Rose Woodhouse’s excellent post about voting and economic rationality once again rekindled my own interest in the idea that we as human beings are capable of deciding upon the rationality of another person’s decisions. Perhaps that’s phrased wrong: we’re obviously capable of judging the apparently irrational decisions of third-parties. The question that interests me is whether or not we’re right, and my contention is that in very single imaginable scenario of perceived irrationality by a third party, we’re wrong.
Given how enthusiastically received my “Come on guys, let’s all be relativists!” arguments tend to go, I don’t imagine I’ll be anymore popular after asserting that all human beings are entirely rational actors. But popularity be damned; I simply cannot force myself to assume that there are other human beings out there who don’t know what they’re doing. I’d like to offer an illustrative example of why I believe what I believe. It has to do with coffee.
But before getting into coffee, a brief sojourn back to Rose’s post, in which she declared indignation about the offensive idea that people vote against their own self-interest as defined by others. She wrote:
The working assumption seems to be that to vote for any reason other than economic self-interest is to be somehow bamboozled. Or at least, clearly irrational.
In a nutshell, the opinion seems to be, “These are things you ought to care about, but since you apparently don’t, you and your decisions are irrational!” You won’t be surprised to discover that these things you ought to care about often line up very conveniently with the things that the person making such a comment already believes. We hear this often in the realm of politics. Entire books have been written dedicated to a debate about the rationality of voting and I remember running into the concept whilst a very bad woefully ineffective graduate student. Why, I always wondered, were we assuming our calculations of rational behavior onto third parties? Why, I also wondered, were we trusting what people said and not what people did?
That later point is a big one for me: as a social worker, I worked exclusively with children who often promised me that their behavior was going to change. And my response, every single time, was that I didn’t care what they told me, I cared what they actually did. That was our metric of measuring success. A kid who frequently stole from other kids promising to change wasn’t nearly as valuable as a kid who stole from other kids not stealing as much from other kids. It was this experience, repeatedly daily for three years, which left totally unconvinced about what people say and totally taken with what people do.
So then, for us to judge a voter’s rationality then seems like a fool’s errand: we can’t be certain of what got them into that voting booth, but we can be certain that they were in that booth and not doing any of the other things that they could have been doing instead. What mattered most to them was voting; what came in second place was literally everything else. That seems to me to be a person who has prioritized voting in their lives, not an irrational nut incapable of deciding for themselves what is and isn’t best.
But is voting a good topic for a consideration of rationality? Maybe not. So I want to try asking something else instead: is it rational to consume coffee? Well…
-Yes, it is rational, because coffee contributes to your health in numerous ways, including the prevention of diabetes, helping us to avoid heart attacks and strokes, and a decreased risk of Parkinson’s Disease.
But…
-No, it isn’t rational, because most coffee contains caffeine, an addictive stimulant which can ruin sleep patterns and, according to some, complicate pregnancy. Furthermore, quitting caffeine can induce withdrawal.
But…
-Yes, it is rational, because coffee is delicious, as evidence by the fact that people the world over not only consume the stuff, but figure out new and fascinating ways to make the stuff.
But…
-No, it isn’t rational, because coffee is bitter, and of the five tastes, bitter is the one that is supposed to caution us away from consumption due to its association with toxicity.
But…
-Yes, it is rational, coffee looks fantastic
But…
-No, it isn’t rational, because these people are awful.
But…but…but…
To have those that judge the rationality of others tell it, we can know the right and wrong reasons for consuming coffee, and from that, we can effectively judge the decision to do so, just as we can do with voting (or, frankly, with anything). But there are so many reasons for doing nearly anything. We cannot know how or why an individual prioritizes their decision making; we can only see the decisions that those individuals make. From that, it seems much more reasonable that we can back into an understanding of their apparent preferences and knowing that, we can take educated guesses at their rationality. Even then though we are still unlikely to possess a comprehensive view of an individual’s reasons for doing this and not that.
One final thought: why do I consume coffee? Because when I turned 30, I decided that coffee was a drink I ought to consume, and I fought myself to learn to drink it and enjoy it. This involved many of bitter faces and exasperated reactions from my wife and my children. For me though, the challenge of learning coffee outweighed the initially bad experiences. This is, in hindsight, a relatively ridiculous thing to have done, and I seriously doubt that any economist anywhere would have been capable of teasing out that explanation for why I did what I did. But I write this having just finished a cup of coffee that I thoroughly enjoyed and having just uploaded pictures to a tiny tumblr dedicated to the drink’s imagery.
I struggle to see the irrationality of the explanation that I have offered for my own behavior, just as I struggle to think that anybody anywhere is acting irrationality when they do the things that they do, even if they’re not things that I myself would do.
I simply cannot force myself to assume that there are other human beings out there who don’t know what they’re doing.
This part I find really unusual. I mean, I grok the rest of your piece and all, but in my general experience the vast majority of people hold ideas in their head that are logically inconsistent. That makes ’em pretty irrational, in my book.
Any one of their singular ideas, presented in a vacuum, might be considered rational if you talk to them long enough; these are my root principles, and adding some logic spice on top and simmering for 20 minutes, I come to that conclusion. Seems rational enough.
But then, of course, you ask them about some other idea that they hold, and they go with; these are my root principles, and adding some logic spice on top and baking for two hours, I come to that conclusion.
But wait. When you were talking about this one of your root principles in argument number one, you said the principle plus the logic led you to foo, and now you’re saying it’s bar.
And then we spend the next hour listening to special pleading.
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