The Institutional Bias of Rationality and Morality

This is one of those articles where I’ve had an idea strike me that I trust and feel compelled to write about on an instinctual level, in that my justification for trusting such a thought is almost pure intuition, and in a very real sense I am but a mere medium acting as a slave to my psyche - there is little reflection or scrutiny here. For when such images arise it always appears best to attempt to articulate what they say as if I was a translator writing a transcript of a meeting, and then allow the articulation to speak for itself - considering I will subsequently have to attempt to understand what it is I have written. For it won’t do to disrupt the fluid thoughts with the petty red-tape of ‘rationality’. Albeit it shouldn’t be mistaken that rationality is entirely absent, for within the thoughts themselves it’s very evident that they have stemmed from and included previous rational considerations. But that it often takes the lucid daydreaming and playing of the psyche to do something interesting with these rational deliberations, considering rationality has a certain way of being dull and boring - and I definitely cannot do dull and boring.

So what are these images that my psyche imposed on my consciousness as mentioned? The easiest way through which to explain this is to draw out the image themselves, and then unpack through language what they depict.

It appears to me that both rationality and morality can be considered ‘overriding mechanisms’ through which to organise a set of particulars. And in that sense the important thing to pay a keen awareness to is what they do ‘institutionally’, in that the real distinguishing factor is in what are the observable distinctive ways that they organise particulars, and what is the real world impact of this? It is common knowledge by now in most philosophical circles that the notion of an ‘objective rationality’ was never all that objective, but that people were deluded into believing because they believed rationality was ‘objective’. Although I do want to emphasise that I am not referring to any psychological factors here, in the sense that I’m discussing these things in the abstract without considering how people actually use such concepts - because there certainly is another fascinating layer of interaction between the ‘institutional bias’ of rationality and the biased use of rationality by humans, but I’m certainly not intelligent enough to even begin to touch that question.

This all originated whilst writing the first draft of a chapter for my book, in which I was writing about the confusion people enter when trying to debate rationally incommensurable concepts. For if one believes freedom itself grounds morality and another that the law of God grounds morality, then there is just no way to reconcile these two position because they cement themselves in a way that they will just reinterpret whatever the other person says to further prove their point, and if genuine incoherencies emerge they can simply disparage their opposing position by pointing out their own inconsistencies. What is the function of rationality in debates such as these? It appears practically that it is used for its reconciliatory function, where between two opinions one’s truth can be reconciled and incorporated into another, or simply that each side presents unique particulars which each can then reconcile into their own belief system. For we tend to see rationality as something akin to maths, where we have a formula which will prove one wrong and the other correct in a manner in which both sides will approve, this seems to be the core of reconciliation to me. But the best debates are those which expose the underlying assumptions and ‘threads’ which run through beliefs; I’m certainly not perceptive enough to describe precisely what this entails, but there’s a range of implicit emotions, beliefs, and motivations which weave and glue together a variation of ideas into a coherent belief system - and the most enlightening moments are when we catch glimpses of these. But then the question we have to ask ourselves is this, is rationality the only way to reconcile these disputed opinions? In some sense it’s a nonsense question, for I doubt we can (and we certainly shouldn’t want to) separate ‘rationality’ and ‘morality’ into isolated operations, they should be intertwined - and yet I think such a meaningless question will show what I mean. Because when there are two positions which are equally rational, it almost certainly will be the case that one leads to better outcomes than the other. And as such this allows a successful reconciliation between the two opinions, because we can assert the one with better outcomes as more moral than the other one, hence the idea which should be advocated.

Returning to the images, we can conceptualise rationality as a circle and morality as a pyramid, although I am aware this almost certainly is reductionist in some degree - and I don’t wish to place too much emphasis on the specific shapes themselves. As far as I can tell this is likely encapsulating the fundamental distinction between ‘descriptivism’ and ‘value-laden evaluations’, in that the latter whilst organising particulars into a coherent narrative, necessarily involves a hierarchy within said organisation in addition. The issues with the rational circles is that there are a multitude of ways to organise the world which are all as orderly as each other, even if they look very distinct. This is evident when most people have their ‘personal view of the world’ in that most people see the world as a joint-together organised whole through which things make sense: which I mean both in a very literal sense of the physical and sensual experience of the world as a unified ‘stream of experience’ rather than a series of individual moments which bare no relation to each other, and in a philosophical sense of how we engage with an abstract concept of ‘the world’ which define the underlying layers of what ‘reality actually is’ - in that we physically view one can of Pepsi in a pack as ‘sharing a unity/relation’ with all the other cans of Pepsi in the pack, and metaphysical can say “Ah but Pepsi and Coke whilst on appearance are very different, actually are just a bit of a sweet cola taste fundamentally!”. Now potentially we could chalk this down to mistakes in the use of rationality, and in reality some groupings are more rational than others, therefore in a sense this isn’t incorrect. But look at the wider picture and the utter uncertainty that plagues a great deal of personal and academic ideas, that so many ideas and theories seem plausible and yet incompatible; when you look at the collective trend it becomes obvious that there is a fault in rationalities reconciliation abilities, that it just cannot prove one idea as the victor over another.

This undermines the ability of rationality to reconcile opposing opinions, which is a severe issue in the current zeitgeist of seeing rational analysis not merely as vitally important cognitive tool, but as the ultimate justification and judge of what’s true and false. That’s because the essential implicit ‘institutional’ aim of rationality is merely to organise a set of facts into a coherent narrative, and therefore rationality itself does not discriminate between what it anchors itself around to make itself coherent. This is not to dismiss these ‘rational organisations’ as irrelevant, because as a by-product of striving for coherence is that rationality is ruthlessly effective at detecting bullshit, and hence rational investigations bring a great deal of genuine enlightenment along with them. I’ve seen this in human form with one of my very good friends who has this incredibly sharp rational mind, which he has this incredible ability to immediately identify and cut through bullshit - even with issues he’s just learning about. But for a publicly accessible example, this is why you can find deeply valuable insights even from investigations from a faulty premise; partly because there are objective revelations which come ‘unintentionally’[1] from rationality, in a manner in which the aim of investigation grants tendencies to unearth different truths - are we to expect a traditional Marxist’s rationality who views society through the image of class will produce the same understanding of gender as a feminist’s rationality? And this takes us back historically to the beginning of my investigations into irrationality, when it became apparent that if you could ‘overlay’ these ways of viewing the world on top of eachother and see them all simultaneously, that you would have a far greater understanding than any single position. And it just occurred to me whilst writing that this actually unbeknownst to me is essentially just an abstract articulation of work I did during my first year modules in political science on democratic indices. For the most successful index (I can’t remember the name considering it has been about two years since I dealt with it) was the one which merely averaged out the results of the most popular democratic indices; despite the fact it in actuality was only manipulating the results of other measurements of democracy, it was more successful than any individual index it stole from because it could balance out the biases of each without having to deal with their theoretical conflicts - which would have been unavoidable if making a ‘unified index’. This highlights one of the inescapable flaws of rational justification that is inescapable with the limited capabilities of humans: that because our knowledge is deeply limited, any narrative which is entirely consistent must necessarily be wrong because you shouldn’t be able to complete a jigsaw puzzle is you know there are pieces missing.

This is contrary to the idea of morality (Or maybe more precisely ‘concepts which are essentially hierarchical’), where the observation of outcomes will sort out any conflict. Of course there is the perennial scepticism of ‘what we define as ‘moral’ guides how we assess morality’, which whilst being a sort of interesting problem, is also precisely of the type which completely bricks rationality and renders it almost useless. It deserves a greater elucidation than I currently care to detail, but for now I’ll say that particulars are able to be proved as more solid than the criteria that they’re derived from, and that intuition is a deeply powerful tool in that, like the democratic indices, it can genuinely consider an infinite variety of incommensurable measures to produce a single coherent judgement - there is a significant reason why philosophers often rely on intuition to unpack rationality rather than vice versa. But once we have some value, this allows the reconciliation of opposition, even when what is discussed is of vastly different types from each other. In a sense what we consider ‘morality’ then is something akin to ‘what is the value of values’, it must be a universal through which everything can be judged, and hence reconciled into an ultimately decisive organised whole.

Jordan Peterson in his attempts to discover values from mythological stories (Which is essentially the investigation I’ve imperfectly copied from the scraps of ‘Maps of Meaning’ I’ve understood) framed primordial mythological stories as essentially being a generation-long attempt to battle various values against each other, and that the greatest good would sit atop the hierarchy. In that within the stories of war within religious stories, and through the movement from polytheism to monotheism, what essentially occurred was the ‘conflict’ of debate between values to discover which was the greatest god. Although as far as I can tell ‘goodness’ is more akin to the structure of the hierarchical pyramid itself rather than the greatest value. For implicit within a hierarchy is there needs to be something differentiating the higher from the lower, so if there is to be a hierarchy of values (as there must be, as it’s self-evidently apparent that some values are better than others), then there needs to be some meta-value through which each value justifies its position in the hierarchy. And that essentially is what morality is: an ordering of all things into a single grand hierarchy, and it is their desirability which orders everything. And whilst there may be an infinite amount of value pyramids relative to certain circumstances or individuals, it is impossible for these hierarchies to be based on anything but a differentiating values, and I think in its purest form ‘the good’ is the extraction of what this ability to differentiate things is. And the greater an understanding that we have of this good, the more successfully it will differentiate things; for the inherent value which underlines all other values is the one which can unify all, the one value of which there is no incommensurability because it can unite all judgements.

[1] This itself is an interesting question of what actually counts as ‘intentional’ here. Because whilst the individual almost certainly is intending to find objective truths, if we can anthropomorphize cognition, rationality surely isn’t intending to find objective truths. So is it an intentional act of the individual if their aim is filled unintentionally relative to their actions? Is my restarting of someone’s heart intentional if I truly believe that whacking someone with a cricket bat will restart it, even if such a belief is mistaken?