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Rationality, Value, and Preference*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Kurt Baier
Kurt Baier
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

Gauthier's magnificent book erects a conception of morality, “morals by agreement,” on the foundation of his own theory of practical rationality. This is as it should be if, as he claims, following Hobbes and others, there is an initial “presumption against morality” (MA, p. 13) and no theory of morals “can ever serve any useful purpose, unless it can show that all the duties it recommends are also truly endorsed in each individual's reason” (MA, p.1), indeed, that it is a requirement of rationality that one always satisfy the requirements of morality (MA, p.5). This means, however, that the initial assumption against morality is inherited by his theory of practical rationality. His theory of morals therefore can serve a useful purpose only if his theory of rationality is sound. In this paper, I want to explore some of the more dubious aspects of that theory to see whether it can bear the heavy load of justification that “morals by agreement” places on it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Spring 1988 , pp. 17 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1988

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References

1 Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. All subsequent references will be parenthetically indicated in the text by MA, followed by a page number.

2 It is not clear to me why the market is a morally free zone. One reason for this is that I am unclear about natural and market interactions. Natural interaction tends to degenerate into the use of force and fraud. Why is this? Is it because natural men are not rational, or is it because, though rational, they lack the social structures that make it irrational to engage in force and fraud? If the former, men must be trained to be rational, which assigns an important role to educators not sufficiently stressed in die book. For there one gets the impression that maximizing and only maximizing comes naturally. In any case, part of the education to be rational would include observing the prohibitions of force and fraud, which would normally be regarded as moral. If the market involves coercive social structures, such as the protection of property, then the market does not seem to be a morally free zone since, presumably, these coercive structures are approved by morality. Lastly, Gauthier does not say anything about those coercive social measures, such as antitrust legislation, which are widely regarded as necessary to counteract tendencies of market interactions to undermine the free market. The market thus seems to be a morally free zone in only a rather limited sense.

3 Gauthier uses these terms to refer to his solution to the bargaining problem. That problem arises in a situation in which two or more persons can, by cooperating with one another, achieve a joint product which is greater than what they can achieve if they do not cooperate. The problem is how to distribute the surplus. Every rational agent would most prefer to acquire the whole of the surplus and least prefer to acquire none of it. If a bargain is to be struck, one or all of the parties normally will have to make a “concession,” that is, accept a share of the surplus less than the most preferred; no party normally can hope that the other(s) will make a “complete” concession. Gauthier develops a measure of the concession, which he thinks offers a basis for relating the concessions of different bargainers, which he calls “relative concession.” It is the proportion that its “absolute magnitude” (the difference between the utility expected from the outcome originally claimed and the utility expected from the proposed concession) bears to the magnitude of a complete concession (MA, p. 136). The problem then is to find a rational principle for determining “the concession” each person has to make. According to Gauthier, the principle is this: “… given a range of outcomes, each of which requires concessions by some or all persons if it is to be selected, then an outcome be selected only if the greatest or maximum relative concession it requires, is as small as possible, or a minimum, that is, is no greater than the maximum relative concession required by every other outcome.” (MA, p.137).

In Ch. V. 4.3 (MA, pp. 154–156), Gauthier attempts to show that the principle of Minimax Relative Concession “is equivalent to maximizing equal relative benefit [construed analogously to relative concession] when the latter uses up the co-operative surplus” (MA, p. 155).

4 In a review of Gauthier's book, which I received after I wrote this, Allan Gibbard makes what is essentially the same point (forthcoming in the Times Literary Supplement).

5 I am not concerned to give an exhaustive account of the various everyday uses of ‘preference’ or a full account of the few I distinguish. My aim is only to distinguish the four uses which could plausibly be represented as both ordinary uses and uses Gauthier might have in mind. I believe, though I do not wish to argue this here, that the economists and Gauthier have broadened the use of ‘preference’ far beyond the ordinary, to include desires, motives, considerations, reasons, and perhaps more. I here completely ignore, because irrelevant, uses such as ‘I would prefer tea’ as a polite request, where it means, ‘please give me tea’, which is quite compatible with my hating tea and preferring other things offered to it, although such uses may make more plausible the economists’ conception of “revealed preference.”

6 To avoid confusion, I use the rather awkward term, ‘given preferences’, since Gauthier uses ‘brute’ to mean ‘unconsidered’.

7 According to Aristotle, a person is continent as long as she does what is morally required of her, even if it goes against the grain. She is temperate only if she has developed desires in harmony with what is morally required. On this view, only the temperate person is truly virtuous; the merely continent person is not.

8 The distinction is deep-cutting. Ideals such as that of the macho, I call “aesthetic” (perhaps at the risk of being misunderstood) because their appeal does not depend on the way the preferences embodying it affect the well-being of the person who has the ideal and, above all, that of (all) other people. Nietzsche's forcefully expressed preference for the ideals that make up a master morality is aesthetic in this sense. The ideals of Christian morality are not.

9 I assume that this means that it does not matter which of the two dimensions is made to conform with the other. For otherwise it is hard to understand why Gauthier thinks we can assume, with the economists, that a person's behavior is rational in the absence of contrary evidence which, on his view, would be absent if there were no divergence between the two dimensions of preference (MA, pp.28–29, 32–33). He thus seems to think that what matters for rationality is that there be no divergence between the two dimensions and that we can assume there is none unless there is contrary evidence, by way of such divergence. If it mattered which of the two dimensions had to be changed to harmonize with the other, rather than that there be harmony one way or the other, it would surely be hasty to assume rationality on the basis of outward harmony, since a person may have achieved harmony by modifying the wrong dimension. This is to say nothing about the implausibility of assuming that a person's expression of preference necessarily reveals his attitude, which Gauthier clearly identifies with attitudinal preference.

