J31 - Morality as a Rational, Social Phenomenon

A topic like morality is one which cannot be done justice in a single journal, or a single essay, or a single thesis, or even a single book. Indeed, it is a subject which many of the great minds in our history have dedicated their lives to studying and discussing. My student, Alex Gugie, has himself written over 75,000 words on the subject this year, and I would encourage any reader to visit his website and read his thoughts on the matter. Having exerted no small amount of influence on his project, I can say that I endorse much of what he says there. However, I feel that I must comment, extensively, on morality myself, as it connects so many of the topics in EMC2 this year, and is, in fact, a critically important aspect of being human. And, as always, I have a somewhat unique perspective on the issue, in light of my wider theory of being human. 

With a topic as vast as this, I’m uncertain where I should begin. Therefore, I’ll quite arbitrarily start by examining the idea that human morality is a product of evolution. Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, was a proponent of the idea that morality was a byproduct of evolution, and that our ability to be moral creatures was what really separated us from our closest evolutionary relatives. There is much support for this idea, that morality has evolved. Indeed, we can justify many of the behaviors that we label as moral as behavior which would have aided in our struggle for survival throughout our species’ history, and we see many of these same behaviors in other animals, too. Altruism, doing good for others, is not a trait unique to human beings; many creatures exchange favors with each other. And there is an evolutionary advantage to doing good for others: for one thing, it can be good to be owed a favor, and for another it can be a sign of your own fitness that you’re capable of helping another. Similarly, evolution can explain why human beings, and other creatures, are more concerned with the fate of their close kin than with strangers, since close kin are more likely to carry the acting individual’s genes, and therefore their survival will more likely lead to the survival of those genes. Indeed, there are many ways in which altruistic and “moral” behavior would have been an evolutionary advantage throughout our history. Finally, there are many altruistic and “moral” behaviors that appear among all human cultures, seemingly unexplained. The Trolley Problem in philosophy, for example, is often seen as being easily answered, but ethicists have debated for generations the question of why that natural answer is or is not the right one. On the basis of the existence of these instinctual, advantageous behaviors, many modern theorists, Alex among them, therefore believe that evolution has made us moral.

There is much to be said, however, against that conclusion. The whole argument, the application of the evidence in support of the premise, is abysmally weak. First, it assumes, without justification, what behavior is moral. To say that humans are naturally moral because we are naturally altruistic is to beg the question of whether altruistic behavior is truly moral. It is true that altruism is generally regarded as moral behavior in our society. Why this is so, however, requires an explicated and defendable theory of morality by which to label altruistic behavior as moral. It may be that these theorists believe that evolution has designed us to instinctively know what is moral, and indeed has designed us to be moral, and therefore we can know that altruism is good and moral because, after all, evolution has driven us to be moral and to act altruistically. But surely the circularity in this argument is apparent; to escape it, one is reduced to saying that we act how we act, and that nature itself has stamped natural human behavior with the label of “moral.” Just because most people choose the same course of action when confronted with the Trolley Problem does not mean that their response is the correct or moral one.

But this theory is even more problematic because there are many behaviors which we consider to be moral which are not natural to us, and many behaviors that come naturally to us which we believe would be immoral. Doing “the right thing” often requires an internal struggle against our natural impulses. As Diderot said, “There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.” So even if some moral behaviors are made easier by our evolution-shaped biology, we cannot attribute our entire conception of morality to evolution. Indeed, if evolution had truly made us moral, if how we acted naturally was how we should act morally, then there would be no need to consider the problem of morality, or for all those great thinkers mentioned above to dedicate their lives to the problem. In fact, that we’ve had all of these thinkers, and that each of us personally attempt to solve these problems, and that we all often come to different answers, is evidence that morality is not a product of evolution, but of the human mind. If we were all naturally moral, as human beings, there would be no need for debate over which behaviors were moral, even if perhaps we didn’t always want to conform to them. 

[I am aware of the literature speaking to the evolution of culture and its influence on morality. Given the forum here, I will not address it properly, but meme theory is just as, if not more, susceptible to my criticisms, especially my last.]

Finally, the theory that evolution has shaped us into moral creatures rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is a process, a passive process. It has no agency. It cannot shape us, make us, design us, mold us, push us, do anything to us. Evolution just happens. The confusion here is understandable, as the language used to teach evolution, and indeed to talk about the process generally, suggests its agency. The most fit creatures are “selected,” we are told, to pass on their genes and shape the next generation of the species. The phrase “natural selection” suggests that nature is selecting some advantageous trait for the species to possess. But, like the market, nature has no agency of its own. It does not select anything. Evolution, in a nutshell, is what happens when the individual members of the species who are not sufficiently adapted to their environment die before they reproduce. That’s all. Every single living organism is engaged in an epic struggle, from the moment of its birth, to survive the conditions of its environment. Some of them do not survive, and their genes do not get passed on to the next generation. The fittest do survive, and thus pass on their genes. This process repeats itself endlessly, and the process as a whole, when looked at in retrospect a couple hundred million years down the road, reveals a seemingly systematic series of changes in a species, which we call evolution. 

