Abstract
This paper discusses Robert Audi’s argument for the rationality of altruism as it is presented in his Architecture of Reason. The argument departs from the assumption of a close connection between rational intrinsic desires and intrinsic goodness: If an intrinsic desire should be rational, it must be a desire for something intrinsically good. According to Audi’s axiology, qualities of experiences are those entities that can be intrinsically good or bad. If these assumptions hold and if human beings are essentially alike, it seems appropriate to claim that a self-centered desire for something intrinsically good is as rational as an altruistic desire for the very same thing, i.e. a desire for someone else’s experience of this intrinsically good quality. The paper provides a detailed reconstruction of Audi’s argument and continues by scrutinizing four concepts central to it. First, the applied notion of rationality and reasonableness is analyzed. Second, Audi’s conceptualization of altruism with its tight connection to an impersonal understanding of intrinsic desires is discussed. Thirdly, several possible interpretations of the central premise of human similarity are described and compared. Finally, the idea of integration, according to which a reasonable person strives for an adequate balance and responsiveness between her beliefs and her desires, is scrutinized.
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Notes
- 1.
With that goal in mind, we do not intend to defend or even advocate an egoistic conception of practical rationality here, but rather simply point out that there are certain problems with Audi’s response to the challenge.
- 2.
See as well for a short overview Audi 2007, 7f.
- 3.
- 4.
Audi mentions Aristotle and Hume as prominent defenders of some versions of motivational foundationalism.
- 5.
Another label Audi uses for this psychological view is “motivational foundationalism” claiming that “if we want anything at all, we want something or other intrinsically” (Audi 2001, 68). As Audi reminds us, this thesis is first and foremost a thesis in the philosophy of mind and not necessarily a normative thesis about the foundations of practical reason and whether they encompass any restrictions bearing on the content of what can be rationally and intrinsically desired.
- 6.
We will not inquire the structural analogies Audi draws between theoretical and practical reason here, although this unifying attempt might well constitute an important virtue of his theory and provides illuminating insights for a philosophical account of rationality (see Audi 2001, 62ff.).
- 7.
Audi distinguishes between “rational intrinsic desires” and “intrinsically rational desires” (Audi 2001, 68). While the latter ones would be desires which cannot fail to be rational because of properties essential to them, like e.g. their content, rational intrinsic desires might be only prima facie and defeasibly rational (ibid.). Here we are dealing with rational intrinsic desires only since Audi does not claim that there are intrinsically rational desires.
- 8.
Audi is sympathetic to what he calls “axiological experientialism, the view that only experiences have intrinsic value” (Audi 2001, 98). Since this view, which extends the range of intrinsically valuable experiences beyond hedonistic pleasure and pain, is not essential to his conception of rationality, however, we will not discuss this aspect further.
- 9.
In other places Audi captures this difference by distinguishing between wanting something for pleasure and wanting something to cause pleasure (Audi 2001, 85). Someone who, e.g., visits an amusement park out of boredom and despair, because he thinks it will cause him to enjoy himself and will help him to retain his sanity, does not necessarily envisage intrinsic qualities in this activity for which he wants it. To him “[t]he distinctive pleasures of visiting an amusement park are beside the point” (ibid.) and irrelevant to his instrumentalist stance.
- 10.
Pleasure, so Audi reminds us, is not “an autonomous object of experience but […] takes its character from the way in which one experiences the thing that one enjoyably does or undergoes” (Audi 2001, 85).
- 11.
Audi concedes that the contrary impression that action-desires are constitutively self-referential gains some prima facie plausibility from analyzing locutions one uses to ascribe desires to oneself. But, he argues that whereas such self-ascriptions of desires in fact require an indexical referring to the agent, simply having the desire does not (Audi 2001, 93).
- 12.
Of course, it must be noted that Audi’s formulation here is quite defensive. Stating only that “it should be possible” to intrinsically want someone else to enjoy some experience still allows for various qualifications and further restrictions. And Audi explicitly stresses, e.g., that altruistic desires do not have to be overriding in each and every case, that they can be affected by further circumstances, and that they do not have to be purely altruistic but can be mixed with self-interested wants (Audi 2001, 145ff.).
- 13.
A comparable objection against Audi’s notion of altruism is raised by Jason Bridges (2007). In a certain respect, this objection is also familiar to the so-called “separateness of persons”-objection prominently raised against utilitarianism. It should be noted, however, that our objection applies to Audi’s conception of altruism in a significantly different way and does not attack any aggregationist aspects, but rather concentrates on the question of whether genuine altruism and treating others as ends are fully compatible with Audi’s conception of the impersonal grounds of rational intrinsic desire.
- 14.
This leads to further interesting questions. If the identity of the experiencing subject is not important at all, it may not be important either whether this subject is of a human kind or not. The main condition rather seems to be that one is able to recognize qualities of experiences with a certain amount of reliability. If one could show that at least certain animals are capable of doing this, there is no reason to exclude those animals from a circle of hypothetical addressees.
- 15.
Note, however, that it reads not: “He has come to known that the wetness of the cool water envelops him, he senses the free movement within it and its ambient sustenance.” The experiencing subject is not important. The qualities lie within the experience and are not relational.
- 16.
In fact Audi does not oppose this: “[…] there is no need to suppose that altruistic desire […] must be pure: one could want the good of another both for its own sake and as part of one’s effort to maintain a flourishing relationship with the other person” (Audi 2001, 139).
References
Audi, Robert. 2001. The Architecture of Reason. The Structure and Substance of Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2004. The Good in the Right. A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2007. Rationality and the Good. In Rationality and the Good. Critical Essays on the Ethics and Epistemology of Robert Audi, ed. Mark Timmons, John Greco, and Alfred R. Mele, 3–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2011. Rationality and Religious Commitment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bridges, Jason. 2007. Review: “Robert Audi: The Architecture of Reason”. Mind 116: 1083–1088.
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Becker, C., Heger, R., Müller-Salo, J., Schnieder, K., Schwabe, B. (2018). Audi on the Rationality of Altruism. In: Müller-Salo, J. (eds) Robert Audi: Critical Engagements. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00482-8_5
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