Vicky Pryce & the nature of rationality

In the Times, Janice Turner asks: "Why did Vicky Pryce, a pre-eminent economist lavishly paid to predict the future of nations, not foresee her own doom?" This raises an awkward point in the philosophy of economics - that rationality is more ambiguous than often realized.

The standard conception  in economics comes from Hume:

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

In this conception, rationality consists in maximizing "utility", in choosing that action which best satisfies whatever passion we have. This allows economists to speak (pdf) of rational addiction. From this point of view, Ms Pryce was rational. Her passion was negative altruism, a desire to hurt Huhne even at a cost to herself, and she achieved this. She was rational in the way that Eli Berman and David Laitin claim (pdf) suicide bombers to be.

But surely, there's a distinction between Ms Pryce and suicide bombers? There is. It lies in our second conception of rationality. This requires that beliefs are proportionate to evidence. Most of us would claim that suicide bombers are irrational in that their beliefs in paradise and in the evil of the west are not proportioned to the evidence. But Ms Pryce's beliefs were not so irrational; Huhne had treated her terribly.

The passions are not always beyond reason. We can judge Ms Pryce's negative altruism as rationally motivated, but suicide bombers' as not.

You might wonder why I'm talking of negative altruism rather than hatred or anger. I do so for two reasons.

First, to note a distinction between hatred and anger. Anger often clouds rational thought whereas hatred can be consistent with it - as, for example, when a military commander pursues the best strategy.

Secondly, it's because that word "altruism" brings me to my third conception of rationality.

Altruism - positive or negative - sits oddly with economists' presumption of rationality.They might think of it as just a passion beyond reason, or try to embed within a system of reciprocity, or look for an evolutionary explanation for it.

But there's another possibility, stressed by Alasdair Macintyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? This says that rationality is not a feature of desiccated calculating machines who exist outside of society and history, but is instead embodied withni practices and tradition. Take, for example, the doctor who treats patients outside his contractual hours or the soldier risking his life for his comrades. These might seem irrationally altruistic to economists. To Macintyre, however, such behaviour is rational - it's part of what it means to be a good doctor or good soldier. In this conception, the question "how can I serve God?" makes sense - as a striving to continue a tradition - even though many of us would say it doesn't according to our second conception of rationality.

But - Macintyre would say - just as we can ask "what is a good doctor or good soldier?" so we can ask: "what is a good life?" And by this standard, Ms Pryce has been irrational because most of us would say that a good life consists partly in staying out of the Big House.

Ms Pryce has therefore inadvertently done us a service. She's shown that rationality has many, sometimes incompatible, meanings. (And this is before I mention Nozick!) Faced with these, the challenge is to avoid the twin dangers of either a Dawkinsite pigheadedness ("That's not what I think, so it's stupid") or a sloppy "anything goes" relativism. I fear that nobody tries hard to steer between these.

Comments

[Keith]

Surely rationality is a meaningless concept here. All of these examples are just people being emotional in a self destructive way. Wanting to hurt your faithless husband is human but not rational. Like suicide bombers.

To be happy requires more than reason; it requires a well adjusted Psychological state. Not all spouses want revenge on their faithless partners, some merely move on after a amicable break realising that Love has gone. Most people who dislike the USA or its Foreign policy have more of a sense of proportion than to think that indiscriminate violence is a good response.

Instrumental rationality suffers from the problem that it has no moral centre. Making a good bomb has a rational test, does it go bang at the intended moment? But deciding if you ought to make a bomb or when to detonate it is a moral and emotional issue that instrumentality cannot answer. In the same way that you cannot say how much money you should make or how much cocaine to consume or if you should consume it at all. The answer to those questions requires some world view which involves judgements not reducible to utility. There are good passions and bad passions and Hume is being unhelpfully contrarian by ignoring the Philosophical question of how we should discriminate between them. Ideals like being a "good" soldier are an example; a pacifist could say there are no good soldiers as war is a mistake. We could also ask what does being a good soldier imply? Does it mean following the Customs of war and refusing to obey orders that violate them? Does it mean refusing to join in Torture or refusing to fight in wars you consider unjust? Ideals are not simple concepts and if you think about them all sorts of inconsistencies come to light.

[Jon]

This all works logically, but it does seem to be bending over backwards to keep 'rationality' in the equation when it seems to have been the last thing on her mind.

[wewfrilejer]

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