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Throughout much of the last century, the idea that we inhabit a somehow disenchanted modernity has exerted a powerful hold in political and public debate. As the political theorist Jane Bennett argues, the story is that there was once a time when God acted in human affairs and when social life, characterized by face-to-face relations, was richer; but this world then ‘gave way to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism, and the bureaucratic state – all of which, combined, disenchant the world’.

The post For the love of reason appeared first on OUPblog.

People exist at different times. My life, for instance, consists of me-at-age-five, me-as-a-teenager, me-as-a-university-student, and of course many other temporal stages (or time-slices) as well. In a sense, then, we can see a single person, whose life extends over time, as akin to a group of people, each of whom exists for just a short stretch of time.

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William Godwin did not philosophically address the question of debt obligations, although he often had many. Perhaps this helps to explain the omission. It’s very likely that Godwin would deny that there is such a thing as the obligation to repay debts, and his creditors wouldn’t have liked that.

The post William Godwin on debt appeared first on OUPblog.

Please find below a pastiche of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that illustrates what it means to choose rationally:

‘Sit down, dear’, said the White Queen.

Alice perched delicately on the edge of a chair fashioned from oyster-shells.

‘Coffee, or tea, or chocolate?’, enquired the Queen.

‘I’ll have chocolate, please.’

The Queen turned to the Unicorn, standing, as ever, behind the throne: ‘Trot along to the kitchen and bring us a pot of chocolate if you would. There’s a good Uni.’

Off he trots. And before you can say ‘jabberwocky’ is back: ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty, and Miss Alice, but we’ve run out of coffee.’

‘But I said chocolate, not coffee’, said a puzzled Alice.

The Unicorn was unmoved: ‘I am well aware of that, Miss. As well as a horn I have two good ears, and I’m not deaf’.

Alice thought again: ‘In that case’, she said, ‘I’ll have tea, if I may?’

‘Of course you may,’ replied the Queen. ‘But if you do, you’ll be violating a funny little thing that in the so-called Real World is known as the contraction axiom; in Wonderland we never bother about such annoyances. In the Real World they claim that they do, but they don’t.’

‘Don’t they?’ asked Alice.

‘No. I’ve heard it said, though I can scarce believe it, that their politicians ordain that a poor girl like you when faced with the choice between starving or taking out a payday loan is better off if she has only the one option, that of starving. No pedantic worries about contraction there (though I suppose your waist would contract, now I come to think of it). But this doesn’t bother me: like their politicians, I am rich, a Queen in fact, as my name suggests’.

‘On reflection, I will revert to chocolate, please. And do they have any other axes there?’

‘Axioms, child, not axes. And yes, they do. They’re rather keen on what they call their expansion axiom – the opposite, in a sense, of their contraction axiom. What if Uni had returned from the kitchen saying that they also had frumenty – a disgusting concoction, I know – and you had again insisted on tea? Then as well making your teeth go brown you’d have violated that axiom.’

‘I know I’m only a little girl, Your Majesty, but who cares?’

‘Not I, not one whit. But people in the Real World seem to. If they satisfy both of these axiom things they consider their choice to be rational, which is something they seem to value. It means, for example, that if they prefer coffee to tea, and tea to chocolate, then they prefer coffee to chocolate.’

‘Well, I prefer coffee to tea, tea to chocolate, and chocolate to tea. And why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because, poor child, you’ll be even poorer than you are now. You’ll happily pay a groat to that greedy little oyster over there to change from tea to coffee, pay him another groat to change from coffee to chocolate, and pay him yet another groat to change from chocolate to tea. And then where will you be? Back where you started from, but three groats the poorer. That’s why if you’re not going to be rational you should remain in Wonderland, or be a politician.’

This little fable illustrates three points. The first is that rationality is a property of patterns of choice rather than of individual choices. As Hume famously noted in 1738, ‘it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger; it is not contrary to reason for me to chuse [sic] my total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian’. However, it seems irrational to choose chocolate when the menu comprises coffee, tea, and chocolate; and to choose tea when it comprises just tea and chocolate. It also seems irrational to choose chocolate from a menu that includes tea; and to choose tea from a larger menu. The second point is that making consistent choices (satisfying the two axioms) and having transitive preferences (not cycling, as does Alice) are, essentially, the same thing: each is a characterisation of rationality. And the third point is that people are, on the whole, rational, for natural selection weeds out the irrational: Alice would not lose her three groats just once, but endlessly.