There are two important aspects to understand about this more realistic presentation of the theory of evolution. First, the trait being passed on must precede the passing on. That is, nature must have something to select. The fittest survive because they already have the trait which is advantageous in their environment. They may have gained this trait from their ancestors, but their ancestors had to acquire the trait (through mutation or specialized expression of certain genes) before it could be passed on. Therefore, evolution has not made us anything, has not truly chosen any trait for us to have. All that happened is that some creature had some trait, and this trait got passed on. Morality, therefore, even if it is evolutionary, could not have been produced by the evolutionary process. And since morality proper is a uniquely human phenomenon, and humans act with purpose, there must have been a reason for humans to begin acting morally before natural selection could find the moral members of the species to be the fittest for the environment. The idea of morality, therefore, is not a product of evolution, and therefore evolution did not make us moral. Morality had to be invented before it could be passed on. Second, there should be no conflation between traits which aided in our survival in certain environments and traits which are good and moral. In fact, there’s no guarantee that a certain trait we possess is even advantageous; perhaps the members of the species which possessed the trait were independently fittest and this other trait just happened to be passed along. Furthermore, we should not fall prey to the Whig theory of history and presume that every evolutionary change has been an improvement. We are always just trying to survive in our environment. No one acts a certain way because they believe that the action is “evolutionary advantageous.” No, people act as they do because they believe that the action will help them survive. This means that a species isn’t building towards something greater. The species that exist today are no better or worse than the species that existed millions of years ago. We’re all just trying to survive in, or adapt to, the environment we currently find ourselves in. And that environment could change, gradually or rapidly, and the fittest members of a species could suddenly lose that status. 

So evolution did not make us what we are. The fact that our ancestors managed to survive their environments and reproduced is what resulted in us being like they were. But there is nothing inherently good about that; it just is. We are what we are because our ancestors were what they were. That doesn’t make any of us moral. So, I reject the proposition that morality is somehow an evolutionary concept. 

As mentioned above, morality had to exist before it could be passed on. And, also mentioned above, morality is unique to human beings. But what is it that makes man different? Ah, yes. Reason. Man is the rational animal. Morality, therefore, must be a product of reason, and therefore discernible through reasoning. [I will admit that evolution has left us moral, but only insofar as evolution has left us rational.]

Reason, which is man’s great tool in his struggle against scarcity, allows man to always act purposefully, in what he believes to be his best interests. If reason has generated a system of morality, therefore, it seems sensible to conclude that the purpose of morality is to aid man is his quest to survive and thrive in a world of scarcity, to always act purposefully to attain what he believes to be in his best interests. As we have discussed in a great many journals, man’s faculty of reason is fully developed only in society. Additionally, it is society which has allowed man to do as much as he has in reshaping the world to fit his own image. Man, therefore, is a social creature just as much as he is a rational animal. They are one and the same. Therefore, the existence of society, which enables each individual man to fully develop his great tool of reason and also gives rise to an extensive division of labor which results in increased productivity for all, is in man’s best interests. It is society which has allowed man to not just survive, but to conquer nature and transform the world. However, as discussed in my journal on Society and Ideology, society is a rational phenomenon but not a designed one. Just like individuals don’t act as they do because they want evolution to pick their genes, individuals don’t act as they do because they want to sustain society. The concepts of evolutionary heritage and human society are just two big and alien for them to enter regularly into the calculus of acting man’s decision-making. Ignorance of the long-term consequences of one’s individual actions on the social fabric can lead men to inadvertently damage society by disregarding seemingly meaningless social norms. To combat this, I explained, society gives rise to other institutions, beyond the basic market economy at its foundation, to encourage social life. Law, education, and family all develop alongside society and serve to strengthen and sustain the social structure of humanity. Morality, I contend, is one of these institutions. It is an idea of how people should act, and it exists as a formal discipline so that human actions can be considered in light of their long-term consequences on the social structure and judged as either good or bad. By going through this process academically, general principles can be distilled which serve as a basic check on the behavior of individuals living in society. These individuals may not understand exactly why they should refrain from killing and stealing and lying, having not personally followed the long chains of reasoning behind the prohibition, but they know that the prohibited actions are “immoral,” and that they should seek to be moral. Therefore, they align their actions with the interests of society. 

Moral action, therefore, is action which sustains society. Immoral action is action which endangers society. Note that I am not necessarily talking about actions affecting other people. We certainly associate the idea of morality with our relationships with other people, but this is a result of the social nature of morality, not necessarily because morality is about other people. Moral action may be action that hurts other people, so long as it helps sustain society. Closing a factory, for example, is seen by many as an immoral action, as it suddenly thrusts a great number of workers into joblessness. But if the factory was suffering severe losses, this indicates that the factory’s operation was diverting resources that were more needed in other lines of production, and this factory’s closure means that society is better serving its purpose of maximizing wealth for all. The pursuit of profit, therefore, which is a hallmark of a capitalist society and is ruthlessly condemned by the critics of capitalism, is actually a moral principle which furthers the development and flourishing of human society. 

Society is what sets us apart from other creatures. Yes, reason sets us apart, but we are rational because we are social. What has allowed us to advance and create as no other species in the history of the world is our ability to cooperate with one another in a complex division of labor. Indeed, in his book A Natural History of Morality, Michael Tomasello says that while the great apes are about as intelligent as homo sapiens in physical tasks, they are vastly behind us when it comes to social tasks. That is, chimpanzees can build tools and understand language and mimic behavior and remember which cup hides food, but they do not cooperate with each other to solve tasks like humans do. This is what distinguishes human beings, our social nature, our "social intelligence." Tomasello actually says that the idea of “social intelligence” is something of an understatement, that we are actually “ultra social” and tend to cooperate with each other even on tasks where cooperation is unnecessary. This is because, Tomasello explains, we have come to think of ourselves as members of a larger group working towards one task, a phenomenon he terms “shared intentionality.” This shared intentionality, this sense that we belong to a group, a society, is the true cognitive difference between us and apes, he says.

I bring up Tomasello’s book because he raises a very interesting point in it. He compared the cognitive abilities of apes to the cognitive ability of children in a great many studies as he developed his understanding of the differences between homo sapiens and our closest relatives. In one of the chapters, he notes that the idea of morality is often broken down into two parts: the idea of sympathy, or concern for others, and fairness, or a concern that people get what they deserve. Tomasello notes that chimps have sympathy for each other, but that they lack a concern for fairness. And then, almost as a side note, he says that in these experiments, when the children worked together to obtain food, they would split the food evenly between them, but if the children were randomly given different amounts of food, they generally did not spread the food evenly between them. It seems that the experiments suggest that children believe it is fair to share a reward when they worked together to obtain it, but only in that context of collaboration. If a child did not contribute to the acquisition of the reward, then he or she did not deserve to share in it. I think this throw-away observation is extremely significant because it suggests that morality is directly tied to the idea of cooperation (implying shared effort in the completion of a task). Morality involves considerations of fairness, not just the arousal of sympathies.

Now, what generates society among human beings and not among lesser species? And what do I mean by society? Because the great apes and other species of humans throughout history have had families and bands and tribes that they lived in. But I’m talking about a more extensive society, one based on trade, rather than kinship. What leads to the development of society is the higher productivity of the division of labor, and the ability to recognize this fact. This recognition of the benefits of the division of labor, this is unique to homo sapiens and it is what has allowed us to create a society where no other species has. Many creatures engage in the swapping of favors and understand reciprocity (“scratch my back now and I’ll scratch yours later”). But to simultaneous swap two different objects for each other is a uniquely human phenomenon. And this idea of trade leads to the idea of specialization, which is the realization of the division of labor and its concomitant benefits in terms of productivity. 

Exchange is the fundamental social relation, and the market is the foundation of society. Again, society exists because it is man’s tool in his quest to survive and thrive in the world of scarcity in which he lives. Recognition of the benefits of society makes society possible. As Mises has said, “The greater productivity of work under the division of labor is a unifying influence. It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence. It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals.” Peace. The idea of working together to create more for everyone, rather than fighting each other to get more for yourself, is the heart of society. Recognition of the higher productivity of the division of labor leads to the idea of peaceful cooperation, and this peaceful cooperation gives rise to human society with all its glory. This idea of peace is what allowed individual bands of homo sapiens to work together and build something greater. No other ape, and no other species of human, ever developed a society that extended beyond their family or core group. And this is because no other group of apes or other species of human could interact peacefully with other groups. And this is because none of these other groups could recognize the benefit of working with others. As Matt Ridley remarks in The Rational Optimist, “Famously, no other species of ape can encounter strangers without trying to kill them, and the instinct still lurks in the human breast. But by 82,000 years ago, human beings had overcome this problem sufficiently to be able to pass Nassarius shells hand to hand 125 miles inland. This is in striking contrast to the Neanderthals, whose stone tools were virtually always made from raw material available within an hour’s walk of where the tool was used.” Neanderthals were bigger than us, stronger than us, and probably had bigger brains than us. But the idea of trade was foreign to them, and without trade they were doomed to economic, technological, and cultural stagnation.

Society defines human beings. It allows us to be fully human, and it allows as to transform the world into a version that suits us better. Human action tends naturally towards the creation of society, in that we can recognize the benefits of the division of labor. However, the maintenance and growth of society is no sure thing, product of human will and action as it is, and therefore there needs to be guidelines for how a member of society should act within one, such that the society can be maintained and grow. These guidelines are what we call moral truths, or moral codes, and moral action is action which is conformity with these codes. I will not attempt to elucidate what a proper moral code would fully look like here, for that is not the purpose of this journal. But I do want to set forth two fundamental principles that must be embodied by such a code. First, the moral code must embody the peace principle. Society exists because men can cooperate with one another, and men can cooperate with one another only where there is a level of peace among them and one can trust that they will not be killed or otherwise harmed by his association with others. Almost all moral codes do hold relatively fast to this idea of peace among men. Again, morality is recognized as a social, or relational, concept. Many moral codes, therefore, include prohibitions against murder, theft, adultery, rape, lying, etc. These are all aggressive actions that disturb the peace and therefore lead to the decline of society. But there is a second principle that often goes missed in moral codes, and that is the market principle. In fact, even many of the greatest champions of the market economy have felt the need to make more philosophical appeals to justify their insistence that anti-market behavior is coincidentally immoral (see, for example, Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty). But the truth is radically simple: society exists because of the higher productivity of the division of labor. If the benefits of the division of labor cannot be realized because of interference with the market system, then there is no reason for society to continue existing, as burdensome as it is for the individual, and therefore it will disintegrate. Therefore, hindering the operation of the market economy may be viewed as immoral behavior, as it tends to lead to the destruction of society.

Of course, this begs the question of whether or not society should be preserved. I can imagine, for instance, presenting this argument to some socialist-type and receiving the response that a society that creates such injustices as capitalism shouldn’t exist anyway. And this is a fair enough point, I suppose. But there is no real alternative, as I’ve demonstrated here and elsewhere, notably my first SDA. Society is based on the market. No market, no society. And a life without society would lead not only to the decline of man’s rational faculties, but to a decline in living standards for all and death for most. Society can sustain the population it does at the living standard it does because of the higher productivity of the division of labor and the innovation generated by competition and trade within a market economy. Society gives us the resources we need to live the lives we want to live. That’s why we created it. Society enables us to attain so many more ends, ends that wouldn’t even be conceivable to isolated man, than we could attain without it. So, even though moral, social behavior doesn’t always seem to come naturally to us, and always seems to be an inconvenience, we all try our best to comply because we believe it is the right thing to do, for whatever reason works for us, but ultimately because this behavior, while requiring some short term sacrifices, ultimately serves to sustain the society which has generated so much wealth and pleasure and long-term benefits for us to enjoy. There is no real standard for saying that (capitalist) society is better than isolated struggle, except the idea that human life and welfare is a good thing. So living in a society, and living morally in a society, does involve sacrifice, and doesn’t result in utopia. But every choice between ends involves sacrifice, and the economic science is unmistakably clear that the ends secured by the existence of a prosperous society are vastly greater than the ends served by short-term, anti-social behavior to avoid the discomforts of living in society. Therefore, we should all strive to be moral. It’s not about sacrificing for the good of society. The choice before each of us is not a choice of doing what’s good for us or doing what’s good for others. The choice is always a choice of doing what we want to do now or of living the type of life we want to live tomorrow. And to avoid having to work through that cost-benefit analysis at every moment, we have developed principles, bolstered by whatever belief system proves most effective, to assist in making those decisions.

Given the length of this journal, I think it necessarily to briefly recap before concluding. The title of this journal is “Morality as a Rational, Social Phenomenon.” As I’ve shown here, what sets humans apart, what allows for the exercise of our reason and makes our fantastical lives possible, is the existence of human society. This society is based on the higher productivity of the division of labor and man’s recognition of this fact. Because man acts for himself, and not with an eye towards how his actions affect others or even always how his actions will affect himself in the long run, it is possible that even individuals who genuinely recognize the benefits of society and wish to continue enjoying them may act in ways which tend to hurt society (the structure, not the other people in it). Therefore, man’s reason, which created society, also creates moral codes for the members of society to follow, so that man can act without having to trace the consequences of his short-term actions on his long-term well-being and the well-being of others. Morality is therefore a rational phenomenon, and its raison d’etre is society. Isolated man has no need for a moral code; he may act as he pleases with no thought to the consequences beyond his view. This moral code, in order for it to serve its true function, must embody both the principle of peace and the principle of the market, for these are the foundational principles of society. Peaceful cooperation in man’s struggle to survive and thrive in a world of scarcity. It is important that individuals are moral because society provides individuals with incalculable benefits that would be denied to them in isolation.

It is critically important to recognize morality as a social and as a rational phenomenon. Otherwise, otherworldly ideologies are appealed to, or other methods and philosophies are devised to yield moral codes. If morality is merely a product of evolution, then it need not be critically examined and sought to be improved, as either evolution will see to its improvement, or it needs no improvement, or it’s not important. If morality is merely a product of God’s will, then it need not be critically examined and sought to be improved, as God is good and God knows all and God says act this way, so we should. It is the same for other sources of morality. But when morality is acknowledged as a product of human reason, and is recognized as meant to serve a specific purpose (encouraging social action), then it can be critically examined and subjected to revision and improvement. [An effective delivery system will still be required for delivering these moral truths to the masses.] And I think this is so important because the state of morality for many people in our society remains a vague, fuzzy conception. Most people believe that morality roughly overlaps with altruism, and that there are a few prohibited activities related to that altruism. But this instinctual grasping of morality is not enough, for it entirely misses, and indeed substitutes altruism for, what should be the central principles of a strong moral system. This misunderstanding of morality leads to widespread action which is not truly moral, and this action can have deleterious effects on society. We could call morality a concern for our fellow man, then, in addition to ourselves, because getting morality right is of the utmost importance for everyone. Nothing less than the fate of humanity is at stake.

History of Reason in Western Thought

The first group of thinkers to really recognize reason as an independent concept worthy of thoughtful consideration and development, as something more than a method of efficiently applying means to ends, were the Greeks. As Plato explains in The Republic, underlying the Greek idea of reason was the conception of form. Form is an identity of structure, a pattern of commonality, that connected diverse and changing iterations of the same essential thing. The Greek word for reason meant order or relation, and it was the Greek idea that the order and relation of things was not sensed, but apprehended through intelligence, which could see the universal trait in the particular iteration. This idea of form was broken down into four sub-ideas: form as essence, which dealt with the particular by reducing it to a kind of general, by classifying this particular structure as a type of tree; form as end, which connected objects based on their common end, by recognizing that although the sprout and the tree did not appear to have any common characteristics, they were both stages on the way to the realization of one goal; form as law, which examines what is required by the characteristics of the object, that the implication of the object being a tree is that it will burn; and form as system, which would create a unity between the many forms, allowing man to think without our sensory crutches and to see all things as connected necessarily.

The idea of form as law was really important. It held that the laws it derived were certain, or necessarily true; new, not merely analytic; independent of sense, seen with intelligence not sight; universal, with no exceptions and the same for all men; objective, existing outside of ourselves; and unchanging, providing an underlying structure for sensory changes to occur upon. The dominant conception of rational law in Western thought is based on this Greek idea of the form as law.

The idea of form as system is really interesting to me. Plato would say that in a fully rational system, there would be nothing arbitrary or isolated. That is, everything would be necessarily implied by everything else, so that all the parts would give each other support. He admits that this is a difficult level of comprehension to reach, since we are cursed, through weakness of focus, to see things piecemeal, moving step by step from premise to conclusion. But, he says, we can sometimes glimpse a better way of thinking in a piece of knowledge that we are quite familiar with. “The man who knows his subject never thinks in syllogisms.” [I find this rather compelling, because I have often been visited by startling flashes of insight after long consideration of a subject. That is, I know exactly what experience he’s talking about.] Plato thought it would be possible to see things as a whole, and to not have to move one’s attention from one part to the next because one would be seeing each thing in the light of its relation to everything else. That is, one could see the whole in the part and the parts in the whole.

Plato thought that the best and happiest life was the life of contemplation. He believed that practical reason would allow us to shape ourselves into our true forms, consistent with our true natures (ascertainable through reason). Thus, reason for him was more than a power of framing or following an argument, but was a crucial element that we needed to form an accurate idea of the ends of our life or to plan that life well.  

For the next major thinker in the history of reason, we have to fast-forward a couple thousand years, to Rene Descartes. [Strictly speaking, the idea of reason continued to develop during the intervening period, but it was wedded to the Catholic Church; Aquinas was the major rationalist in this time period, and I am a fan of his. But Descartes made reason autonomous once again.] Descartes believed that reason was a “natural light” that all normal men possessed and was our one source of clear and distinct (and therefore certain) knowledge. By distinct he meant absolute knowledge, by means of which we can grasp what things are in themselves with no distorting conditions. To get at this knowledge, he believed that we had to apply the method of mathematics to all knowledge: first, deal only with “simple natures,” abstractions of such simplicity that there was no ambiguity; second, deduce their relations logically, remaining unsatisfied with any connection that is less than necessary and self-evidencing; and third, proceed from the logically prior to the logically posterior, beginning with self-evident axioms. Unfortunately, Descartes failed to apply the first two steps successfully to the real world.

