A Vote for Reason

Suppose I offer, at no charge, to drop a drug in the water supply that would cause almost everyone in the country to vote like you this November. You would probably feel at least a little bit tempted to take the deal. Presidential politics is a matter of grave import, after all. Still — many of us would hesitate, and rightly so. There seems to be something really wrong with manipulating people to believe things even when the stakes are high. We want to convince our opponents, yes, but we want them to be convinced by our reasons.

This hope that exchanging reasons matters, not just for what it gets us but in itself is as old as Plato, but it has often been derided as something of a muddle-headed fantasy, as “nothing but dreams and smoke” as Montaigne put it in the 16^th century. And of course there is some sense in this. You don’t have to be Karl Rove to appreciate the obvious fact that the evidence often fails to persuade, to suspect that what really works are the tried and true methods of good advertising, emotional associations and having the bigger stick (or “super PAC”).

Recently, however, some social scientists, most notably the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, have upped the cynical ante. In Haidt’s view, the philosophers’ dream of reason isn’t just naïve, it is radically unfounded, the product of what he calls “the rationalist delusion.” As he puts it, “Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason. We all need to take a cold, hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is.” [1] Haidt sees two points about reasoning to be particularly important: the first concerns the efficacy (or lack thereof) of reasoning; the second concerns the point of doing so publicly: of exchanging reasons.

According to Haidt, not only are value judgments less often a product of rational deliberation than we’d like to think, that is how we are supposed to function. That it is how we are hardwired by evolution. In the neuroscientist Drew Westen’s words, the political brain is the emotional brain.

Often “reasoning” really seems to be post-hoc rationalization: we tend to accept that which confirms what we already believe (psychologists call this confirmation bias). And the tendency goes beyond just politics. When people are told that they scored low on an I.Q. test, for example, they are more likely to read scientific articles criticizing such tests; when they score high, they are more likely to read articles that support the tests. They are more likely to favor the “evidence,” in other words, that makes them feel good. This is what Haidt calls the “wag the dog” illusion: thinking that reason is the tail that wags the dog of value judgment.

Indeed, reason sometimes seems simply beside the point. Consider some of Haidt’s own well-known research on “moral dumbfounding.” Presented with a story about consensual, protected sex between an adult brother and sister — sex which is never repeated, and which is protected by birth control — most people in the studies reacted with feelings of disgust, judging that it was wrong. Yet subjects struggled to defend such feelings with arguments when questioned by researchers. [2] Even so, they stuck to their guns. Haidt suggests that this means that whatever reasons they could come up with seem to be just along for the ride: it was their feelings doing the work of judgment.

Data like this — and these examples are just the tip of a very large iceberg — certainly should give us pause; but we need to be careful not to exaggerate the lessons it has to teach us. The inability for people — in particular young college students like those in Haidt’s study — to be immediately articulate about why they’ve made an intuitive judgment doesn’t necessarily show that their judgment is the outcome of non-rational process, or even that they lack reasons for their view. Intuitions, moral or otherwise, can be the result of sources that can be rationally evaluated and calibrated. [3]

Moreover, rational deliberation is not a switch to be thrown on or off. It is a process, and therefore many of its effects would have to be measured over time. Tellingly, the participants in Haidt’s original harmless taboo studies study had little time to deliberate. But as other studies have suggested when people are given more time to reflect, they can change their beliefs to fit the evidence, even when those beliefs might be initially emotionally uncomfortable to them.

Indeed, recent history seems to bear this out: Consider, for example, the change in attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage taking place in the United States. Perhaps we can explain large-scale moral and political change of this sort without having to evoke the efficaciousness of reasons, but it seems just as likely that appeals to evidence — evidence, in fact, often uncovered by social scientists — have had at least some impact on how people view same-sex (or interracial) marriage. And it seems downright likely that rational deliberation is going to be involved in the creation of new moral concepts — such as human rights. In short, to show that reasons have no role in value judgments, we would need to show that they have no role in changes in moral views over time.

