How many rationalities?

Russell Roberts has ignored the advice of the Sermon on the Mount:

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine. (Matthew 7:06)

He's tried to tell journalists about economics.
This Herculean effort hit trouble when he told them it was irrational to vote, because the costs (the walk to the polling booth) outweighed the benefits (the chance that your vote would be decisive):

The journalists reacted to my claim with a mixture of outrage and laughter.  They couldn't decide on whether I was a monster or simply a fool.

The problem here, I suspect, is simple. Russell was thinking, as economists invariably do, only in terms of instrumental rationality. But this is only one type of rationality.
A story by John Searle (The Construction of Social Reality p137-8)  illustrates the point. Instrumental rationality - the economists' way of thinking - tells us that if we value two things, there must be some odds at which you would exchange the two. There are some odds at which we we happily pay $1 for the chance of winning a sports car.
Sounds logical? It's not, says Searle. There are no odds - not even billions to one - that would induce him to accept a penny in exchange for a risk to his son's life.
This is because to accept such odds would merely raise the question: what kind of father are you? In this context, Searle rejects instrumental rationality in favour of symbolic rationality. That is, he acts so as to symbolize or signal the kind of person he is.
Now, I suspect voting is (traditionally) symbolically rational. People vote not out of cost-benefit considerations but to symbolize who they are. My grandad voted Labour all his life simply because that was what working-class people like him did. He no more thought of voting Tory than he thought of leaving the house without his hat - it was just against nature to do so.
This, I suspect, is why voter turnout has fallen is the UK. The symbolic rationality motive for doing so has declined, partly because class allegiances have weakened, and the instrumental rationality motive is just too weak to replace it.
For more about the manifold nature of rationality, can I recommend two great books? There's Robert Nozick's The Nature of Rationality - a far better book than that other one - and Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
These should challenge economists' preconception that rationality is a straightforward concept.

Comments

[The Pedant-General]

"Sounds logical? It's not, says Searle. There are no odds - not even billions to one - that would induce him to accept a penny in exchange for a risk to his son's life."

not even billions to one?

Bollocks. If someone came up to me and said "I'll give £100 and pay for the ticket if you take your son on a plane with you", I would grab it. There is a good statistical chance - much shorter than billions to one - that the plane will crash and my son will be killed, but we simply wouldn't get out of bed if we worried about stuff like that.

The irrationality is slightly different: it concerns our ability to assess risk. If your chap had some diabolical device with a lump hammer aimed at my son's head, and which had a neatly arranged mechanism that released the hammer every x button presses, then one would be sceptical.

Where the risk is not one we encounter everyday, humans are very bad at assessing extremely long odds.

The irrationality in voting is nothing to do with costs and benefits: It is a game theory problem, hence the nonsense of tactical voting (and especially the subsequent complaining about the outcome of tactical voting)...

Toodle Pip!
PG

[dearieme]

I conclude that Searle's son was not in his teenage years at the time.

[chris]

P-G - a very good point. But it's about the importance of the way choices are framed, rather than about the unimportance of symbolic rationality.
Of course, parents risk their kids' lives every day, and so make instrumentally rational (or not) decisions.
But Searle faced a differently framed problem - an explicit threat to his son's life. Within this framework, symbolic rationality took over.
Put this another way. No-one would think Searle a bad parent for putting his son on a plane, because millions of parents do that. But Searle was (by hypothesis) being asked to put his son in a unique position. That raises doubts about what it means to be a parent, in a way that plane flights don't.

[The Pedant-General]

Chris,

I think I agree with this. The irrationality comes from playing a game with extremely long odds only a very small number of times (or only once). This is where casinos make their money: they take 1 or 2% from an extremely large number of plays. The punter - on the other side of the equation - is looking for the statistical outlier - the one in a million chance that just happens to be his. The casino cleans up on the 999,999 punters whose 1 in a million chance didn't come up.

Searle's analogy is this in reverse. I wouldn't stick my child under the lump hammer, because the 1 in a million chance might be mine...

However, I still don't agree that this analogy applies to voting. That is still game theory and we all know that some game theory problems can have peculiar/non-intuitive results.

PG

[rjw]

A very similar issue comes up in a debate I know rather well over environmental policy. The economist says we should weigh up and aggregate the costs of reducing pollution, compare to the aggregate of benefits, and fix an instrumentally rational , or optimal, level of pollution.

Others have argued that our tolerance or otherwise of damage to the natural environment is a social value - our choices reflect the type of society we live in (in the same way, for example, that our attitude to abortion might) - and that a cost benefit analysis is therefore inappropriate. You can't simply aggregate individual costs and benefits. It's the interpersonal shared values that matter. In philosophical terms they say the economist are making a category mistake. A prominent example of this view was Mark Sagoff's "the economy of the earth".

In this case I'm on the side of the economists, on the whole. But at a certain point it is no longer black and white. For example - hypothetically - would we accept pollution that wiped out anyone and everyone over the age of 80 without fail?