Gert on Subjective Practical Rationality

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider Joshua Gert’s novel view of subjective practical rationality in his book Brute Rationality. After briefly outlining the account, I present two objections to his view and then consider his own objections to a rival approach to understanding subjective rationality which I take to be much more plausible.

It has become common in discussions of practical rationality to distinguish between objective and subjective rationality. Surprisingly, however, one finds few attempts in the literature to offer a precise characterization of either form of rationality, especially when it comes to detailed necessary and sufficient conditions. One noteworthy exception is the recent account of both concepts provided by Joshua Gert in his book Brute Rationality: Normativity and Human Action.¹ I have already critically evaluated Gert’s proposal regarding objective rationality elsewhere (Miller 2005), and so the purpose of this paper is to consider Gert’s novel view of subjective practical rationality. After briefly outlining the account, I present two objections to his view and then consider his own objections to a rival approach to understanding subjective rationality which I take to be much more plausible.

1 Gert’s Account

According to Gert, to say of an action that it is objectively rational is to bestow on it the highest normative recommendation there is in favor of the action (1–10). An agent may be mistaken about whether the action really is objectively rational, since such a fact is not something to which we will always have veridical epistemic access. Nonetheless, if an action is objectively rational, there is no sense to be made of the claim that we should not perform it.

In contrast, subjective practical rationality pertains to the processes of deliberation and acting that the agent actually goes through. It is directly connected to our evaluation and assessment of agents (3), and to call an action ‘silly,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘boneheaded,’ or ‘a bad idea’ is to evoke concepts which fall under the heading of subjective irrationality (143). In a similar vein, subjective rationality also bears a close relationship to concepts pertaining to “freedom, moral responsibility, disabilities of the will, competence to give consent, and so on” (153). Most views of subjective rationality will allow that an agent could act in a way that is subjectively rational but objectively irrational if, through no fault of her own, she was mistaken about what was the best thing to do but otherwise satisfied the relevant subjective rational norms.

Beyond this, it is difficult to say much more about subjective practical rationality without begging the question against either Gert’s view or the more traditional internalist approaches to subjective rationality to be mentioned below. So let us proceed directly to Gert’s positive account:

• (1) An action is subjectively irrational iff it proceeds from a state of the agent that (a) normally puts an agent at increased risk of performing objectively irrational actions, and (b) has its adverse effect by influencing the formation of intentions in the light of sensory evidence and beliefs (160).

As stated, (1) is intended to be neutral with respect to different accounts of objective rationality. Thus my critical remarks in what follows will not presuppose any of the details of Gert’s proposal regarding the nature of objective rationality. Simply in order to illustrate how (1) is supposed to work, however, we can note that for Gert:

• (2) An action is objectively irrational iff it involves a nontrivial risk, to the agent, of nontrivial pain, disability, loss of pleasure, or loss of freedom, or premature death without a sufficient chance that someone (not necessarily the agent) will avoid one of these same consequences, or will get pleasure, ability, or freedom, to a compensating degree (141).

Thus with this proposal in mind we can see that according to Gert, if certain of a person’s actions proceed from a desire to harm himself and others (a desire which, let us suppose, leads to the formation of various intentions to act harmfully), then his actions will be subjectively irrational since this desire increases the risk of performing objectively irrational actions according to (2).

2 Against Gert’s Account of Subjective Practical Rationality

Such an account of subjective irrationality in (1) strikes me as unpromising for two main reasons. First, consider Frankfurt’s famous examples of a willing and an unwilling drug addict (Frankfurt 1971). In each case, the addicts have a powerful desire to take drugs which, we may plausibly assume, normally puts them at increased risk of performing objectively irrational actions. In the one case, however, the addict is a willing addict in virtue of identifying with that desire, whereas in the other case he is alienated from the desire and views it as a causal force outside of his will with which he does not identify.²

Now suppose that in both cases the first-order desire to take drugs causes the formation of intentions which in turn lead each addict to make an injection. According to (1), both the willing and the unwilling addict would be performing actions which are subjectively irrational since the causally relevant desire in each case satisfies both (a) and (b). But this is problematic given that Gert intends his account in (1) to capture the sense of rationality relevant to moral responsibility, freedom, disabilities of the will, and the like. For given (1), the actions of both addicts receive the same evaluation as subjectively irrational, while it seems that they intuitively deserve very different evaluations when it comes to moral responsibility and the other related concepts that Gert mentions. Presumably the willing addict can experience himself as freely making the injection as a result of a desire which is part of his will, and his action will be one for which he can be held responsible and hence properly blamed to a significant extent. The unwilling addict, on the other hand, may experience himself as acting in ways which are beyond his control and outside of his will, and we would be far less inclined to blame him to the same extent once we learned about the mental battle he is undergoing against his addiction. So the account of subjective rationality in (1) seems to not be closely tied to the concepts with which it is supposedly related, or at least not in this case.³

