Abstract
Rationality is not merely an objective science but is a normative project. It seeks to make changes in people and society. But it has undergone steady abuse over the millennia, with reviling detractors and seemingly constant misunderstandings. But at the same time we do not know if the campaigns, no matter how little we know of the outcomes, can be guaranteed positive. So detractors do have a point. Rationality given via the 12 precepts and receiving strong philosophical support appears to have endangered life on Earth. Should we indeed keep loaning it more chances? This chapter offers it further support but also gives ear to the skeptics.
“Is it possible,” he thought, “that I cannot master myself, that I am going to give in to this … nonsense?” (Those who are badly wounded in war always call their wounds “nonsense.” If man did not deceive himself, he could not live on earth.)
—Turgenev, The House of Gentlefolk (tr. C. Garnett)
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Notes
- 1.
This characteristic of the book can support the notion that the republic is intended more as a theoretical account of the structure of the soul and how society may best reflect and fulfill that soul than as a manifesto for actually refashioning society.
- 2.
Would it remain an ideal if all agents—excepting perhaps small children and others in compromised conditions—were to adopt it? I believe it would remain an ideal, as one could always veer from it. This nature of rationality evokes the need for free will in acting rationality, which Kant (1993) at least attempted to describe.
- 3.
One also runs into the quagmire of what is the actual, quotidian experience of feeling happy that counts for an agent’s being happy. Mill (2006) did give this quagmire some consideration in saying that it is not the quotidian feeling of happiness (the emotion) that counts to qualify for happiness but something like the lifelong sense of accomplishment that counts morally. Mill then only stays in the quagmire, tossed about by its ebb and flow: Whatever accomplishment is remains unclear; the experience of sensing that accomplishment is essentially an emotion; and the entailed length of time one must live to achieve this sense is puzzling and feckless, as the cut-short lives of Büchner, Galois, Keats, Schubert, Frank Ramsey, and Anne Frank attest. If Mozart’s life had been cut short at age five, he still would have accomplished much in that lifetime but perhaps not been able to sense and savor (emotionally!) that accomplishment. Even by Mill, then, it is not apparent that one must be rational to be happy. And, as the adolescent Mill of can attest, having grown up among the highly rational tutelage of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, only to escape suicide by taking refuge in the arational wilds of north-England nature, being rational does not entail being happy.
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Miller, L. (2024). Why Rationality? The Growth and Normativity of Rationality. In: The Rationality Project. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39920-6_8
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