Having Reasons: An Essay on Rationality and Sociality

by Frederic Schick

Overview

This important contribution to choice theory examines two theories of motivation and two kinds of explanation of behavior that they support.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612959
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #587
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

Read an Excerpt

Having Reasons

An Essay on Rationality and Sociality

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By Frederic Schick

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07280-7

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CHAPTER 1

Prospectus

1. Some people cannot stand pigs, and others can't live without them. There are people whom pigs disgust, who insist that pigs are unclean. Others see pigs as special friends, some even as part of the family. These last bring them up with their children, feed them from their table, stroke them and talk to them and sleep next to them. In the end they slaughter them all, but then they start over with new pigs.

This is not the usual thing, so we ask what moves people here. How did these people come to this? Marvin Harris takes up the question in his Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. He dismisses the common accounts of the origins of pig hatred. Pigs are no dirtier than many animals to which no one ever objected. And though pigs carry trichinosis, other animals are disease carriers too. Cattle transmit anthrax, a far more serious disease. This was known in ancient times, yet no one raised his voice against cattle.

Harris argues that the banning of pigs was simple ecological prudence. Pig hatred arose in the Near East, where the early Jews and Arabs were nomadic herders. Pigs cannot be herded and so would have been burdens. They would have been hard to manage even for farmers in that region, for pigs need more shade and water than do other domestic beasts. Unlike cattle, sheep, and goats, they have a diet that competes with man's. They give no milk and don't serve for traction. The only appeal of pigs is their flesh. The flesh of pigs can overwhelm prudence. Harris concludes that the danger was such as to call forth the strongest warnings against them.

The special concern and care for pigs is shown to be equally prudent. The pig lovers Harris considers are the Maring tribesmen of New Guinea. In the tropical forests of that island, the temperature and humidity are ideal for pigs. Here too these eat what people eat, but at first the pigs are few and make for no problems for anyone. The increasing number of pigs, however, speeds up the exhaustion of the tribal ranges and leads each tribe to extend its borders. This brings the tribes into conflict. A war must now be fought, and the pigs provide the protein needed for the fighting about to begin, the more pigs eaten and given to allies the better a tribe's chances of victory. Harris concedes there are simpler ways of arranging for tribal land holdings. But that is aside from his central point: given what each knows of the others' plans, the Maring are acting rationally.

2. The aversion to pigs is also discussed by Mary Douglas in her Purity and Danger. She asks not only why the Bible bans pigs but why it bans also the hare and the camel. Why does it ban the hippopotamus? Why is the stork banned but not the frog? Why are certain locusts ruled out but not other locusts?

Douglas works out the answers from the commandment to be holy. The Old Testament concept of holiness means distinguishing and setting apart and also wholeness and completion. The divisions of nature must be kept clearly separate and projects begun must be brought to fulfillment. Incest and bestiality are abominations because they cross lines of division, and unconsummated marriages are unholy because they are incomplete. These offenses against natural order are mentioned in the same context as the animal rules. This suggests that the banned animals were thought unnatural too. Douglas shows how the various outcasts (the pigs, the hares, the camels, and the rest) each failed to be properly separate or whole, how the current conception of what was natural left no place for them.

Why the avoidance of pigs? Douglas holds that the Jews believed that the ambiguous would contaminate them. They were obeying God's injunction to make and keep themselves pure. They were looking to God and acted as they thought He wanted.

3. What follows below is not about pigs but about making sense of people. It takes up two theories of motivation. Why do people act as they do? What sorts of reasons move them? The usual answer is Harris': everyone always pursues his interests. Action is always purposive, or at least outcome-directed. What people do is prompted by their thinking that they will benefit from it. Economists base a general analysis of business and markets on this idea. Sociologists used to be wary of it, but now they too often accept it. So also do some anthropologists, as in Harris' case.

The answer that Douglas offers is different. People are moved by various reasons. They pursue their interests — certainly that is true. But sometimes also they act as they do because of their awareness of certain others. This may on occasion (as with the Jews) be God. More often it is their fellow mortals, or those that stand out somehow for them. They don't here change their interests to reflect the interests of these other people and then proceed on this new basis; rather, they attend to the others directly, without any prior change in themselves. This idea too is familiar. It hasn't caught on in any of the social sciences, but our common understanding is often governed by it.