This example raises a second and more general concern about (1), which is that by tying subjective rationality so closely to objective rationality, Gert’s account has thereby lost the appropriate subjective footing it needs to have to such notions as moral responsibility and disabilities of the will. This second concern in my view is more important than the first and takes us to the heart of why (1) is implausible. Whether a given state of mind will “normally put an agent at increased risk of performing objectively irrational actions” is something about which everyday agents will at times have very little reliable evidence because of the tremendous epistemic difficulties involved in determining such a thing, and this is true with the comparative harm/benefit account of objective irrationality in (2) as well as with a host of other views in the literature. As a result, it is hard to see how our notions of moral responsibility and the like would closely track such epistemic successes and failings. For example, many agents might scrupulously examine their mental states, and yet despite their best efforts unknowingly end up with states of mind which normally increase the risk of performing objectively irrational actions. But I suspect that we would not want to always call their actions subjectively irrational, and in some cases would not blame them for acting the way that they did.⁴ Similarly, agents might just so happen to form mental states which unbeknownst to them turn out to normally decrease the risk of performing objectively irrational actions, and yet such good luck on their part does not contribute to their actions’ deserving our praise and esteem.

3 In Defense of an Alternative Approach

As a general alternative, my view is that subjective practical rationality is roughly a matter of the agent’s actions being properly responsive to the practical reasons that the agent has by his or her own lights. Here I find myself in good company: Gibbard, Copp, Parfit, Scanlon, Joyce, Sobel, and Kolodny, among many others, all seem to hold similar views.⁵ And such a view gives a more intuitively compelling account of the above examples. The willing addict would be subjectively rational in taking the drugs since by his lights the relevant normative considerations favored such an action, whereas the same action would be subjectively irrational for the unwilling addict. Hence the difference in our ascriptions of degrees of moral responsibility and blame in these two cases could be correlated in part with a difference in our evaluation of the subjective rationality of each addict’s action. Similarly, someone who scrupulously examined and endorsed the reasons which led her to perform an action and yet nonetheless happened to act in a way that was objectively irrational, might still be deemed subjectively rational in this instance by the above account. On the other hand, someone who was led by a tempting desire, addiction, phobia, or the like to act in a way that was not in line with what he took himself to have most reason to do, may still luck out and do something objectively rational. But in this instance and in contrast to Gert’s proposal, the above account would rightly deem his action to not be subjectively rational.⁶

What does Gert have to say about this alternative approach to subjective rationality? The closest he comes to addressing it is with his critical discussion of the following view:

• (3) An action is subjectively irrational if, relative to the beliefs of the agent, it is objectively irrational (154).⁷

He rejects such an approach because of examples like the following:

[S]uppose that I believe that I can fly, and therefore that I will not fall to my death when I jump off of the roof of my apartment building. Despite the fact that I do not believe I will be harmed by jumping, it is still subjectively irrational to jump. Why? Because I should believe that I will be harmed (154, emphasis his).

Naturally we would want to hear some more details about this case, and in particular why the person believes that he can fly in the first place. For there are at least two importantly different versions of this example, and yet in neither of them does it seem to me that the person’s action of jumping off the building is subjectively irrational. In the first version, let us suppose (rather artificially perhaps) that the person in the example does not have any evidence about the harmful effects of jumping off buildings. We might imagine, for instance, that he has lived a very sheltered life, and furthermore has been indoctrinated into believing that he can fly. With this background information about the case, I suspect many people would want to say that neither the person’s action nor even his belief is subjectively irrational, although both are surely objectively irrational. We can see this in our attitude towards the person’s act of jumping off the building, as we would not be inclined to blame him much if at all once we learned about the upbringing he had received.

According to the second version of the case, the person did in fact have plenty of evidence beforehand that jumping off a high building would harm him. He saw several action movies involving villains plummeting to their deaths, and was also injured a few years ago after falling from a wall. Yet let us suppose that despite this evidence he still forms the belief that he would not die if he jumps. Why would he do such a thing? Perhaps because he also has a deep wish to fly, or has an unconscious desire to fly, or has a powerful emotional experience when he imagines himself flying, or the like. Due to one or more of these non-cognitive psychological states, it may turn out that the empirical evidence has no force for him. What should we say here? In such a case as well, it seems that his action of jumping would be subjectively rational; the epistemic counterevidence simply does not serve as a motivating reason by his own lights against jumping. Rather, to the extent that there is a subjective rational failing going on in this version of the case, it is a subjective epistemic failure in forming and retaining such a belief about flying in the first place in the face of the recalcitrant evidence.

