What is Objective Rationality?
#3 // How can we determine if someone's decision was rational or not? Was former President Trump's COVID response "rational"?
Being Human by Psaco
What is Objective Rationality?
“Rationality is a bar of soap.
One that I don’t want to slip from my hands,
while showering in this prison of my mind”.
Okay - cringe expressive poetry aside, it's easy to fall into philosophical and moral debates about what is, or isn’t rational. Beneath the question of what is rational, we all have some idea of what is not rational. Sometimes it might be easier to shape your morality by what you shouldn’t do, instead of what you think you should. A large part of our sense of self, values, morality, and by extension, rationality, can come from a person’s own health and biology, personality, belief systems, psychological development, family supports, social/cultural influences, and the circumstances around making a “rational” decision. This article touches on that last piece about how we define rationality. It's important to recognize the fact that people are different. What is rational for one person, is not rational for another. So what does it mean to be ‘rational’ in the eyes of a human?
Introduction
Imagine you’re walking down a crowded street with a friend. You see a woman who seems like she fell down, is visibly distressed, and is calling out for help. Would you reach out to help her? Most people would probably say yes, but research suggests that our actions depend on the situation. If you’re alone on the street by yourself, there is a fairly high chance you’d call out and go help the woman. If you are in the presence of strangers, the likelihood of reaching out significantly drops. If you’re walking through a crowd with a friend, the statistic drops even further!1 This is the bystander effect, which happens when someone in an emergency situation feels a diffusion of responsibility in responding to an emergency event, or critical incident. The more people on the street, the less likely each individual is to react and help the distressed person out. The chance to follow your rationality and help someone in distress goes down, significantly. You feel less individual in a crowd.
“Somebody else could help her out, right? This doesn’t look like my problem”, you might justify to yourself.
Since every choice (rational or not) is made in some context of the decision-maker and situation, we can understand the components of rationality in a number of different ways. Uriel Abulof (2015)2 breaks rationality down into five essential axioms: Rational Subject, Rational Purpose, Rational Cognition, Rationales, and Postmodern/Scientific approaches to rationality. This post looks at how each of these are related, and how being “rational” is not as simple as trying to make the best decision in a given time (moment) and place (situation).
1. Rational Subject
“Was Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response rational?”
The question itself is a bit complicated. It could be broken down by choice (deciding what to do from available options), act (what Trump actually did), or the actor (his general ability to act “rationally”). As the President of the United States, foreign countries might look at him and say “hey look, this is how America is dealing with the COVID response”. Abulof argues that a government or collective is wrongfully seen as a single-agent, rational subject. “[A]s if it were an individual person with one set of preferences, one set of perceived choices, and a single estimate of the consequences that follow from each alternative” (Abulof, 2015).
As President, Trump (now, Biden) was the single agent representing America internationally. His team debriefed him about the virus and available options, but it is unrealistic for any person to represent the knowledge, thoughts, judgment, and rationality of an entire group, especially if the group is being defined as an entire country. Trump was the face of 52 states, but even American states responded differently to the pandemic, with unique rules for lockdown and quarantine. Here, it’s difficult to address where in a system (especially a system the size of the government) individual responsibility is diluted in a bystander effect kind of way, and how lack of individual responsibility might affect the rationality of the final decision-making agent (the President, state governors, and other key administrative figures). This article focuses on circumstances around the rational “act” (what someone can do, or has done), and not rational choice or actor, since both of the latter can vary by the situation.
2. Rational Purpose
What’s the point of judging people’s decision-making from our own worldview? Like the bystander effect, as social creatures, humans feed off social cues and behaviour. We’re highly adaptive, and can’t help but react or judge other people’s decisions, because part of our judgment is comparing what they’re doing to our own inner beliefs and values about what people should do. Determining what is rational or not, is the only way society has a way of getting consensus on our collective morality (by the way, writing/codifying our collective morality is how laws are made).
When we gossip and give our opinions about a person or event, we are engaging in the collective cultural consciousness in sharing why someone’s actions were, or were not, rational. Most of us agree that killing newborn babies is not rational, and is probably frowned upon in most cultures. When we judge something that’s already happened as rational, irrational, or in a fuzzy area of gray, we do a kind of postmortem on the decision-making about someone’s rationality. It doesn’t have to be on big issues like infanticide, but even everyday gossip about someone’s fashion choice is a form of rational negotiations and prescribed judgments within a collective conscious (comparing someone’s outfit to the current fashion trends). Rationality can be:
Descriptive (describing what someone did),
Explanatory (explaining why someone did something),
Prescriptive (opining what someone should do/have done), or
Subjunctive (assuming people behave as if they want to seek rationally, a maximum expected return on a decision).
For example, the US electoral system is believed to reflect America’s collective decision on picking the most qualified candidate for the job of leader of the free world. When we aggregate opinion (counting the votes of millions who believed voting was the rational thing to do), we assume every voter acted “rationally” when choosing their candidate of choice, even when it's probably true that not every voter is “rational” in their choice. Many scholars and game theorists studying rationality assume that all actors make subjunctive rational decisions, assuming “as if” being rational was the prime goal, at the forefront of the minds of each individual agent. In reality, this is probably untrue more times than not.