In these initial statements of them, neither idea gets very far. But in fact the first has had a history of development. Starting with Bernoulli in the eighteenth century, a long line of thinkers in various fields has studied the structure and implications of it. This has now left us a family of what are called rational-decision theories, or theories of rational action. We will speak of them more simply as theories of rationality.

The second idea has not yet had any systematic study. Butler, also in the eighteenth century, had much to say about responding to others. But other-regarding, as he understood it, only made for more broadly based interests. Butler never doubted that (in the sense we will give this) people pursue their interests. The idea here is different; it is that people sometimes consider others without their own interests entering. Loosely, and very partially, it is that people sometimes act as if they were serving others alone, being moved in these situations by their sense of these others' interests. We have as yet no theory of this, but the first steps have been taken, if with something else in mind. One suggestive concept appears in the literature on collective choice, in the discussion deriving from the work of Kenneth Arrow. I will adapt it to our purpose in what I will call a theory of sociality.

The project I have in view is to design a theory of this sort. First, however, we must lay out a rationalist theory in some detail. What we shall want in that connection is an analysis that is formally comprehensive and a sense of how this applies to the cases that suggest sociality. These are all cases in which people act in a way that takes note of the interests of others. How does an awareness of other people with something at stake affect our conduct? The rationalist offers one answer; the social theorist offers another.

We shall want to consider both answers, to see how much can be made of each. But our discussion of rationality will keep an eye to the larger project. I want to show how far a proper rationalist theory can be made to go. But I want also to contest the bias against any other than the rationalist answer, and most of course to undo the bias against the answer the social theorist offers. This bias rests on confusions. Often it rests on a confusion of the concept of being rational with that of having reasons. Where these two concepts are not distinguished, a person not acting rationally appears to have no reason for what he does. Some authors go so far as to hold that rationalism is necessarily true, that a person not acting rationally is not acting at all but only going through motions, only functioning (like a machine): all action is rational by definition. Some of these ratio-imperial dogmas should lift on their own as we proceed. Others are deeply rooted and will call for special attention.

We will have to be careful here how we interpret the basic concepts. If we suppose that an action always has some reason behind it and take a person's reasons to be whatever makes his behavior rational, the rationalist has his cards stacked for him. The bias in favor of rationalism is endorsed by logic alone. A theory intended to provide explanations cannot have it that easy; there must at least be a possibility that it will turn out false. A great deal also hinges on how certain other basics are understood. I propose a suitable analysis of these concepts in Chapter 2.

I go on in Chapter 3 to present a rationalist theory, one that departs in some respects from the currently standard ones. The theory presented is fairly abstract. It may nonetheless account for much interactive behavior. Some of what it covers is often thought to be not rationalizable; I show how the theory applies to these special 'hard' cases in Chapter 4. The question remains whether it accounts for all conduct, whether every involvement with others can be rationalized by it. In Chapter 5, I take up some cases the theory does not easily cover, and I propose a concept of sociality as a step toward a theory that works better. That theory itself is then developed and defended against some likely objections.

Chapter 6 starts out by relating the idea of sociality to that of moral values. The purpose here is not to argue that we ought to be social somehow, that we ought to do this or do that. I have no sermons up my sleeve. My purpose is philosophical; it is to show that the idea of sociality yields an analysis of moral judgments — of the ones that in fact we make. Better perhaps, the point here is this, that thinking in terms of sociality allows for a fresh view of these matters.

Still, this is only a part of it. I want in this chapter to remark on yet another kind of motives. People often explain what they do by saying that they think it is right. Their reason is that what they are doing advances some moral ideal they have, that their principles commit them to it. This is neither a rational nor a social account of what they are doing. But we shall see that (in typical cases) it implies that their conduct is social.

The thesis will be that sociality makes for a promising theory, but we will put that off for a while. Again, a lot must come before that. My discussion of social reasons will relate them to those that are rational. So a theory of rationality must first be presented and studied. Nor can we launch right into that. We must first put the basic concepts we shall be using into shape. We have been speaking loosely of actions, of reasons, and interests. We must now pull up our socks.

CHAPTER 2

Some Basics

1. What follows deals mostly with people's choices. This may seem unpromising. In our usual thinking about people, how they act is what matters to us. An action often, however, expresses a prior choice of the agent's, and this allows us to think about actions in terms that we can define for choices. A rational action is then an action expressing a rational choice, and a social action is one that expresses a choice that is social. Here we are using a concept of expression yet to be introduced, so we again are ahead of ourselves. We must start further back.

Our main concern will be with choices. A choice resolves an issue, and an issue is a set of options. These ideas are common enough, but let us look more closely at them.

2. A person debating what to do sometimes has all his alternatives fixed. He does not always get this far, but think of a case in which he has. All his alternatives collectively are the issue this person faces. What I will speak of as his options are these same alternatives singly.

A person's options are what he thinks he might do. They are the courses that he considers, those he has neither yet ruled out nor selected. An option isn't just anything open but one of a set of possibilities that, in conjunction, raise a problem for the agent. More fully, a person's set of options is some set of possible actions of which all the following holds. The person thinks that he will take one and only one of these actions, but does not yet know which he will take and which not. He expects to take whichever action he will want to take. And he wants to take one of these actions, though not yet to take or not to take any particular one. Or rather, the agent's set of options is the finest partition of possibilities of which all this is true.

This definition is clumsy but each of its clauses belongs. It brings out how in adopting an issue we put ourselves under some pressure. Let me restate the central idea. Where we are facing an issue, we think we will do this or that or that other and that each course excludes all the rest. We think what we do here is up to us. And we want to take one of these courses, though we haven't yet settled on which. This last is what makes for the urgency: we are standing undecided where the road we are on divides.

The restriction to finest partitions assures that at every divide there is just a single issue. Suppose that the agent's options in a case are the three possible actions a1, a2'> and a2", and that a2' and a2" are different ways of carrying out a2. The threefold set is the finer partition of what is possible for the agent, so a1 and a2 don't compose another option-set for him. For instance, if my issue is whether to stay at home or to drive to Boston or to fly there, then whether to stay at home or to go to Boston is not a second issue for me.

The above speaks of a person's taking some option (or possible action). We will read that in the obvious way: a person takes an option in doing what the option proposes. Where my only options are my reading a book or going to bed, I take one of my options in doing one or the other. Taking an option is just acting it through.

Choosing an option is very different from this. Again, a person's set of options composes an issue for him. To choose an option is to resolve an issue, to close out the problem in this way or that. A choice is a settling down; a person's choosing a course is his coming to settle on that one. It is his coming to want to take it, though only where what he comes to want is (or was) part of an issue for him.

This may have the sound of dogma, but it is meant as a definition. A theory of choice had better begin with a clear concept of choosing. Once more, our concept here is that of coming to want an option — in that sense, of settling an issue. A person may come to want something without his facing an issue on it; he may see an ad for Greece and come right off to want to go there. But where he faces no issue he has no choice to make.

Likewise with rejecting an option, with coming to want not to take it, with coming (we need such a word) to diswant it. There is nothing we can't come to diswant, but only options can be rejected. Rejecting an option needn't settle an issue; it may only diminish it. Suppose that a person rejects some option. He then diswants it; it has stopped being an option. Yet if at least two options are left, what remains is still an option-set for him. His issue is no longer what it was, but it is still an issue.

Choosing and rejecting have much the same logic. Still, only choosing is conclusive (it closes an issue), so we will keep to that. What must be stressed is that we don't choose what we want — we choose something and then we want it, for choosing is coming to want. Where we already want something, we face no issue on that matter. Our minds are already made up and thus we have no occasion for choice. Choosing is a kind of changing, a making-up of our minds. It doesn't confirm who we are but rather adds to what we were.

The point is worth repeating, for much of what follows will turn on it: a choice does not bring into the open what before was hidden. It doesn't reveal what the chooser wanted. Nor does it reveal any other interests he had regarding his options. Rather, it establishes a new desire he didn't have before. So also (we shall see) it establishes other interests for him.

3. A word about the objects of choices. On what does a choice we make focus? What sort of a thing does it pick out for us? A choice does not select an action, for we don't always follow through. A person may choose and then lose interest or reconsider or suddenly die, and so it may be that no action ensues. What we choose is not an action but an action prospect. Our choices focus on schematizations, not on courses of conduct in the round but on how we represent them. In this sense, they have to do with how we put these courses to ourselves, with how it is we propose them. I will say, meaning just this, that choices focus on proportions.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Having Reasons by Frederic Schick. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• 1. Prospectus, pg. 1
• 2. Some Basics, pg. 9
• 3. Rationality, pg. 37
• 4. Cooperation, pg. 66
• 5. Sociality, pg. 88
• 6. Commitment, pg. 120
• REFERENCES, pg. 149
• INDEX, pg. 155