Descartes believed that the difficulties of being rational were difficulties of character rather than ability, and could be overcome through discipline. Reason never errs, so it ever seems to it must be because of a non-rational influence, and the rational man must anticipate and avoid these influences if he wanted to think successfully. 

Descartes’ task was taken up after his death by the great saint of rationalism, Baruch Spinoza. He was magnificent. His main work was on ethics, but he decided that in order to know what was good for man, he had to understand man and his place in nature, and in order to do this he had to create a system of philosophy. But the only tool he used to do this was his own mind: he never appealed to authority or revelation or common consent. And he never shirked from where his conclusions led him, becoming perhaps the first philosopher to discard the existence of God and free will. As a result, his brilliant work was virtually unknown for more than a century after his death.

Spinoza believed that knowledge itself, or rational understanding of things, was the ultimate end of human action. We are animated by a drive to maintain and expand our mental beings, and our minds are always in a process of evolving towards their natural ends. Since the natural end of imperfect ideas is to ultimately become wholly perfect ideas, we are constantly striving to achieve more complete perfect understanding. For Descartes, reason was an all-or-nothing process; either you understood something or you didn't. For Spinoza, there was a scale of reason with infinite degrees of success. There were several levels of advancement that our thought moved through, although all were means of grasping connections. The first level was contingent connections, which might have been otherwise. Here we are not truly thinking, but following lines of association, loosely connecting sense-data and concepts. The second level picks out the threads of necessity running between different things and connecting unanalyzed wholes. In other words, this level was an understanding of relationships between phenomenon, cause and effect. Spinoza believed that when he grasped a causal law, he was seeing a connection that was necessary and therefore intelligible. This second level is where Descartes would have stopped, but Spinoza believed that there was one higher level, which would be an understanding of a whole, similar to Plato’s conception of form as system. Spinoza was dissatisfied with the step-by-step progression of reasoning, and the abstraction that was necessary for logical, mathematical thinking. He believed that a higher understanding could be achieved where a whole succession of steps could be instantly grasped and everything would be seen in its own context of necessary relations. A concrete thing would be a focal point for infinite lines of necessity converging upon it from the rest of the universe. Once man achieved this knowledge, Spinoza believed, his thought would be fused with God’s own divine thought. In his view, God was the universe considered as a single system, fully comprehensive and fully comprehensible. 

Spinoza did get back around to ethics, of course. He believed that morals were a matter of intelligence. To live well is to live reasonably, and people go wrong when they misconceive their own good and the good of others, usually under the influence of emotion. This led him to the conclusion that impulsive behavior was animal and thus determined, while true freedom was found in rational thought and action. Growth in rationality, he said, is to be increasingly restrained by rational law, but this was the secret to true freedom and human happiness. 

The end of rationality, in my opinion, began with Gottfried Leibniz, although I must applaud him for his realism. For Spinoza, the world was a single whole; for Leibniz, the world was an assembly of different substances, and each was subject to its own struggle to a level of clear understanding. Leibniz believed that there were two different kinds of rational insights, “eternal truths,” true for all worlds, and “contingent necessities,” which might have been different than they are. Eternal truths were the propositions of logic and mathematics, analytic statements that he failed to justify and thus fueled the positivist criticisms of rationalism in later years. Leibniz also believed that all true statements about the real world would turn out to be necessary. That is, there were no statements that were merely empirical (except that things existed); everything was determined in the nature of things. If we really understood Caesar, with all of his features and all of his context, we would be able to see that the circumstances of his death were completely necessary and determined by his nature and the nature of the world around him. “Every true predication has its foundation in the nature of things.” 

However, whereas Spinoza believed that the main principles of the even the physical sciences were self-evident truths, Leibniz realized that they were not. Nature seemed to governed by laws that render its course inevitable, but it would be unreasonable to argue that these laws were themselves inevitable, in the sense that they couldn’t have been otherwise. Unfortunately, since these principles were not self-evident, Leibniz could think of no other explanation for them but that they were divinely created and chosen. Interestingly, while he believed that God had chosen the causal laws that governed the world, he also believed that God himself was bound to what logically followed from them, since even He could not do what was logically impossible. Once these laws are in place, the course of all things is logically necessary.

Next comes Immanuel Kant, who was quite a radical rationalist, and yet somehow is most closely associated with the modern sense of rationalism. Kant believed that reason could give necessary and universal knowledge, but also acknowledged that sense data could only ever yield probability, not certainty. Therefore, our understanding of causal laws must be a priori. More radically, we supply the causal laws. In other words, nature adjusts itself to our reason. Kant held that our reason was an ordering faculty that imposed its own structure and design on the sense data it was given, and therefore our conception of the world was a product of our mind. However, we could not control this process, and we could not understand it because our minds were not up to the task. That is, our minds were incapable of understanding the world as it really is, since all we could perceive was a world created by our minds. 

By reason, Kant meant “the faculty which supplies the principles of a priori knowledge.” He held that there were three level of a priori knowledge. The lowest level he called “pure intuition,” and it gave us the categories of space and time. These are not sense data, but orders in which sense data is arranged. The second level was called “understanding,” which operated through concepts and judgments. This is the ability to see how something is embedded in a series of necessary relations. Kant believed that there were four categories that could be derived a priori about things: quantity (everything exists in a whole-part relation with something else), quality (every feature will be present to some definite degree), relation (every event will have some cause and some effect), and modality (conclusions that are not necessary or possible (both a priori), but merely actual [this is the weakest category; I think Kant just got carried away]). The highest level was composed of the ideals which serve to regulate our attempts to order our knowledge. Kant believed that our experience of the world could be broken down into outward nature and inward feelings. Reason would deal with these spheres as distinct disciplines, but then, through rational theology, the fields would have to be reunited to show how the inner life existed in relation to the rest of the rational order. In a disappointing argument, Kant said that achieving full development of our rational faculties could not be achieved in a single lifetime, therefore there must be an afterlife in which we could continue to make progress. If this development is to be realized, it must be through a power that governed both nature and human nature. Thus, Kant “proved” the existence of God. Interestingly, Kant provided a strong refutation of his own theological theory in earlier versions of his Critique. 

Hegel conceived of reason as apprehension a priori, which may be synthetic, and recognized that rational insight is of more than one type. Indeed, Hegel distinguished about 80 categories of a priori thought (Kant only identified [a probably ambitious] 17). Hegel further recognized that these forms of knowledge existed on different levels and must be arranged hierarchically. However, Hegel did not believe that the categories could be broken up into distinct categories; for him, everything was a matter of degree. He replaced Kant’s three levels with a ladder with ascending orders from abstraction to concreteness. Hegel regarded necessity, truth, and reality themselves as matters of degree. The necessity became firmer, and one’s understanding more complete, the further one moved up the ladder and approximated the comprehensive vision at the top. We ascend this ladder through the dialectic, which is a zig-zag pattern of thought whereby we define concepts, thus making them more concrete, through their relation to other concepts. Thesis moves to antithesis and then culminates in a synthesis, which begins the process over again. Hegel believed that this was the necessary method because he believed that concepts changed in different contexts, and that as our scope of understanding widened, we could not assume that the isolated connections we had made earlier would hold true in the larger picture we could now see. It was better to understand things as part of each other from the first, rather than see how each thing was connected to other things, step by step. 

The essentials of Hegel’s theory were pretty much wholly adopted by the British rational idealists like F. H. Bradley. These Brits believed that reason was an impetus towards “wholeness,” that drive in human beings to understand a thing completely and to understand its interdependence with other things. In other words, we see a fragment of reality (and this comes from Hegel), and “the opposition between the real, in the fragmentary character in which the mind possesses it, and the true reality felt within the mind, is the moving cause of that unrest which sets up the dialectical process.” Reason is our drive to complete the picture. The function of reason as it works in each of us is to construct the rational whole. Integrated knowledge demanded consistency, both in itself and through interdependence with other facts, so that every fact was connected necessarily with others and ultimately with all other facts. Only once we reached this comprehensive consistency would reason be satisfied. 

Empiricism developed alongside this process of developing rationalism, though it started later, and at the turn of the century rationalism fell from grace as the preeminent theory of knowledge in the philosophical and scientific communities [for a number of reasons, which we can discuss if you’d like]. In recent decades it has made a comeback, since other philosophies have been found to be intellectually wanting in the areas of the social sciences, even as positivism continues to be the official creed of the universities and postmodernism continues to eat away at anything resembling a rational order [or common sense].

J30 - A More Developed Definition of Reason

The purpose of this journal is to delineate and elucidate what I mean by the word “reason,” as the term has a long and diverse history and I don’t want to cause confusion by my employment of it here. Given the significance of reason, many intellectuals throughout history have written extensively on the subject and offered their own definitions of the concept, from Plato to Descartes to Hegel. To give a full account of all of these conceptions and ruminations on man’s distinguishing feature would fill many journals and perhaps bore some of you to death (the last time I wrote out a brief history of the idea of reason in Western thought, leaving out the church leaders’ writings, the result was over 5000 words). Instead of going through its history, therefore, I wish to here just better define the word reason as I use it.

Generally, however, I can say that throughout its entire history, reason has been regarded as a relational concept. Before the advent of the Greeks and their use of reason in the search of final ends and meanings, reason was that human faculty which connected means to ends, which discovered more efficient ways to use what we had to get what we wanted. This is much the sense that I’ve been talking about reason. However, the Greeks and later thinkers distinguished reason from human action generally, and began to conceptualize reason as a type of “knowing that” rather than a “knowing how.” In their view, reason was the light that revealed the pattern of the universe, which showed the connections between all things. That is, these thinkers believed that the universe was causally interconnected in a complex web of relationships, which man was capable of understanding, and reason was our tool for doing so. Indeed, understanding this arrangement of everything was man’s ultimate purpose, many of them believed. Personally, the distinction between these two ideas of reason escapes me. I understand the arguments that the thinkers make, saying that their concept of reason attempts to understand man’s place in the universe and thereby determine what ends man should choose, as opposed to the lower form of reason which merely applies means to ends. But man’s ultimate end is happiness (in the strict economics meaning of the word), so even the choice of intermediate ends is really just a means for the attainment of the ultimate end. So I guess it’s not that the distinction escapes me, it’s just that the truth escaped them (which is understandable, as many of them lived and died before Cantillon birthed the science of economics). Regardless, it’s worth stating that almost every thinker in the history of Western thought understood reason as a relational concept.

Brand Blanshard has written that if we take reason to be man’s defining characteristic, as Aristotle suggested, then man’s reason to encompass four features, four features of human thinking that are not shared by animals. These four features, writes Blanshard, are: thought not tied to perception, the use of abstractions, explicit inferences, and self-consciousness. These are the functions of our mind which are denied to lower life forms, and they thus set us apart from other living creatures.

Each of these four functions are crucial, I think, although it could be argued that the first is most important. The first feature, thought not tied to perception, is the basis for imagination, which is what I have previously argued makes man special in the order of things. Man alone imagines different worlds, chooses which imaginary world he believes would suit him best, and acts to bring that world into existence by changing his existing world. Reason is that function of the human mind, I believe, that allows man to imagine, choose, and act. The other features, I believe, serve this human conceptualization and action. 

[To briefly comment on the other features: The use of abstractions allow us to understand general causal laws which are applicable in many areas besides the one from whence we learned the law. That is, this feature allows us to classify phenomenon and objects as of a certain type, and thereby organize and apply far greater sums of knowledge to far more situations than we would be able to without the abstractions. Explicit inferences allow us to reason independent of experience. It lets us see the relationships between abstractions, rather than between concrete experiences. This is very important because this makes possible the hard logic which is often contrasted with the soft emotions that might muddle the logic when applied to situations which elicit our sympathies. Explicit inferences allow us to find the right answer logically without the messiness of emotions. And self-consciousness is important for many reasons, but I’d like to specifically point out that it makes possible self-reflection. Freud and his followers in psychology have argued that humans do not actually reason, that our actions are unconsciously driven by external influences, and that the closest we get to reason is rationalizing our actions in hindsight. But, even if this is true, this indicates that there is something in humans that tend towards reason, and that this self-reflection and rationalization can train us (by influencing later actions) to be more reasonable in the future.]

I have previously defined reason as man’s ability to imagine, choose, and act rationally. Most people would probably limit reason to just the rational action part. But all three of these phenomenon happen in the human mind, and they are all part of the same process, so I group them together. The features elucidated by Blanshard make this function of the human mind possible. So, I think that, in my own world of definitions, I would call these features enablers of reason, but not reason itself. Or perhaps just parts of the whole. I think that I could define reason as the four functions listed by Blanshard, infused with purpose. Reason allows us to think of more satisfactory ends, allows us to classify the objects around us as means for the attainment of these ends, plan for the utilization of these means for the attainment of our ends, and act to so utilize the means economically. Reason is itself an enabler; it allows us to be what we are: creators.

I really want to stress this idea of reason as purposeful, because it’s taken as an assumption through much of my writing but, in fact, sets my theory of reason apart from almost every other philosopher in Western history. This is in large part due to my understanding of economics, and the accompanying rejection of the premise underlying much of Western thought in this area, that reason is something different and greater than the minutia of human action, more akin to the gods than the foxes. My theory of reason is distinct in that it holds fast to the belief that an explanation of reason cannot lose sight of the fact that it is human reason. That reason is the defining feature of acting man, and that it must be defined thusly. This is something that almost everyone in history has missed. 

So, reason, in my conception, is the unique feature of the human mind, the ability to imagine, choose, and act rationally to bring about the imagined world. The rational action is obviously related to reason, but it takes a little more thought to see that there is no action without choice and no choice without imagined options. So, my definition can be a little confusing if not carefully considered and in light of the weight of what has been written on this topic by other thinkers. I have written extensively on this topic and my own theory of reason in other places, but hopefully this reasonably-lengthed post has provided enough clarification for purposes of this project.