3. Rational Cognition
The scary (beautiful) part of being human is that we are the opposite of God.
We are not omnipotent, omnipresent, or ominous.
We have a finite set of resources, limited knowledge about a problem, and the limitations of time to make our decisions. Rational cognition touches on the bounded reality and limits of our human capacity for decision-making. This describes our limitations as decision-makers and how they can affect our rationality.
There are theories that argue we use minimal rationality, which is to always conduct purposeful behaviour with a means to an end. There is also maximal rationality, where there is a perfect choice identified after thinking through all information and cost/benefit analyses before making a decision. The problem is, we don’t always follow the rules of minimal or maximal rationality. For example, in tackling COVID-19, people still congregate indoors without wearing masks and delay the end of lockdowns and travel restrictions (lacking minimal rationality). We also didn’t have the luxury of knowing everything about COVID-19 before it spread and started taking lives (lacking maximal rationality). We can’t always be motivated enough to be “rational”, and we can’t always have all the information required to make a “rational” decision, either.
Let's try something else then. Let’s try the idea of optimal rationality, where we can assume people are “reasonable” in their rationality under three core conditions:
Purposive action (believing actors are motivated to seek the best course of action)
Consistent preferences (ranking preference and values, and executing decisions consistently based on a specified framework)
Utility maximization (selecting the most beneficial alternative).
The problem here is that we aren’t always fully motivated when making rational decisions (lacking purposive action). We have changing preferences, such as how the bystander effect, just one variable, can change whether we decide to help someone in public distress (lack of consistent preferences). Given that purposive actions and consistent preferences are... not so consistent, we can’t always select the most beneficial options, either (lack of utility maximization).
In short, minimal/maximal rationality doesn't help us. The three assumptions of optimal rationality make sense as long as rationality is defined using subjunctive and prescriptive terms (what someone should do, and assuming the decision-maker expects a maximized return on the decision). Once your judgment about someone’s rationality uses descriptive or explanatory terms (trying to explain what someone already did, or why they did it), it becomes a lot harder to defend their decisions using an after-the-fact (post-hoc) model of rationality. It’s like saying:
“Of course the stock market was gonna go down in March 2020 because of COVID!”, but very few people successfully bet on that outcome in the moment. Hindsight is, ironically, 20/20.
Our theories about how people should rationalize are different from the theories that try to understand why a certain decision was made in the first place. These are theories about rational purpose for making a future decision, and theories trying to understand how a past decision was “rational” in the first place. Still, both seem kind of pointless. It’s like asking:
“Why were you not being human when you made that decision?”
Maybe our theories and models for rationality are too simplified to justify everything we have done, and the future is too unpredictable and complex to follow rationality models for things that we should do.
4. Substituting Rationalities for Rationales
This is where things might get a bit philosophical. If it is difficult to defend rationality in practice, can we look at the idea of humans trying to be rational, as following a continuum of rationales? There are two types of rationales: instrumental and substantive rationales (Abulof, 2015).
Instrumental rationales are rationality for the sake of completing a purpose or task - it ignores flawed thoughts, desires, values, and morals around the goal. If Trump’s rationality was that he should remain President for another full term, anything that aligns with that goal is fair game, unless his actions go against his initial goal. This type of rationality is defined by its name, which is that instrumental rationality uses rationality as an instrument and practical means to an end of a personally/collectively meaningful goal.
Substantive rationales assume that the decision-maker has some material self-interest (is somewhat selfish), and may be influenced by social forces such as the desire for utilitarian power. This kind of rationality has clear utility in areas like evolution and selection - those who maintain self-interest and make decisions that maximize their own power, are more likely to have more resources, live longer lives, and generate healthier offspring with higher chances of survival and further propagation.
President Trump’s self-interest in maintaining political power after losing to Joe Biden was based on his substantive rationale of preserving his self-interests. He carried out his substantive rationale with instrumental means (such as by tweeting misinformation and filing lawsuits against different states about alleged significant voter fraud).
Here, we saw Trump use instrumental rationality (Twitter, state lawsuits) to get to his goal of maintaining power and self-interests under his own unique substantive rationales. I like to think of it as using social means (instrumental rationality) for serving biological desires (substantive rationality). However, this is a bit of an unhelpful simplification, as substantive rationality is relative to one’s values3, and people still differ in our biology and our values. A capitalist and socialist could have their own substantive reasons for doing things (believing that what they are doing is for a greater good of humanity), but the two might differ greatly in the thought-processes, goals, and outcomes of their decision-making.
5. Postmodern & Scientific Rationalities
Okay - maybe rationality isn’t a black/white thing, and people don’t fall on one or the other side all of the time, so what’s the point?
Maybe we should define rationality as “a set of rationales that are both justifiable and refutable in the eyes of the actor”. This takes a more scientific-deductive approach, with ownership or justifiability behind the decision. If an action or belief is unfalsifiable, then it can be seen as non-rational, but this is different from being irrational. This way, when someone makes a judgement, it is usually justifiable or falsifiable - and their justifications or propositions can be scrutinized. If the assumptions are not refutable, they could be understood through some theoretical belief or worldview of the decision-maker.
A more postmodern view of rationales is outlined in Max Weber’s typology of rationales, where he described four types of rationales that use non-hierarchical rationalities - neither of these has more weight or preference given over another:
Practical/instrumental (utilitarian/of self-interest, as described above)
Theoretical (abstract meanings such as those found in religion)
Substantive (based on one’s own value-rational, as described above), and
Formal (universally applied rules).
However, post-modern rationalities fail to say anything more about what it might mean to be rational, besides placing a reason or appeal to “rationality” in one of these four boxes.
In this fourth rationality of formal rules, the social sciences’ physics envy starts to show. Unlike physics, there are very few universally applied morals, beliefs, and values found across all human cultures. This means there are almost no universal “truths” or “axioms” from which all human decision-making around rationality is made. In other words, different people have different values and weigh these four typologies differently. It’s impossible to hold one over the other, and this makes complete sense in a post-modern look at rationality. Many social scientists envy the physics field over this, because universal truths can be plugged into mathematics and logic, have proof of work, and can make precise predictions to solve problems. In contrast, humans and our decision-making is not nearly as predictable, and our observations and measurement are prone to error and bias.
What about good ol’ science? Scientific rationality is also imperfect, since science is constantly evolving and changing. Although looking at science is a good place to start (especially with something like responding to a global pandemic), scientific knowledge itself is complicated, confounding, contrarian, and dynamic. For every study supporting your rational beliefs, it’s possible that there’s a study out there supporting alternative hypotheses, as well.
Appealing to science alone is appealing to a mostly post-positivist fever dream where you believe all knowledge is derived from observable and quantifiable truth, found through statistically significant data, from laboratory-derived conditions, run by academics fighting zero-sum games for research funding and tenure-track positions.
Conclusion
Is rationality entirely relative then? Probably not. There’s definitely some extreme edge-cases that most people would collectively frown upon (like infanticide), but even that has its place in human history. There can be theories about why these extreme cases exist, like evolutionary theories illustrating our value in human life. Still, there’s no real universal playbook or model that says:
“This is a rational framework for doing something, every human across cultures agrees with it, and here’s what it is”.
This article covered rationality by actor, choice, and act. We focused on rational acts, since the person making a decision, and the choices they have, depend a lot on the context of a situation. Cognitive theories of minimal, maximal, and optimal rationality largely fail because they are too ideal for humans to follow all of the time. With optimal rationality, it only makes sense to believe people are optimally rational if we use subjunctive and prescriptive terms (trying to impose our rationality on why someone is doing something a certain way, and assuming that they really want the best possible results - “best” being whatever we want the outcome to be). If we try to create some model or framework using descriptive or explanatory terms (trying to explain what someone already did, or why they did it), we largely fail because it's impossible to look back in time at someone’s decision and fully understand or justify why someone did what they did. What went on in their head? We fail to mold people’s decisions into some theory about why humans are rational, since many of our decisions don’t seem to be.
So was Donald Trump’s COVID response rational? The question offends the (still mounting) body count. It’s easy to say that the way the federal government handled the crisis in its critically early containment period could have been better. Still, in Trump’s own mind, there could easily have been some substantive or instrumental rationales in his and his administration’s mind that led them to do what they ultimately did, and nobody can ultimately prove that one reason is any better than another, without prescribing their own values onto the actor.
There are some pointers and ideas, but no solidified direction to guide us away from a “less rational” state, towards “more rational” one. We can use scientific knowledge or use Weber’s types of rationalities or some evidence to point at and say “this is why I’m acting this way”, but, like many great philosophical questions in life, the answer to that “why”, the appeal for any decision that we make and its ascribed degree of rationality, seems to be different for each one of us.
tl;dr:
What is rational? Rationality can be broken into rational choice, actor, or act
Choices and actors differ, so we focused on the rational act - how can we judge if an action was rational?
Descriptive/Explanatory rationalities try to understand why someone acted a certain way
Prescriptive/Subjunctive rationalities impose our own bias on what someone should decide to do, and assume the actor wants a maximum expected return
Minimal, Maximal, and Optimal rationalities are too idealistic to assume humans follow them all the time
Instrumental & Substantive rationales are guiding assumptions of selfish behaviour, but describe intent rather than say anything about a decision being objectively rational or not
Post-modern rationales only give categories for our rationalities with no hierarchy, and scientific rationalities are instable, since science is constantly evolving with new data and is prone to error and bias
The academic models and theories of rationality fail to tell us anything, but that revelation itself might tell us more about variability in human nature, culture, and our decision-making, than it does about trying to seek universal human truths about some greater “objective rationality”
Latane, B., & Rodin, J. (1969). A lady in distress: Inhibiting effects of friends and strangers on bystander intervention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 5(2), 189–202. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(69)90046-8
Abulof, U. (2015). The malpractice of “rationality” in international relations. Rationality and Society, 27(3), 358-384.
Kalberg, S. (1980). Max Weber's types of rationality: Cornerstones for the analysis of rationalization processes in history. American journal of sociology, 85(5), 1145-1179.