Which is best: to give charity to Africa or to protest at the G8 summit? Natalie Solent and Chris Bertram have been debating this. I suspect both are missing a point about the nature of rationality.
[Protestors] hope to influence one group of leaders to transfer more money to another group of leaders so that the latter will use it to do good…Compare that to just giving money. How likely is it that the chain of causality that the protestors think will do good will actually break at some point?
Natalie’s right. If we consider the protestors as a single collective actor, instrumental rationality – aimed at improving Africans’ well-being - would require that they stay home and give the money they save to charity.
However, the protestors aren’t a single collective actor. And instrumental rationality isn’t the only type of rationality. These two facts create a case for protesting.
Case 1. A potential protestor might reason as follows. “Oh no. Some damn fool has called for a protest. If people like me don’t show up, G8 governments will infer that people don’t care about African poverty so they’ll do nothing about it. If I turn up to protest, so too will people who think like I do. And although a big protest won't necessarily do Africans much good, a small protest will hurt them. I want to avoid that.”
In terms of causal rationality, this reasoning is nonsense; there’s no causal link from this person going to Edinburgh to anyone else going. Instead, this is an example of diagnostic rationality – one person’s going to Edinburgh is diagnostic of others going.
Case 2. People don’t protest merely to change policy. They do so to demonstrate what type of person they are. Protesting isn’t causally rational – it doesn’t cause a change in policy – but it is symbolically rational. It’s a way of symbolizing who protestors are.
My point here isn’t to take sides with Natalie or Chris. It’s just to show that there are three different types of rationality that bear on the issue – causal, diagnostic and symbolic. Rational protestors are using either diagnostic or symbolic rationality, not causal rationality. This shouldn’t be an alien idea. If it weren’t for these two types of rationality, no-one would vote.
Good libertarians, of course, should know this. Their reading of Anarchy State and Utopia should have led them to Robert Nozick’s other books – in particular this superb one, in which he shows the many different meanings of rationality.
Comments