These three points are equally relevant to the trivia of our daily lives (coffee, tea, or chocolate) and to major questions of government policy (for example, the regulation of the loan market).

Featured image credit: ‘Drink me Alice’, by John Tenniel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post Why be rational (or payday in Wonderland)? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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We all know that asking questions is important. Asking the right questions is at the heart of most intellectual activity. Questions must be encouraged. We all know this.

But are there any questions which may not be asked? Questions which should not be asked? Although many a young undergraduate might initially say “No! Never! All questions must be encouraged!”

I think most thoughtful people will realise there is a little more to it than that. There are, for example, statements which present themselves in all the innocent garb of questions, but which smuggle in nasty and false assertions, such as the phrase “why are blond people intellectually inferior to dark people?” There are questions which mould the questioner, such as “will I feel better if I arrange for this other person to be silenced?”

Questions can serve horrible purposes: they can focus the mind down a channel of horror, such as, “what is the quickest way to bulldoze this village?” Even more extreme examples could be given; they make it clear that not all statements that appear to be questions are primarily questions at all, and not all questions are innocent.

Once you start to think it through, it becomes clear that every question you can ask, just like every other type of utterance you can make, is not a simple self-contained thing, but a connector to all sorts of related assumptions and projects, some of them far from morally neutral. This makes it not just possible, but sometimes important and a matter of honour and duty, not just to refuse to answer, but to raise an objection to the question itself. More precisely, one objects to the assumptions that lie behind the question, and which have rendered the question objectionable.

“Have you stopped beating your children?”

“Tell me, my daughters … which of you shall we say doth love us most?”

“How do you reconcile your rationality with your religious faith?”

In all three cases the question renders any honest person speechless.

But in the first case, if the question is pressed, and I am hauled up before the judge in a court of law, then I will protest, at length and forcefully, that I never did beat my children in the first place. And in the second case, if the question is pressed, then a loving daughter may choose to handle what comes of her silence, and show her love by her behaviour. And if the third question is pressed, then I might explain, as patiently as I could, that the attitude of the questioner is as deeply distorted here as it is in the other two cases, and I will add that my faith was never divorced from my rationality in the first place, and that being required to explain this is like being required to explain that you are honest.

Now we have arrived at the point of this blog, which is not, I will come clean, the general issue of questioning the question, but the specific issue of public discourse in the area of religion. But the two are closely related, because I am interested in focussing attention on where the issue of questioning the question really lies.

The issue is not, “are there questions which are objectionable?” (I think we already settled that), nor is it, “let’s have some intellectual amusement unpicking what is objectionable about this or that ill-posed question which we find it easy to tell is ill-posed.” No, the heart of this issue is, what about the fact that there may be questions which are in fact ignorant and domineering in themselves as questions — like “have you stopped beating your children?” — but which we don’t recognise as such, because of the unquestioned assumptions of our culture and the intellectual habits it promotes.

The third example above is the one which invites the reader to explore this. Is that question objectionable or not?

I will give two reactions: first a subjective one, then the beginnings of an objective one. Subjectively, the question, and others like it such as, “how do you reconcile science and religion?” make me feel every bit as queasy as the “beating your children” one. The hollow feeling of having been pigeonholed before you can open your mouth, of being in the presence of someone whose mental landscape does not even allow the garden where you live, the feeling of being treated like dirt, it is all there.

Now, objectively, are these feelings of mine a sign of trouble in me, or a sign of trouble in our wider culture? I invite reflections. Here I will offer three.

First, my reaction is strong because rationality is a deeply ingrained part of my very identity; it is every bit as important to me as it is to anyone else, so that to face a presumption of guilt in this area is to face a great injustice. Secondly, though, religion is a broad phenomenon, having bad (terrible, horrendous) parts and good (wonderful, beautiful) parts, so the question might be a muddled attempt to ask, “what type of religion is going on in you?” It still remains a suspicious question, like “are you honest?” but in view of the nastiness of bad religion, perhaps we have to live with it, and allow that people will need to ask, to get some reassurance.

