Category: Reason and Rationality

Is it Ever Legitimate to Question Motives?

Absolutely. Suppose someone 'argues' that a photo ID requirement disenfranchises blacks because blacks don't have photo ID. That is a transparently worthless argument, based as it is on a plainly false premise. Once an argument has been refuted it is perfectly legitimate to inquire into the motives of the one giving it. People who give this and similar 'arguments' are out to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Their 'arguments' are merely a smokescreen to mask their fraudulent intent.
 
What is NOT legitimate is to think that one can bypass the evaluation phase. Arguments stand and fall on their own merits quite apart from the psychology of their producers. Only after an argument has been show to be unsound is one justified in psychologizing the producer of it.

True For and True

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, ‘true for X’ are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: ‘true for me,’ ‘true for you,’ ‘true for Jews,’ ‘true for Arabs,’ ‘true for the proletariat,’ ‘true for the bourgeoisie,’ ‘true for our historical epoch,’ and the like. Such semantic prophylaxis would disallow such sentences as ‘That may be true for you but it is not true for me.’

The trouble with expressions like these is that they blur the distinction between truth and belief. To say that a proposition p is true for S is just to say that S believes or accepts or affirms that p. This is because one cannot believe a proposition without believing it to be true. Of course, S’s believing that p, and thus S’s believing that p is true, does not entail that p is true. This is obvious if anything is. There are true beliefs and false beliefs, and a person’s holding a belief does not make it true. If you want to say that S believes that p, then say that. But don’t say that p is true for S unless you want to give aid and comfort to alethic relativism, the false and pernicious doctrine that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative.  'Woke' folk love such obfuscatory expressions, but you don't want to give aid and comfort to them, do you?


Truth ScrutonA belief is always someone’s belief. This relativity of beliefs to believers explains why one person’s believing that p and another person’s believing that ~p is unproblematic. But truth is non-relative, or absolute. This is why it cannot be the case that both p and ~p. If you have truth, you have something absolute. There is no such thing as relative truth. Relative truth is not truth any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck or artificial leather is leather or faux marble is marble. In the expression, ‘relative truth,’ ‘relative’ functions as an alienans (as opposed to a specifying) adjective: it alienates or shifts the sense of ‘truth.’ Just as it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of leather, real and artificial, it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of truth, relative and absolute. Suppose someone sets out to list the kinds of leather. “Well, you got your horse leather, cow leather, alligator leather, artificial leather, real leather, artificially real leather, naugahyde, Barcalounger covering . . . .” One can see what is wrong with this.

The word ‘absolute’ scares some people. But the only reason I use it is to undo the semantic mischief caused by ‘relative truth’ and ‘true for X.’ In a logically perfect world, it would suffice to say ‘true’ or ‘leather.’ There would be no need to say ‘absolutely true’ or ‘real leather’ – “This here jacket a mahn is REAL leather, boy . . . .” If ‘relative’ and ‘artificial’ are (in the above examples) alienating adjectives, then ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ could be called de-alienating: they restore their rightful senses to words that semantic bandits divested them of.

One reason ‘absolute’ scares people is that it suggests dogmatism and infallibilism. Thus if I say that truth is absolute, some people think I am saying that the propositions I affirm as true I affirm as unquestionably or undeniably true. But that’s to confuse an ontological statement about the nature of truth with an epistemological statement about the way in which I accept the propositions I accept. It is consistent to maintain that truth is absolute while being a fallibilist, where a fallibilist holds that either no proposition held to be true, or no member of some restricted class of propositions held to be true, is known with certainty.

In sum, my point is that ‘true for X’ should be avoided since it gives aid and comfort to the illusion that truth is relative. But why exactly is that an illusion? I’ll leave that question for a separate post.

Richter on Rationality

Hi, Bill. I love your Maverick blog.

I’m Reed Richter: a 71 yr old ex-academic, retired and living in Chapel Hill, NC. I was an undergrad philosophy major at UNC and did my PhD at UC Irvine. My early work was on decision theory. After teaching at UCI, UNC, and Duke, I moved to Europe. I taught a year in Salzburg, but dropped out of academics to run a family business. Nevertheless I continued to participate in academic philosophy and publish a few more papers. 
 
BV: Small world. I'm a year younger, quit the teaching racket and a tenured position thirty years ago to write philosophy and live an eremitic life in the Sonoran desert; from Southern California, applied for graduate work at U.C. Irvine for the bad reason that a quondam girlfriend had transferred there; was luckily rejected, studied in Salzburg, Boston, and Freiburg; taught at Boston College, University of Dayton, Case Western Reserve University, and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.  I work and publish in German philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. I know little about decision theory, and I don't call myself a political philosopher. So caveat lector.
 
My son is now a philosophy major, but he’s totally into anarchism, Hegel, and continental philosophy. I have little interest in that material and can’t help him much there.  But he’s writing an honors thesis on Wolff and autonomy and, helping him I ran across your excellent commentary. A couple of comments.
 
A comment on this point: [The following is from my November 2009 entry Notes on Anarchism II: Wolff on Authority]
 
According to Robert Paul Wolff, "Every man who possesses both free will and reason has an obligation to take responsibility for his actions . . . ." (In Defense of Anarchism, Harper 1970, 13) Here a question arises: Is it in virtue of my possession of free will and reason that I have the aforementioned obligation? If yes, would Wolff not be inferring an 'ought' from an 'is'? That I am free, and that I possess reason are non-normative facts about me. Taken together they entail that I am capable of taking responsibility for my actions. But how does it follow that I ought to take responsibility of them, that I am morally obliged to? Let's let this query simmer on the back burner for the time being.
 
Richter: It occurs to me that possessing reason implies being rational. And being rational is implicitly normative, implying oughts. So from the brute facts—I possess reason; I’m rational; in fact above all else, I want a cup of water; and there is a cup of perfectly potable water in front of me—it follows that therefore I ought to drink that cup of water. All things equal, rationality requires maximizing expected utility, generating oughts. Well, at the very least, if one doesn’t want to view rationality as implicitly normative, then that’s a great example of is implying ought.  But that’s a trivial point.
 
BV:  I don't follow the above. To possess reason is to possess the capacity to act rationally.  I take it that rationality in the means-end sense is at issue.  The talk of MEU makes that clear. Suppose an agent exercises his  capacity to reason in a given situation: he chooses means conducive to the end he desires to attain.  He wants a drink of water; potable water is in front of him, and so he drinks the water. How does normativity come into this? Well, if you want water, and potable water is available, then you ought to drink it. It would be rational in the means-ends sense to drink the water, and irrational in the same sense not to drink it.
 
But if an ought is thereby generated, it is a mere hypothetical, not  a categorical ought.  How do we get to the categorical moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions from  the capacity to reason in the means-end sense plus free will?

Sometimes the Truth is not Reasonably Believed

If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)

Playboy Jan 1981Hugh Hefner's death (27 September 2017) reminds me of a true story from around 1981.  This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of mint-condition Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.

I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girlfriend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.

I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, stories, interviews, arguments for analysis in my logic classes, etc.  She of course did not believe that I had found them.

What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.

This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true.  Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.  Rational acceptability varies with time and place; truth does not.

"But what about rational acceptability at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?" 

Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.

As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too. 

_________________

*I am assuming that credibility and rational acceptability are the same property, where 'credibility' is defined as the property, not of being believable by someone, but of being rationally believable by someone. We should also distinguish between the credibility of persons and the credibility of propositions.  My quondam girlfriend did not question my credibility but the credibility of what I asserted.  Finding what I said incredible, she concluded that I was lying on that occasion; an occasional lie, however, does not a liar make.  A liar is one who habitually lies just as a drunkard is one who habitually gets drunk. Same with philanderers and gluttons. (But what about murderers?  It sounds distinctly odd to say, "Mack is no murderer; he murdered only one man.")

In the Absence of Knowledge, May one Believe? Critique of Bryan Magee

According to Bryan Magee ("What I Believe," Philosophy 77 (2002), 407- 419), nobody knows the answers to such questions as whether we survive our bodily deaths or whether God exists. Citing Xenophanes and Kant, Magee further suggests that the answers to these questions are not only unknown but impossible for us to know. Assuming that Magee is right on both counts, what follows?

One inference one might draw from our state of irremediable ignorance about ultimates is that it provides us with 'doxastic wiggle-room' (my expression): if one cannot know one way or the other, then one is  permitted either to believe or not believe that we survive and that God exists. After all, if it cannot be proven that ~p, then it is epistemically possible that p, and this epistemic possibility might be taken to allow as reasonable our believing that p. Invoking the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing (Critique of Pure Reason, B 146 et passim) one could maintain that although we have and can have no knowledge of God and the soul, we can think them without contradiction, and without contradicting anything we know. Does not the denial of knowledge make room for faith, as Kant himself famously remarks? CPR B xxx: Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen… "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith…."  (And given that contact with reality is a great good, would it not be better to venture contact with the unknowable portion of it via faith rather than have no contact with it at all by insisting that only knowable truth is admissible truth?)

This inference, however, the inference from our irremediable ignorance to the rational allowability of belief in the epistemically possible,  is one that Magee resolutely refuses to draw, seeing it as a shabby evasion and an "illegitimate slide."(408) Thus he holds it to be illegitimate to move from the epistemic possibility of post-mortem  survival to belief in it. As he puts it, "What I find myself wanting to drive home is not merely that we do not know but that the only honest way to live and think is in the fullest possible acknowledgment of that fact and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith of some kind, and without evasion or self-indulgence of any other sort."  (417) Near the beginning of his essay, Magee cites  Freud to the effect that no right to believe anything can be derived from ignorance. (408)

The relevance of the Freudian point, however, is unclear. First of all, no one would maintain that ignorance about a matter such as post-mortem survival justifies, in the sense of provides evidence for, the belief that one survives.  In any case, the issue is this: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe where knowledge is unavailable? Magee answers this question in the negative. But I cannot see that he makes anything close to a convincing case for this answer. I will simply present an objection the  force of which will be to neutralize, though perhaps not refute, Magee's view. Thus I play for a  draw, not a win. I doubt that one can expect more from philosophy. 

Probative  Overkill?

One problem with Magee's argument is that it seems to prove too much. If we have no knowledge about such metaphysical/religious matters as God and the soul, and so must suspend belief in them lest we violate  the putative epistemic duty to believe only on sufficient evidence, then we must also suspend belief on a host of other issues in respect of which we certainly cannot claim knowledge. Surely, the very same reasons that lead Magee to say that no one knows anything about God and the soul must also lead us to say that no one knows whether or not there are cases in which justice demands capital punishment, or whether or not a just society is one which provides for redistribution of wealth, or whether or not animals have rights, etc. Indeed, we must say that no one knows what justice is or what rights are. And of course it is not merely about normative issues that we are ignorant.

Do we know what motion, or causation, or time are? Do we know what properties are, or what is is for a thing to have a property, or to exist, or to change, or to be the same thing over time? Note that these questions, unlike the God and soul questions, do not pertain to what is transcendent of experience. I see the tomato; I see that it is red; I see or think I see that it is the same tomato that I bought from the grocer an hour ago; applying a knife to it, I see or think I see that slicing it causes it to split apart.

For that matter, Does Magee know that his preferred ethics of belief is correct?  How does he know that?  How could he know it?  Does he have sufficient evidence? If he knows it, why do philosophers better than him take a different view?  Does he merely believe it?  Does he believe it because his fear of being wrong trumps his desire for the truth?  Does he want truth, but only on his terms?  Does he want only that truth that can satisfy the criteria that he imposes?  Would it not be more self-consistent for Magee to suspend belief as to his preferred ethics of belief?  Why is it better to have no contact with reality than such contact via faith?  Isn't it better to have a true belief that I cannot justify about a life and death matter than no belief about that matter?  Does the man of faith self-indulgently evade reality, or does the philosopher of Magee's stripe self-indulgently and pridefully refuse such reality as he cannot certify by his methods?

No one knows how economies really work; if we had knowledge in this area we would not have wildly divergent paradigms of economic explanation. But this pervasive ignorance does not prevent people from holding very firm beliefs about these non-religious issues, beliefs that translate into action in a variety of ways, both peaceful and violent. It is furthermore clear that people feel quite justified in holding, and acting upon, these beliefs that go beyond what they can claim to know. What is more, I suspect Magee would agree that people are often justified in holding such beliefs.

So if Magee is right that we ought to suspend belief about religious matters, then he must also maintain that we ought to suspend belief about the social and political matters that scarcely anyone ever suspends belief about. That is, unless he can point to a relevant difference between the religious questions and the social-political ones. But it is difficult to discern any relevant difference. In both cases we are dealing with knowledge-transcendent beliefs for which elaborate rational defenses can be constructed, and elaborate rational refutations of competing positions.

