Chapter 4 – Foundations for a Moral Code: Rationalism and Its Flaws

             

In Western philosophy, rationalism is the main alternative to empiricism for describing the human mind and understanding what knowing is. It is the way of Plato in Classical Greek times and of Descartes in the Enlightenment. Rationalism suggests that the human mind can build a system for knowing and understanding itself, and for how it knows its universe, only if that system is first of all grounded in the human mind by itself, before any sensory experiences or memories of them enter the system.

 

Descartes, for example, points out that our senses give us information that can easily be faulty. As was noted above, the stick in the pond looks bent at the water line, but if we remove it, we see it is straight. The hand on the pocket warmer and the hand in the snow can both be immersed in tepid tap water; to one hand, the tap water is cold and to the other, it is warm. And these are the simple examples. Life contains many much more difficult ones. Therefore, the rationalists say, if we want to think about thinking in rigorously logical ways, we must try to construct a system for modelling human thinking by beginning from some concepts that are built into the mind itself before any unreliable sensory information even enters.

Plato says we come into the world at birth already dimly knowing some perfect “forms” that we then use to organize our thoughts. He drew the conclusion that these useful forms, which enable us to make sense of our world, are imperfect copies of the perfect forms that exist in a perfect dimension of pure thought, before birth, beyond matter, space, and time—a dimension of pure ideas. The material world and the things in it are only poor copies of that other world of pure forms ultimately derived from the pure Good. The whole point of our existence, for Plato, is to discipline the mind by study until we learn to more clearly recall, understand, and live by the perfect forms—perfect tools, perfect cooking, perfect medicine, perfect beauty, perfect justice, and many others.

Descartes formulated a similar system of thought that begins from the truth the mind finds inside itself when it carefully and quietly contemplates just itself. During this quiet and totally concentrated self-contemplation, the thing that is most deeply you, namely your mind, realizes that whatever else you may be mistaken about, you can’t be mistaken about the fact that you exist; you must exist in some way in some dimension in order for you to be thinking about whether you exist. For Descartes, this was a starting point that enabled him to build a whole system of thinking and knowing that sets up two realms: a realm of things the mind deals with through the physical body attached to it, and another realm the mind deals with by pure thinking, a realm built on the “clear and distinct ideas” (Descartes’s words) that the mind knows before it ever takes in the impressions of the physical senses.

These two rationalists have had millions of followers—in Descartes’s case for four hundred years and in Plato’s case for well over two thousand. They have attacked empiricism for as long as it has been around (since the 1700s, or in a simpler form, some argue, since the time of Aristotle, who was Plato’s pupil, but who disagreed diametrically with Plato on several matters).

The debate between the rationalists and the empiricists has not let up, even in our own time. But in our quest to find a universal moral code, we will find that we must discard rationalism just as we did empiricism because rationalism contains a flaw worse than any of empiricism’s.

In fact,  it turns out that rationalism has major problems as well. The science of psychology, in particular, has cast a harsh spotlight on the inconsistencies of rationalism. The moral philosophers’ hope of finding an empiricist foundation for a moral system was broken by thinkers like Quine and Gödel. Rationalism’s flaws were just as clearly shown up by psychologists such as Elliot Aronson and Leon Festinger.

                         

                                                                    Leon Festinger

                

                                                                Elliot Aronson.

Aronson was Festinger’s student, who went on to win much acclaim in his own right. They both focused their work on cognitive dissonance theory, which describes something fairly simple, but its consequences are profound and far-reaching. Basically, it says that the inclination of the human mind is always toward finding good reasons for justifying what we want to do anyway, and even more vigorously argued reasons for the things we’ve already done. (See Aronson’s The Social Animal.¹)

What it says essentially is this: a human organism tends, actively, insistently, and insidiously, to think and act so as to perceive and affirm itself as being consistent with itself. In every action the mind directs the body to perform, and especially in every phrase it directs the body to utter, it shows the desire to remain consistent with itself. In practice, this means humans tend to find and state what appear to themselves to be good reasons for doing what they have to do in order to maintain the conditions of life they have become comfortable with. The individual human mind constantly strives to make theory match practice or practice match theory—or to adjust both—in order to reduce its own internal clashing—that is, what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.

A novice financial advisor who used to speak disparagingly of all sales jobs will soon be able to tell you with heartfelt sincerity why every person, including you, ought to have a carefully selected portfolio of stocks. The physician adds another bank of expensive tests and therapies—both of doubtful effectiveness—every year or so to his repertoire. The plastic surgeon can show with argument and evidence that all of the cosmetic procedures he performs should be covered by the country’s health-care plan because his patients aren’t spoiled and vain, they are “aesthetically handicapped.” The divorce lawyer is not setting two people who used to love each other at each other’s throats. He is merely defending his clients’ best interests, while his clients’ misery and despair grow more profound every week. The cigarette company executive not only finds what he truly believes are flaws in cancer research, he smokes over two packs a day. The general sends his own son to the front. And his mother-in-law’s decent qualities (not her rude ones) become more obvious to him on the day he learns she owns over ten million dollars’ worth of real estate. (All that worry! No wonder she’s rude.)

And the philosophy professor, whose mind is trained to seek out inconsistencies? He once said he believed in the primacy of the rights of the individual over any group rights. He sought to abolish any taxes that might be used to pay for social services. Private charities could do such work, if it needed to be done at all. But then his daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder and sometimes secretly goes off her medications and runs away from all forms of care, no matter how loving, runs off and becomes one of the homeless in the streets of a distant city. She is spotted and saved from almost certain death by alert street workers, paid (meagrely) by the government. Now he argues for the responsibility of citizens to pay taxes that can be used to create programs that hire street workers who look out for and look after the destitute and unfortunate in society. In addition, he once considered euthanasia to be totally immoral. But now his aging father with Alzheimer’s disease has been deteriorating for over five years. Professor X is broke, sick, and exhausted himself. He longs for the heartache to be over. He knows that he cannot keep caring personally, day in and day out, for the needs of this now unrecognizable, pathetic, gnarled creature for very much longer. Even Dad, the dad he once knew, would have agreed. Dad needs and deserves a gentle needle. Professor X is certain of it, and he tells his grad students and colleagues so during their quiet, confidential moments.

Do we, in our endlessly subtle rationalizations, see what is not there? Not really. Out of the billions of sense details, the googols of patterns we might see among them, and the near infinite numbers of interpretations we might give to those details, we tend to give prominence to those that are consistent with the view of ourselves and our way of life that we find psychologically most comforting. We don’t like seeing ourselves as hypocrites. We don’t like living with nagging feelings of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, we tend to favour and be drawn to ways of thinking, speaking, and acting that will reduce that dissonance, especially in our internal pictures of ourselves. Inside our heads, we need to like ourselves.