10 Of course, as we saw, only the first case (a) could be correctly reported, by her or anyone else, with the words (a’): ‘I (Jill) preferred to sit out the dance rather than dance with Jack’. The second case (b) would have to be reported as (b’): ‘Jill preferred to sit out the dance and obey her mother rather than dance with Jack and disobey her mother’, since the first report (a’) would misrepresent her concrete preference in die second case (b). For in that case, (b) she would have preferred dancing with Jack to sitting out the dance, so sitting out the dance would be counterpreferential as far as mat aspect of her choice is concerned, yet die first report, (a’) ‘Jill preferred to sit out the dance … etc’ implies that her choice was according to preference as far as that description of her choice is concerned.

It may perhaps be thought that Jill's behavior is not counterpreferential even in case (b). For though it is true that she would have preferred to dance with Jack, is it not also true that, as things were, she did prefer not to dance with Jack? Was her preference not for what she intentionally did, although in other circumstances she would have preferred to dance with him? Not so. To think so would be to confuse actual and hypothetical concrete preferences. Suppose I am offered a choice of a Golden Delicious apple or a pear and I choose die apple, but if the apple offered had been a Jonathan, I would have preferred die pear. Or suppose I am offered a choice of an apple and a pear, and I choose an apple, but would have preferred a pear, if I had just eaten an apple before that. Then ‘I would have preferred a pear’ means that I would have chosen differently either if die choice had been between different alternatives in die same circumstances, or between die same alternatives in different circumstances. However, in the case in hand, namely, (a) ‘Jill would have preferred to dance with Jack’ does not refer to different alternatives or circumstances. Her actual concrete preference, in this very case, between these very alternatives considered as such, and in these very circumstances, was for dancing with Jack. But since she intentionally sat out the dance, it would be misleading to report her behavior with the words ‘Jill preferred - rather than would have preferred - to dance with Jack’, for that implies two things: (i) her preference was for dancing with Jack and (ii) 'She chose and acted from preference’, i.e., she did dance with Jack. But, of course, in die case in hand (ii) is false. So die conjunction is false, since the second conjunct is false. But, of course, this does not imply that the first conjunct is false. In fact, it is true. Her preference was for dancing with Jack, but she did not act from her concrete preference between these alternatives, but for a reason (her mother's prohibition), and this reason required counterpreferential action. Note, incidentally, that if die reason was adequate, her choice and die action based on it would not be judged irrational, even though they were counterpreferential.

11 I here assume that at least one thing Gauthier has in mind when he speaks of attitudes, attitudinal preferences, or attitudinal dimensions of preference or expressions of preference, is (what I have called) concrete rather than prima facie preferences, and that by fully considered attitudinal preference, he means all things considered concrete preferences.

12 If I have intransitive preferences, say, I prefer eating an apple to eating a pear, eating a pear to eating a peach, and eating a peach to eating an apple, then I shall presumably be willing to offer something, say, 1 cent, for trading my peach to a pear, my pear to an apple and my apple to a peach. By trading in this way, on the basis of my preferences, I arrive at my starting position at the cost of 3 cents. In this way, money can be pumped out of me, if I have intransitive preferences.

13 It is not clear what we are to say about the rationality of these preferences themselves, as opposed to the choices based on them. On the one hand, “we may … speak of the conditions for coherent and considered preference as conditions of rational preference” (MA, pp.24–25, emphasis added), but on the other hand, choice based on insufficiently considered (experienced and reflected on) preference is not necessarily irrational (MA, p.31). This means either that being fully considered is not really a necessary condition of being a rational preference or that choices based on irrational preferences need not themselves be irrational.

14 I believe there are important differences between a person's values and the value of persons or things, between these and the excellence of things and persons of a certain sort, e.g., knives and doctors, and all these and the good from a certain point of view, and that rationality relates in quite different ways to these things. But this is too big a topic to take up here, and so I am compelled to formulate my views in an oversimplified way. I have drawn some of the necessary distinctions in “What is Value,” Baier, Kurt and Rescher, Nicholas, eds., Values and the Future (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp.33–67;Google Scholar “Value and Fact”, Ethical and Social Justice, vol. IV, of Contemporary Philosophic Thought, Kiefer, Howard and Munitz, Milton K., eds. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press at Albany, 1968, 1970);Google Scholar and “Preference and the Good of Man,” invited paper (submitted in 1974) for the von Wright volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, P.A. Schlipp, ed. (forthcoming). I have not found space in this paper to air my objections to tying rationality to maximization, but I have done so in “Maximization and the Good Life,” Ethics, Foundations, Problems, and Applications, Proceedings of the 5th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 1980 (Wien: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1981).Google Scholar

15 This seems contrary to what we ordinarily do when we call certain emotions, such as fear or anger, irrational, or when we find paradoxical Hume's view, which Gauthier endorses (MA, p.48), that it is not “contrary to reason” – which Gauthier seems to identify with irrational – to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of one's finger. Gauthier attempts to explain this by distinguishing between irrationality and madness. I cannot discuss this here, but it is perhaps worth mentioning that in some of the best studies of the legal notion of insanity, which involves mental disorder, disease, or illness, it is construed as a form of irrationality. Cf., e.g., Herbert Fingarette's books on this topic.