In both cases we are dealing with very abstruse and 'metaphysical' issues such as the belief in equal rights, a belief which manifestly has no empirical justification. And in both cases we are dealing with issues of great importance to our welfare and happiness. On the other hand, if Magee thinks that we are justified in holding beliefs about social and political matters, something he does of course hold, then he should also maintain that we are justified in holding beliefs about religious matters. There is no justification for a double standard. In this connection, one should read Peter van Inwagen's Quam Dilecta, in God and the Philosophers, ed. T. V. Morris (Oxford University Press, 1994), 31-60. See especially 41-46 for a penetrating discussion  of the double standard. 

Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

A re-post from March 2016.  Was in Georgia 10 pt; now in 12 pt. Slightly emended. Stands up well. Internal hyperlink verified.

………………………….

There are those who love to expose and mock the astonishing political ignorance of Americans.  According to a 2006 survey, only 42% of Americans could name the three branches of government.  But here is an interesting question worth exploring: 

Is it not entirely rational to ignore events over which one has no control and withdraw into one's private life where one does exercise control and can do some good?

I can vote, but my thoughtful vote counts for next-to-nothing in most elections, especially when it is cancelled out by the vote of some thoughtless and uninformed person.  I can blog, but on a good day I will reach only a couple thousand readers worldwide and none of them are policy makers.  (I did have some influence once on a Delta airline pilot who made a run for a seat in the House of Representatives.)  I can attend meetings, make monetary contributions, write letters to senators and representatives, but is this a good use of precious time and resources?  It may be that Ilya Somin has it right:

. . . political ignorance is actually rational for most of the public, including most smart people. If your only reason to follow politics is to be a better voter, that turns out not be much of a reason at all. That is because there is very little chance that your vote will actually make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a presidential race, for example). For most of us, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities that are more interesting or more likely to be useful.

Is it rational for me to stay informed?  Yes, because of my intellectual eros, my strong desire to understand the world and what goes on in it. The philosopher is out to understand the world; if he is smart he will have no illusions about changing it, pace Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.

Another reason for people like me to stay informed is to be able to anticipate what is coming down the pike and prepare so as to protect myself and my stoa, my citadel, and the tools of my trade.  For example, my awareness of Obama's fiscal irresponsibility is necessary if I am to make wise decisions as to how much of my money I should invest in precious metals and other hard assets.  Being able to anticipate Obaminations re: 'gun control' will allow me to buy what I need while it is still to be had.   'Lead' can prove to be useful for the protection of gold, not to mention the defense of such sentient beings as oneself and one's family.

In brief, a reason to stay apprised of current events is not so that I can influence or change them, but to be in a position so that they don't influence or change me.

A third reason to keep an eye on the passing scene, and one mentioned by Somin, is that one might follow politics the way some follow sports. Getting hot and bothered over the minutiae of baseball and the performance of your favorite team won't affect the outcome of any games, but it is a source of great pleasure to the sports enthusiast.  I myself don't give a damn about spectator sports.  Politics are my sports.  So that is a third reason for me to stay on top of what's happening.  It's intellectually stimulating and a source of conversational matter and blog fodder. 

All this having been said and properly appreciated, one must nevertheless keep things in perspective by bearing  in mind  Henry David Thoreau's beautiful admonition:

Read not The Times; read the eternities!

For this world is a vanishing quantity whose pomps, inanities, Obaminations and what-not will soon pass into the bosom of non-being.

And you with it.

Can the Existence of God be Proven?

A reader inquires,

I was wondering whether you had any direction you could offer for rational arguments for God's existence?

If you are looking for arguments that are not merely rational, but rationally compelling, I don't believe that there are any.  I also believe that there aren't any such arguments for the nonexistence of God.  A rationally compelling argument for a proposition is a proof; a rationally compelling argument for its logical contradictory is a disproof.  When it comes to God, and not just God, there are no proofs or disproofs. There are arguments, some better than others. That's as good as it gets.

Note that my claim that this is so is not a proposition that I claim to be able to prove.  I claim merely that it is reasonable to believe.  I do believe it and will continue to believe until someone gives me a compelling reason not to believe it. If I am right, however,  that cannot happen. For my meta-philosophical thesis is substantive, and if I am right, said thesis can neither be proven nor disproven. So the the best you could do would be counter me with the contradictory of my meta-thesis. But then we would be in a stand-off.

What is it for an argument to be rationally compelling?

Philosophers make reasoned cases for all manner of propositions, but their colleagues typically do not find these arguments to be compelling.  So a reasoned case need not be a compelling case.  But it depends on what exactly is meant by 'compelling.'  I suggest that a (rationally) compelling argument is one which forces the 'consumer' of the argument to accept the argument's conclusion on pain of being irrational.  (What is it to be irrational? That's a long story I cannot now go into, but the worst form of irrationality would be the acceptance of a logical contradiction.) I will assume that the 'consumer' is intelligent, sincere, open to having his mind changed, and well-versed in the subject matter of the argument.  Now it may be that there are a few arguments that are rationally compelling in this sense, but there are precious few, and surely no arguments for or against the existence of God.
 
To appreciate this, note first that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. (An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p.)  Now given that no argument can prove its own premises, what reason could one give for accepting the premises of a given argument?  Suppose  deductive argument A has P1 and P2 as premises and that conclusion C follows logically from the premises.  Why accept P1 and P2?  One could adduce further arguments B and C for P1 and P2 respectively.  But then the problem arises all over again.  For arguments B and C themselves have premises.  If P3 is a premise of B, what reason could one give for the acceptance of P3? One could adduce argument D.  But D too has premises, and if you think this through you soon realize that you have brought down upon your head an infinite regress which is vicious.  The regress is vicious because the task of justifying by argument all the premises involved cannot be completed.
 
To avoid argumentative regress we need premises that are self-justifying in the sense that they are justified, but not justified by anything external to themselves.  Such propositions could be said to be self-evident.  But what is self-evident to one person is often not self-evident to another.  This plain fact forces a distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence.  Clearly, subjective self-evidence is not good enough.  If it merely seems to subject S that p is self-evident, that does not suffice to establish that p is objectively self-evident.  Trouble is, when someone announces that such-and-such is objectively self-evident that too is a claim about how it seems to that person, so that it is not clear that what is being claimed as objectively self-evident is not in the end itself merely subjectively self-evident.
 
Example.  Suppose an argument for the existence of God employs the premise, 'Every event has a cause.'  Is this premise self-evident?  No.  Why can't there be an uncaused event?  So how does one know that that premise is true?  It is a plausible premise, no doubt, but plausibility is not the same as truth.  And if you do not know that the premises of your argument are true, then your argument, even if logically impeccable in every other way, does not amount to a proof, strictly speaking.  Knowledge entails certainty, objective certainty.
 
My point is that there are hardly any rationally compelling arguments for substantive theses.  But one can make reasoned cases for theses.  Therefore, a reasoned case is not the same as a compelling argument.
 
Because people are naturally dogmatic and crave doxastic security, they are unwilling to accept my meta-philosophical thesis that there are hardly any compelling arguments for substantive theses.  They want to believe that their pet beliefs are compellingly provable and that people who do not accept their 'proofs' are either irrational or morally defective.  Their tendency is to accept as sound any old argument for the conclusions they antecedently accept, no matter how shoddy the argument,  and to reject as unsound arguments that issue in conclusions they do not accept.  Their craving for doxastic security swamps and suborns their critical faculties.
 
One way to refute what I am saying would be by providing a compelling argument for the existence of God, or a compelling argument for the nonexistence of God.  You won't be able to do it. 

In the absence of compelling arguments, what should one do?

I don't believe that there can be talk of proof when it comes to God, the soul, and other big topics, assuming you use 'proof' strictly.  After considering all the evidence for and against, you will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.  The will comes into it. One freedom comes into it. I thus espouse a limited doxastic voluntarism. In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the theist and that of his opposite number.  So it is up to you to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

For me the following consideration clinches the matter.  Bring the theoretical question back down to your lived life, your Existenz in the existentialist sense.  How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days?  Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke?  Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake?  Will you live life as if it has an Absolute Meaning that transcends the petty particular relative meanings of the quotidian round?  Will you take the norms that conscience reveals as so many pointers to an Unseen Order to which this paltry and transient sublunary order is but prelude?

It is your life.  You decide.  You can drift and not decide, but your drifting in the currents of social suggestion and according to the idols of the age is a deficient  mode of decision. Not to decide is to decide.

Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing.  Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal after-death experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life.  What will they have lost by believing as they did?

Nothing! Nothing at all.  You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion and giving themselves and others false hope.  But no one will ever know one way or the other.  And if the body's death is the last word, then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.

If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere. 

The Irrationality of Playing the Lottery

I have posted several times over the years on the irrationality of playing the lottery and on the immorality of state sponsorship and promotion (via deceptive advertising) of lotteries.  The following e-mail, however, raises an interesting question that gives me pause:

As I was reading this story of an impoverished young rancher who won $88 million net with a Powerball ticket, I was wondering whether you'd allow that a case could be made for the rationality of his gamble. The young man and his whole family were in desperate financial circumstances with no way to cover back taxes, livestock loans, etc. They faced foreclosures, eviction, etc. The young man bought one ticket. He was not a chronic heavy lotto-gambler. The one ticket did not make his situation worse. Arguably, the lottery gamble was his only hope of salvaging his situation. If you have only ONE way to save yourself, the odds don't really matter.

Actually, according to the account linked to above, the cowboy bought $15 worth of tickets.  So he bought more than one ticket.  But no matter.  Let us assume that this $15 was the only money he ever spent on the lottery.  And let's also assume that the cowpoke was at the end of his rope — pun intended — facing foreclosure and imminent residency on Skid Row.  We may also safely assume that the young man will never again play the lottery.  (For he seems resolved not to fritter away his winnings  on loose women and fast cars.) The question is whether it was rational for him in his precise circumstances to spend $15 on lottery tickets.
 
Now one question to ask is whether the rationality of a decision can be judged ex post facto.  I would say not.  A rational agent agent is one who chooses means that he has good reason to believe are conducive to the ends he has in view.  A rational decision is one made calmly and deliberately and with 'due diligence' on the basis of the best information the agent has available to him within the limited time he has at his disposal for acquiring information.  A rational decision cannot be rendered irrational by a bad outcome, and an irrational decision cannot be rendered rational by a good outcome.
 
So I am inclined to say that our cowboy made an irrational decison when he decide to spend $15 on a chance to win millions.  The fact that, against all odds, he won is irrelevant to the rationality of his decision. The decision was irrational because the chances of winning anything significant were astronomically small, whereas the value of  $15 to someone who is down to his last $15 is substantial. 
 
But I can understand how intuitions might differ.  Suppose we alter the example by supposing that the man will die and knows that he will die if he does not win today's lottery.  Suppose he has exactly $15 to spend and he spends it on lottery tickets.  He now has nothing to lose by spending the money.  It is perhaps arguable that, in these precise circumstances, it is prudentially if not theoretically rational for the cowpoke to blow his last $15 on lotto tickets.
 
Just what is rationality anyway?

Intellectual Integrity and the Appeal to Mystery

Bradley Schneider writes,

. . . while we're on the subject of divine simplicity, I would be interested in your thoughts on the following dilemma.  Suppose you are strongly persuaded by philosophical arguments that, if God exists, God must be simple, i.e., some version of DDS must be true.  Otherwise, if God were composite, He would not be absolute and therefore would not be God.  At the same time, you appreciate the problem of modal collapse.  That is, you appreciate that DDS appears to imply modal collapse.  Suppose further that you are convinced that modal fatalism cannot be true, i.e,. the world that we inhabit is both ontologically and modally contingent.  Question: Can you, with intellectual integrity, believe in or have faith in God's existence in this scenario?  It seems to me that you can if you accept the following:  (a) DDS is true; (b) DDS does not imply modal collapse; and (c) the reason DDS does not imply modal collapse is a mystery beyond human comprehension.  

 
Is that a reasonable position or an intellectual evasion?  Put another way:  There are obviously some philosophical assertions that are so demonstrably incoherent or contradictory that one cannot hold them with intellectual integrity, e.g., "There is no truth," "I have no beliefs," etc.  Is the belief that [DDS does not imply modal collapse and the reason is a mystery] analogous to such beliefs?  When is it reasonable to believe in something that you don't understand? 
 
Well, Bradley, you are asking the right questions.  The central question, I take it, is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.
 
To affirm mysterianism is to affirm that there are mysteries.  But what is a mystery?

Mystery-1:  A proposition which, if true, is knowable, presently unknown, and interesting to know, but the interest of which evaporates upon being known.  For example, the proposition Jimmy Hoffa's body was fed through a wood chipper is, if true, knowable, unknown, interesting to know but such that, if it came to be known, then the question of the final disposition of Hoffa's body would be settled and would no longer be interesting or a mystery.  The aim of scientific research is to banish mysteries in this first sense of 'mystery.'   Perhaps we could say that this is the Enlightenment Project in a nutshell: to de-mystify the world.  The presupposition that guides the project is that nothing is intrinsically mysterious or impervious in principle to being understood; there are no mysteries in reality.  Accordingly, all mystery is parasitic upon our ignorance which, in principle, can be overcome.

Mystery-2:  A proposition which, if true, cannot by us in this life be known to be true, and cannot even be known by us in this life to be logically-possibly true, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and is of the highest interest to us, but whose interest would in no way be diminished should we come to know it.

An example of mystery-2 is the doctrine of the Trinity as understood by Roman Catholics (but not just by them).  The Trinity is an exclusively revealed truth; hence it cannot be known by us by natural means.  What's more, it cannot even be known by us to be free of logical contradiction and thus logically possible.  Our finite intellects cannot see into its logical possibility let alone into its actual truth.  We cannot understand how it is possible.  But what is actual is possible whether or not we have the power to understand how it is possible. 

(Compare: motion is possible because actual, whether or not the Zenonian arguments to the contrary can be adequately answered.  Someone who is convinced by the Zenonian arguments, but who refuses to deny the reality of motion, is a mysterian about the reality of motion.  He is saying: Motion must appear to us as logically impossible; yet motion is actual and therefore possible  despite our inability to explain how it is possible. This mysterian could easily grant that the irrefutability ofthe Zenonian arguments is excellent evidence of the unreality of motion but still insist that motion is real.  He might say: the considerations of our paltry intellects must give way before the massive evidence of the senses: you can see that I am wagging my finger at you now. The evidence of the senses trumps all arguments no matter how compelling they seem. Similarly, the believer in the triune God could say that God's revelation trumps all merely human animadversions.)

So from the fact that the Trinity appears to us in our present state as contradictory, and thus as logically impossible, it does not follow that it is not true.  For it could be like this:  given our unalterable ('hard-wired') cognitive architecture, certain revealed truths must appear to us as contradictory when the propositions which must so appear are not only in themselves not contradictory, but are also actually true!

The philosophical mysterian is a person who holds that there are mysteries in the second sense.  Is Colin McGinn a mysterian in this sense? 

McGinn 'takes it on faith' as a teaching of the scientific magisterium that all mental activity is brain activity. He no more questions this than a believing Catholic questions the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, etc.   It just seems obvious to him and therefore a thesis that cannot be reasonably questioned.  Of course mental activity is brain activity!  What the hell else could it be?  You think and feel with your brain not with some 'spook in the skull' (my coinage) or "ghost in the machine." (Ryle) There is one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it. And so consciousness, self-consciousness, qualia, intentionality, conscience must all be reducible without remainder to physical processes and states.

But there are powerful arguments which I have rehearsed many times why qualia and object-directed mental states cannot be physical states.  Confronted with these arguments, McGinn goes mysterian.  He grants their force and then says something like this:

It is incomprehensible to us how consciousness could be a brain process.  But it is a brain process.  It is just that our unalterable cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to see into this truth.  It is true and therefore possibly true even though we cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true due to our cognitive limitations.

As I read McGinn, these limitations are in our human case unalterable.  And so I read McGinn as a mysterian in much the same sense that a theological mysterian is a mysterian.  What is common to the doctor angelicus and the decidedly less than angelic McGinn is a commitment to the thesis that there are true, non-contradictory propositions that we humans by our very nature are not equipped to understand as either true or non-contradictory.  Access denied!  We have no access to certain truths because of our cognitive make-up. 

This leaves open the possibility for McGinn that there be extraterrestrials who are equipped to grasp mind-brain identity.  And it leaves open for Aquinas the possibility that there be angelic intellects who are equipped to grasp and wholly understand Trinity,  God-Man identity (the Incarnation) and how Jesus Christ could ascend into  heaven soul and body!

