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

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.

                     

                                                       Elliot Aronson (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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, the theory 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 firmly held reasons to justify the things we’ve already done. (See Aronson’s The Social Animal.¹)

What it says essentially is this: a human being 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 that 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 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 plans because his patients aren’t spoiled and vain, they are “aesthetically handicapped.” 

The divorce lawyers are not setting two people who used to love each other at each other’s throats. They’re merely defending the clients’ best interests, while the clients’ misery grows 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 that she owns over ten million dollars’ worth of real estate. (All that worry! No wonder she’s rude.)

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’s 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 who 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, 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 infinite interpretations we might give to those details, we tend to give prominence to those that are consistent with the view of ourselves that we find psychologically most comforting. We don’t like seeing ourselves as hypocrites. We don’t like nagging feelings of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, we tend to 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.