This brings us around to Haidt’s second main point about reasoning, mentioned above. He endorses what he calls a Glauconian view of reasoning about value. The reference here is to an old saw from Plato: What would you do with a ring of invisibility? Fight for truth, justice and the American way or spy on people and steal stuff?  In Plato’s “Republic,” the character Glaucon asks this question to illustrate the idea that it is merely the fear of being caught that makes us behave, not a desire for justice. Haidt takes from this a general lesson about the value of defending our views with reasons. Just as those who do the “right” thing are not really motivated by a desire for justice, those who defend their views with reasons are not “really” after the truth. As the cognitive scientists Mercier and Sperber put it, what they are really after — whether they acknowledge it or not — are arguments supporting their already entrenched views. If so, then even if appeals to evidence are sometimes effective in changing our political values over time, that’s only because reasons themselves are aimed at manipulating others into agreeing with us, not uncovering the facts. To think otherwise is to once again fall into the rationalist delusion.

In giving reasons we certainly aim to get others to agree with us (I’m doing that now, after all). And aiming at agreement is a good thing, as is searching out effective means of reaching it (indeed, this is one of the noble ideals of Haidt’s book). But it is less clear that we can coherently represent ourselves as only aiming to get others to agree with us in judgment.

To see this, think about how Haidt’s view applies to itself. The judgment that reasons play no role in judgment is itself a judgment. And Haidt has defended it with reasons. So if those reasons convince me that his theory is true, then reasons can play a role in judgment — contra the theory. Think about the passage I quoted above in this context: those who love truth need to take a good, hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. This sounds like a self-defeating argument: we are being advised to use reason to see that reason is flawed.

There is a larger point here. Even if we could start seeing ourselves as giving reasons only to manipulate, it is unclear that we should.  To see ourselves as Glauconians is to treat the exchange of reasons as a slow-moving, less effective version of the political correctness drug I mentioned at the outset. And we are right to recoil from that. It is a profoundly undemocratic idea.

To engage in democratic politics means seeing your fellow citizens as equal autonomous agents capable of making up their own minds. And that means that in a functioning democracy, we owe one another reasons for our political actions. And obviously these reasons can’t be “reasons” of force and manipulation, for to impose a view on someone is to fail to treat him or her as an autonomous equal. That is the problem with coming to see ourselves as more like Glauconian rhetoricians than reasoners.  Glauconians are marketers; persuasion is the game and truth is beside the point. But once we begin to see ourselves — and everyone else — in this way, we cease seeing one another as equal participants in the democratic enterprise. We are only pieces to be manipulated on the board.

Critics of reason, from Haidt to conservative intellectuals like Burke and Oakeshott, see reason as an inherently flawed instrument. As a consequence, they see the picture of politics I’ve just suggested — according to which democracies should be spaces of reasons — as unfounded and naïve. Yet to see one another as reason-givers doesn’t mean we must perceive one another as emotionless, unintuitive robots. It is consistent with the idea, rightly emphasized by Haidt, that much rapid-fire decision making comes from the gut. But it is also consistent with the idea that we can get better at spotting when the gut is leading us astray, even if the process is slower and more ponderous than we’d like. Giving up on the idea that reason matters is not only premature from a scientific point of view; it throws in the towel on an essential democratic hope. Politics needn’t always be war by other means; democracies can, and should be places where the exchange of reasons is encouraged. This hope is not a delusion; it is an ideal — and in our countdown to November, one still worth striving for.

NOTE: A related article by Gary Gutting will be published later this week. The Stone has also invited a response from Jonathan Haidt.

FOOTNOTES

[2]I don’t meant to suggest, and neither does Haidt, that such feelings can’t be defended; that is a different topic.

[3]See Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011) and “What Does the Modularity of Morals Have to Do With Ethics? Four Moral Sprouts Plus or Minus a Few,” Owen Flanagan and Robert Anthony Williams. Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010) 430-453. On the following point about changes, see J. M. Patxton, L. Ungar, and J. Greene, “Reflection and Reasoning in Moral Judgment” Cognitive Science 36: 1, p. 163-177.

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Michael P. Lynch is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book is “In Praise of Reason.”