When Reason Fails Us: How We Act and What We Do When We Do Not Know What to Do

Introduction

An important feature of so-called rational decision making, at least in times of crisis, is arational: that is, our ability to decide manifests features of our characters or the values we hold rather than our reasoning abilities.¹ Such a position stands in obvious opposition to the Western philosophical tradition. Consider, by comparison, the view of Immanuel Kant, who held that reason could, and perhaps sometimes ought to, operate independently of (and in opposition to) our sentiments. Contrary to Kant, William James argues in "The Sentiment of Rationality" that arational mental states and phenomena—such as feelings, emotions, values, and attitudes—are indispensable to practical rationality (317). The attempt to characterize decision making, particularly in times of ethical crises, as rational is a long-standing practice in philosophy that has begun to receive challenges both from inside and outside of philosophy. Experimental ethicists have shown a willingness to break from a strictly rationalist conception of ethics, and social psychologists have argued that there is very little evidence to support the contention, common amongst philosophers, that people form judgments, especially ethical judgments, solely on the basis of rational justifications.² It may well be that the best guide for understanding the operation of practical reason when considering different ethical frameworks is to be found in the discipline of philosophy of science. This article argues that this approach is, in fact, the best guide and, therefore, starts with a discussion of Bas van Fraassen's stance on scientific revolutions.

In The Empirical Stance, Bas van Fraassen gives an answer to the following question: "How are we to understand scientific and conceptual revolutions?" (100). The answer he provides, interestingly, is perspective-dependent. And, more interestingly, it also helps to answer a seemingly very different question: How are we to understand ethical crises and our responses to them? This article first explicates van Fraassen's answer to the first question. It then establishes the connection between the two questions and demonstrates how the answer to one recommends an answer to the other. Along the way, a defense is mounted for the existence of paradigms and paradigm shifts in ethics, as well as for the claim that an important feature of human reason is arational.

Van Fraassen emphasizes the answer from the perspective of a person contemplating a shift to a new theory, in other words, in what he calls "the prior position," where he contends that the change from one paradigm to another cannot be a result of a rational decision-making procedure. As he says: "There is . . . no rational way of deciding upon such a transition [between one conceptual paradigm and another], if rational means 'rational by the lights we have beforehand'" (Empirical Stance 102). What is enough for a decision to seem rational is that, in the posterior position, after the new paradigm has been accepted, the convert can view her change in position as the result of rational deliberation—though it was not. In other words, as long as the jump from one paradigm to another is not (completely) irrational, we will and do rationalize this change from the posterior point of view. Some such jumps will be rationalized from the posterior position, but not all must be able to be rationalized from that position. The prior position is that occupied by a prevailing tradition in some particular scientific field at the time of a crisis, where crisis is loosely defined as an increasing inability to deal satisfactorily with challenges to the prior position or prevailing paradigm. The posterior position is that occupied by the scientists who have adopted what will become the dominant paradigm.

It is of particular interest to the authors that van Fraassen sees himself as making a general epistemological point. In other words, though he is a philosopher of science, this point concerning the prior/posterior shift in our understanding of successive paradigms applies to epistemology in general. This article will pay special attention to the ability of normative ethical theories, first, to give an account...