Having said that, (and thirdly) we can only make a reply if there is enough oxygen in the room–that is, if the questioner does not come over like an inquisitor who has already made up his mind. The question needs to be, in effect, “I realise that we are both rational; would you unpack for me the way that rationality pans out for you?” We need the questioner at least to be open to the idea that willingness to recognize God in personal terms can be a thoroughly rational thing to do, in a similar sense that recognizing other humans as consciously willing agents is a thoroughly rational thing to do. In both cases, it requires a willingness that is in tune with reason, not unreason, but which is larger than reason, as a chord is larger than a single note.

Headline image: King Lear: Cordelia’s Farewell by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1898. Public domain via WikiArt

The post Questioning the question: religion and rationality appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Are the political ideals of liberty and equality compatible? In this video, OUP author James P. Sterba of University of Notre Dame, joins Jan Narveson of University of Waterloo, to debate the practical requirements of a political ideal of liberty. Not only Narveson but the entire audience at the libertarian Cato Institute where this debate takes place is, in Sterba’s words,  ”hostile” to his argument that the ideal of liberty leads to (substantial) equality.  Sterba goes on to further develop that argument in From Rationality to Equality.

Click here to view the embedded video.

James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His latest work, From Rationality to Equality, publishes in February 2013. His previous publications include Three Challenges to Ethics (OUP, 2001), The Triumph of Practice over Theory in Ethics (OUP, 2005) and Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? A Debate, with Warren Farrell (OUP, 2007). He is past president of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division).

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By Simon Blackburn

 
David Hume was born three hundred years ago, on 26^th April 1711.  He lived most of his life in Edinburgh, with only a few improbable interludes: one as tutor to a lunatic, one assisting in a comic-operatic military adventure, and one somewhat more successfully as Embassy Secretary, being a lion in the literary salons of Paris. Apart from these his life was devoted to philosophy, history, literature, and conversation. He is the greatest, and the best-loved, of British philosophers, as well as the emblem and presiding genius of the great flowering of arts and letters that took place in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment. As with all philosophers, his reputation has gone through peaks and troughs, but today it probably stands higher than it ever has.

This may be surprising. Movements in twentieth-century philosophy were not, on the whole, kind to Hume. Analytical philosophy, initiated by Moore and Russell, took logic to be its scalpel and the careful dissection of language to be its principal task, yet Hume was neither a logician nor primarily interested in language. His empiricism, indeed, had echoes in the later work of the logical positivists. But he was widely regarded as having driven empiricism into a sceptical grave. Russell, for example, could assert in his History of Western Philosophy, that Hume ‘developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent, made it incredible’, and this was a widely-held view. On the Continent it has usually been assumed that Hume was simply a curtain-raiser to Kant, who allegedly instructed us how to avoid his sorry descent into scepticism, on the grounds that any world in which we could find ourselves must have a nice regular structure, discernible by the light of reason alone.

There is unquestionably a skeptical side to Hume’s philosophy. But there is another side as well, that is responsible for its current standing. Hume is indeed sceptical about the power of reason to determine what we believe. But he is not sceptical, for example, about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. He just has the calm understanding that our confidence in uniformities in nature, such as this one, is not the result of logic or of any exercise of pure rationality. It is just the way our minds happen to work—as indeed, do those of other animals.

Similarly when it comes to understanding the springs of action, Hume again dethrones reason, arguing that nothing that reason could discover would motivate us without engaging an inclination or ‘passion’. He entirely overturns the Platonic model of the soul in which reason is the charioteer, controlling and steering the unruly horses of desire. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. We can correct mistakes about the world in which we act, and choose more efficient means to gain our ends. We may even be able to persuade ourselves and each other to alter our courses, for better or worse. But we can only do this by mobilizing other considerations we care about. These concerns, or in other words the directions of our desires, are themselves a bare gift of nature, again. Hume excelled in adding detail to this: his account of the evolution of what he called the ‘artificial’ virtues—respect for such things as reciprocity, institutions of justice, social conventions, law or government—is the grandfather of all later decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of cooperation. But it took over two centuries before this would be recognized. Only recently has Hume’s naturalism become the gold standard for everyone at the cutting edge of contemporary investigation, whether in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthrop