perfect; but they will not have the virtue of a good man, unless we assume that in a good state all the citizens must be good (1).
Any opinions, findings, conslusions, or recommendations expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The help of Professor Stuart F. Spicker is gratefully acknowledged.
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References
Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle ( New York: Random House, 1941 ), p. 1180
John Rawls, Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971 ).
Norman Daniels, Reading Rawls ( New York: Basic Books, 1974 )
Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977 ).
A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice, ” Science, 1981, 211: 453–458.
Max Born, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949 ), pp. 122–123.
H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971 ), pp. 80–81.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ( New York: Scribner’s, 1958 ), p. 181.
Act utilitarianism” is the version of utilitarianism in which each individual act must be judged directly in terras of the utilitarian criterion. Thus a morally right act is one that, in the situation the actor is actually in, will maximize social utility. In contrast, “rule utilitarianism” is the view that the utilitarian criterion must be applied, in the first instance, not to individual acts but rather to the basic general rules governing these acts. Thus a morally right act becomes one that conforms to the correct moral rule applicable to this sort of situation, and a correct moral rule is that particular behavioral rule that would maximize social utility if it were followed by everyone in all social situations of this particular type [see John C. Harsanyi, “Morality and the Theory of Rational Behavior,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 41.
Philosophers in the 18th century were not reluctant to invoke a little bit of black magic to sustain their sometimes unbelievable explanations. Adam Smith relied on the “invisible hand” to effect the efficient distribution of goods, as Hegel invoked the “cunning of reason” (die List der Vernunft) to make us behave rationally in spite of ourselves. Such processes which lead to social choice and consequences are referred to by Robert Nozick as “invisible hand processes.” Nozick, in fact, attributes “a certain lovely quality to explanations of this sort.” He maintains that “they show how some overall pattern or design, which one would have thought had to be produced by an individual’s or group’s successful attempt to realize the pattern, instead was produced and maintained by a process that in no way had the overall pattern or design ‘in mind.’” Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia ( New York: Basic Books, 1974 ), p. 18.
Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 ), p. 77.
Rawls, quoted in Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 37–38, 39.
Nozick, Anarchy, p.159.
Charles Taylor, “The Diversity of Goods,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, p.129.
Kenneth Arrow casts some doubts even about the venerable Golden Rule when he cites G.B. Shaw’s astute remark: “Do not do unto others as you would have that they do unto you. They may have different tastes.” Kenneth J. Arrow, The Limits of Organization ( New York: Norton, 1974 ), p. 24.
Kant’s uneguivocal description of those who cannot or will not follow the dictates of theoretical reason is worth quoting: “Deficiency in the faculty of judgment is what we call stupidity, and there is no remedy for that. An obtuse and narrow mind, deficient in nothing but a proper degree of understanding and correct concepts, may be improved by study.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Muller (Garden City: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1966 ), p. 119n. Theoretical reason is not to be identified with pure reason. The latter serves to distinguish a priori knowledge from such knowledge as is based on empirical evidence. The transcendental character of pure reason need not concern us here.
Paton, Categorical Imperative, p. 79.
Harsanyi, “Morality,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, p. 61.
Harsanyi, “Morality,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, p. 42.
See n. 3 above.
J.J.C. Smart, “An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics” in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism for and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 46 ff.
Wolff, Understanding Rawls, p. 13.
I will briefly outline the dilemma: Two prisoners on parole from an earlier conviction were apprehended under suspicion of having committed a crime. The evidence was not as clear cut as one would have liked. The counsel for the defendants asked for the opportunity to plea bargain. The public prosecutor offered the following terms: (a) If both scoundrels admit to having committed the crime, both will get five years in jail; (b) If both deny any guilt, they will each get two years in jail; (c) If one of the two turns state’s witness, admits his own guilt, and implicates his partner, then he will get remission of the ten-year jail sentence that he was already serving from an earlier conviction, and the other fellow will get an additional ten-year jail term. From the perspective of each prisoner, option (b) is not as prudent a strategy as (a), where an admission of guilt brings with it no more than a five-year jail terra and possibly no jail term at all, should the other prisoner opt for (c). In other words, option (a) is an enforceable minimax outcome. Here “enforceable” means an outcome that is independent of any cooperation between the two prisoners even if they had made earlier promises to one another. An enforceable minimax outcome (a) is surely worse than the best outcome for both (b), but it is clearly better in this case than (c), the broken promise.
Williams discusses the Prisoner’s Dilemma from a somewhat different point of view (“A Critique of Utilitarianism” in Smart and Williams, Utilitarianism, p.131). His analysis is concerned more with patterns of social learning described in a very interesting article by Douglas R. Hofstader in reference to the work of Robert Axelrod at the University of Michigan: “Computer Tournaments of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Suggest How Cooperation Evolves,” Scientific American, May 1983, pp. 16 ff.
T.M. Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, p.122.
In contrast to utilitarianism, the individual agent — conceived as moral agent—plays a central role in the thinking of both Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, the social theorist who is the most articulate contemporary proponent of the so-called Frankfurt School of German philosophers. The question of how “true desires” can be discovered was addressed by the Frankfurt School in their “critical theory,” which Habermas has changed somewhat by grafting on a version of transcendentalism. Although Rawls and Habermas approach the discovery problem from quite different ideological standpoints, the similarity of their objectives is striking. With his insistence that an action is morally acceptable or a belief true if and only if arrived at by consensus reached under ideal conditions, Habermas resonates with Rawls.
Stephen Edelstone Toulmin, An Examination for the Place of Reason in Ethics ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958 ), p. 190.
John Rawls, “Social Unity and Primary Goods,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, p.164.
John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory; The Dewey Lectures 1980,” Journal of Philosophy, September 1980, 78: 518: a conception of justice holds only when a basis is established for political reasoning and understanding within a public culture. The social role of a conception of justice is to enable all members of society make mutually acceptable to one another, their shared institutions and basic arrangements, by citing what are publicly recognized as sufficient reasons, as identified by that conception. To succeed in doing this, a conception must specify admissible social institutions and their possible arrangements into one system so that they can be justified to all citizens, whatever their social position or more particular interests. Thus whenever a sufficient basis for agreement among citizens is the presently known, or recognized, the task of justifying a conception of justice becomes: How can people settle on a conception of justice to serve this social role, that is (most) reasonable for them in virtue of how they conceive of their persons and construe the general features of social cooperation among persons so regarded?
John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory; The Dewey Lectures 1980,” Journal of Philosophy, September 1980, 78: 518:
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Menkes, J. (1985). Limits of Rationality. In: Covello, V.T., Mumpower, J.L., Stallen, P.J.M., Uppuluri, V.R.R. (eds) Environmental Impact Assessment, Technology Assessment, and Risk Analysis. NATO ASI Series, vol 4. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70634-9_29
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