To his credit, Gert does anticipate the kind of response just given to this second version of his example, whereby what might have seemed like a subjectively irrational action was really a rational action arising from a subjectively irrational belief. As far as I can tell, here is Gert’s primary objection to such a move:

…not all actions that are based on irrational beliefs are viewed in the same way, with reference to moral responsibility, free will, etc. If I irrationally believe that wearing green brings me small pieces of good luck, and for that reason I wear green, this action would not typically be regarded as irrational at all. And if it were, it would not be regarded as being nearly as irrational as my jumping out of the window, thinking I could fly. This difference in the rational status of the action has nothing to do with the degree of irrationality of the belief (156).

I must confess that I am not sure what to make of these remarks. Both examples here involve objectively irrational actions, to be sure, and let us suppose both involve subjectively irrational beliefs. But once these irrational beliefs are in place, the resulting actions seem to be perfectly rational in both cases. Nor do I see any difference in moral responsibility, freedom of the will, and the like that needs to be explained. The only difference in responsibility that I can make out is a difference in epistemic responsibility as presumably the person in the second case should be epistemically blamed to a greater degree given how much more recalcitrant evidence he had to ignore as compared to the person in the first case.⁸

So much, then, for Gert’s alleged counterexample to the proposed account of subjective rationality in (3). More recently, Gert has tried out another example which he also thinks will do the job. It is worth quoting Gert here at length:

Consider the following two people: Noah, the character from the Bible, and Peter, a modern-day schizophrenic. Let us assume that both of them have the very same subjective evidence that God is speaking to them, telling them of an upcoming flood, and directing each of them to build an ark. The difference is that for Noah, his experiences are caused by God speaking to him, while for Peter, they are the result of an unusual chemical environment in his brain. My view is that with regard to the kind of subjective rationality that is relevant to mental illness, moral responsibility, and so on, Noah’s actions count as perfectly rational, while Peter’s do not. Seen from the inside, however, there is no difference. This is why I think a substantive, externalist, reliabilist account of subjectivity rationality is the correct one … The right thing to say is that Peter is suffering from a mental illness, and that the actions that stem from this illness equally clearly count as irrational actions.⁹

I want to first respond directly to this example, and then draw a more general lesson from it as to where the disagreement between myself and Gert seems to lie.

What should the defender of a view like (3) say about this example? My own inclination is to say much the same thing that we did about the second version of the case involving the person jumping off a building. Certainly we can agree that Peter is suffering from a mental illness, and that his belief about the flood is a mad belief without any epistemic warrant whatsoever. Nonetheless, given that he has it and is unaware of his illness, his action certainly seems to make sense and appears to be rational. His responsibility for performing the action is certainly mitigated, but not because of anything having to do with subjective rationality, but rather because of the mental illness which produced the action in the first place.

Note that there is another interpretation of the case which, in my view, is less compelling than the above, but which is still more plausible than Gert’s. On this reading, Peter’s actions stemming from the mental illness are not irrational, but rather are non-rational. The chemical imbalance in his brain has undermined his capacity for rational thought in general, or at least it has done so with respect to certain areas of his mental life. Thus we might refrain from holding the relevant actions of such a person accountable to the standards of subjective rationality in the first place.¹⁰ Instead, we might say that Peter’s actions are rationally neutral, and that his illness has absolved him of responsibility for them. Thus according to this response, for such an example to be used against the advocate of a view like (3) is less than compelling since that view presupposes (or at least should presuppose) that the actions in question are actions which stem from the exercise of an agent’s rational capacities, and only thereby come under the purview of subjective rational evaluation.

4 Fundamental Methodological Divide?

So I find Gert’s own account of his example to be far from persuasive. But the above passage is also interesting for the way in which it highlights what is likely to be a fundamental methodological divide in thinking about subjective rationality. As Gert makes clear, regardless of the exact details of his positive proposal, he is generally committed to a broadly externalist approach to subjective rationality. Other philosophers such as Gibbard, Joyce, and Scanlon, on the other hand, seem to be internalists about subjective rationality. Now the ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ labels are often less than helpful, especially given the various ways that they have been employed in discussions of warrant, justification, reasons, and motivation. But as an initial characterization, we can say that Gert’s remarks in the passage above seem to commit him to an externalist view such that the conditions necessary and sufficient for subjective rationality are each external conditions. For internalists, on the other hand, these conditions are each internal conditions whereby a normal person has (or potentially could have) special epistemic access as to whether or not they are satisfied.¹¹ This special access might, for instance, involve being able to use reflection alone to determine whether an action is subjectively rational, or being certain that it is subjectively rational (not, however, under that description of course). Externalist conditions, on the other hand, might involve the claim that the action must arise from reliable action-guiding processes to which the subject need not have or even potentially could have special access.

Now clearly this is not the place to attempt to adjudicate between internalist and externalist approaches to subjective practical rationality. Instead let me simply register three broad concerns with the externalist position, not by way of trying to settle the issue, but rather by way of hopefully lending some credence to internalism as a more promising methodological approach in this area. The first is that when it comes to subjective epistemic rationality, an internalist approach is widely endorsed in the epistemology literature (see, e.g., Bonjour 1980; Foley 1987). And this is for good reason; a person who is dehydrated and drinks a clear liquid which he believes is water (but which is really an indistinguishable toxic liquid), would have a false belief but not be epistemically blameworthy. His belief about there being water in the glass, we would naturally say, was a rational belief precisely because from the first person point of view he satisfied the reasonable norms of belief-formation. But if this is right, then why would not his action of drinking the water also be rational as well precisely because the person acted in a way that befitted the evidence and reasons for action as he saw them? Thus if internalism is true about subjective epistemic rationality, it is unclear what considerations would prevent it from also being true of subjective practical rationality as well.

The second concern appeals to considerations of epistemic responsibility. There is a longstanding tradition in epistemology of tying notions of epistemic praise and blame to the special access required by internalism.¹² One intuition guiding this tradition, for instance, has been that people can only be held responsible for something, whether it be a belief, an action, a character trait, or the like, provided that the norms governing that thing are standards against which the agents themselves can measure their success or failure at complying. Epistemic internalist positions can capture this intuition via standards to which agents have (or potentially could have) special access as to how well their beliefs are conforming, whereas for externalists a belief might count as warranted even though the agent has no awareness whatsoever that the process which produced the belief is, for example, reliable.¹³ Thus if it is correct to think that there is a connection between epistemic internalism and responsibility for belief formation, then the challenge for Gert is to be able to explain why there is not a similar connection between internalism about subjectivity rationality and responsibility for action.

Finally, when it comes to externalism about epistemic warrant—roughly, that property or set of properties which makes the difference between true belief and knowledge—even externalists are widely agreed that one of the necessary conditions for warrant is an internalist no-defeater condition. Alvin Goldman, for instance, claims that a belief in some proposition p cannot be warranted if the person believes (whether rightly or not) that p is undermined by counterevidence (Goldman 1986: 62–3, 111–2).¹⁴ It would appear that, if nothing else, the same kind of internalist no-defeater condition is also needed in an account of subjective practical rationality. Recall that Gert’s account is the following:

• (1) An action is subjectively irrational iff it proceeds from a state of the agent that (a) normally puts an agent at increased risk of performing objectively irrational actions, and (b) has its adverse effect by influencing the formation of intentions in the light of sensory evidence and beliefs (160).

Now suppose that the state which produced an action A by agent S is a true belief that S ought to A, a belief which it so happens does satisfy (b) but not (a). Thus according to (1), A would not be subjectively irrational. But suppose as well that by his own lights S at the time of the action had very strong undefeated reasons for not performing A. It would then seem that intuitively his A-ing was subjectively irrational in light of the presence of these defeaters. Yet (1) gives the opposite result.¹⁵ Thus at the very least Gert should follow the lead of externalists in the epistemology literature and supplement his account with an internalist no-defeater condition.

5 Conclusion

Overall, then, I think we have good reason to be skeptical about the details of Gert’s account in (1). In the process we have also seen two more general themes emerge. The first is that construing subjective practical rationality in terms of objective rationality runs the serious risk of losing the appropriate connections to related notions of responsibility, freedom, and the like. Given how difficult it will often be to determine whether an action is objectively rational or not, an agent could make mistakes and perform objectively irrational actions in cases in which it intuitively seems that she is not to be blamed for doing so. The second and related theme is that the plausibility of one’s account of subjective practical rationality may hinge crucially upon whether one adopts a broadly internalist or externalist approach. And one way to make such a choice is to first examine accounts of subjective epistemic rationality. The prominence of internalist accounts there should, in my view, lend credence to internalist accounts in the practical realm as well.

Of course, criticism is one thing; advancing a positive view of one’s own is something else altogether. So while I have raised doubts in this paper about Joshua Gert’s account of subjective practical rationality, I am fully aware that the daunting task still remains of more fully developing a plausible alternative position.