But let's return to  the doctrine of the Trinity. We are assuming that it is apparently contradictory, and that attempts to relieve the apparent contradictoriness fail.  See The Logic of the Trinity Revisited in which I spell out the doctrine, show the (apparent) contradiction, and rebut a couple of quick responses to it. Now consider the following position:
 
The Trinity doctrine appears contradictory to us (ectypal) intellects, and must so appear in our present state due to cognitive limitations endemic in our sublunary, and presumably fallen, condition. (Sin has noetic consequences.) In reality, however, the doctrine is internally consistent and each of its component propositions is true.  It is just that we cannot understand, in our present state, how the doctrine could be true. So, in our present postlapsarian and pre-salvific state, the Trinity must remain a mystery.  The claim is not that the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction; there are no true contradictions, pace Graham Priest and his tiny band of dialetheists.  The claim is that the Trinity doctrine is true and non-contradictory, but not such as to be understandable as true and non-contradictory by us in this life. On the contrary, it must appear to us as contradictory and false in this life.
 
Following Dale Tuggy, we may call the position I have just sketched positive mysterianism.  In critique of it, Tuggy says this:
 
Positive mysterianism must leap this hurdle: if this Dogma [Trinity] resolutely appears contradictory, doesn’t that give us a strong reason to think it false? How then, [can] this admission be part of a defense of the rationality of believing in this Dogma?
The admission is that the doctrine appears contradictory to us.  But this admission is not part of the defense of the rationality of believing the doctrine. Presumably, only a latter-day Tertullian would defend the rationality of belief in a doctrine on the ground of the doctrine's appearing absurd, i.e., logically contradictory, or actually being absurd.  No one will say, "It is rational for me to believe that p precisely because, after careful and protracted consideration, it appears to me that p is or entails a logical contradiction."
 
The positive mysterian (PM) is not defending the doctrine on the ground that it appears contradictory. The PM is defending the doctrine on the ground that what appears contradictory might not be contradictory. The PM, in other words, is appealing to the possibility that there are certain non-contradictory truths that must appear to us in our present state as contradictory.
 
Is that possibility one that can be dismissed at the outset?  Can one be objectively certain that there cannot be truths that are reasonable to affirm but must appear to us as contradictory?
 
The PM can grant to Tuggy that, in general, a doctrine's appearing to be contradictory is a strong reason for thinking it false while insisting that the appearance of contradictoriness does not entail the reality of contradictoriness.  A strong reason needn't be a rationally compelling reason. Can Tuggy & Co. be objectively certain that the Trinity doctrine is contradictory and necessarily false simply on the basis of its appearing to be such to us in our present state?  No, they can't be certain. So there is the possibility that the doctrine is really true despite being apparently contradictory.
 
'But then couldn't any old crazy doctrine be defended  in this way?" 
 
There are philosophers who take the eliminativist line that consciousness is an illusion. This is a crazy view that refutes itself straightaway: nothing is an illusion except to consciousness; hence, the crazy view presupposes the very thing it proposes to eliminate. Well, could one give a mysterian defense of the crazy view? I don't see how. We have direct Cartesian evidence that consciousness exists and cannot be an illusion.
 
Philosophy is long, but blog is short. So I need to wrap this up. The question is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.  My tentative answer is that one may reasonably affirm positive mysterianism.  

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

Any reasons one adduces in support of the thesis of  the infirmity of reason will share in the weakness of the faculty whose weakness is being affirmed.  Is this a problem for the proponent of the thesis? Does he contradict himself? Not obviously: he might simply accept the conclusion that the reasoning in support of the thesis is inconclusive.

Suppose I argue that, with respect to all substantive philosophical theses, there there are good arguments  pro and good arguments contra, and that these arguments 'cancel out.'  Now my thesis is substantive, and so my thesis applies to itself, whence it follows that my meta-thesis has both good arguments for it and good arguments against it, and that they cancel out.

Where is the problem? I am simply applying my meta-philosophical skepticism to itself, as I must if I am to be logically consistent.  Now I could make an exception for my meta-thesis, but that, I think, would be intolerably ad hoc.

I am not dogmatically affirming the infirmity of reason; I am merely stating that there are reasons to accept it, reasons that are not conclusive.

Deeper into this topic:

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason