Pragmatism and Rationality

Abstract

In Chapter 2 I argued that as moral and epistemic facts do not figure in causal explanations, we must turn to pragmatic reasons to justify continued participation in these practices. What I hope to demonstrate in this chapter is that it is prudentially rational to submit to moral and epistemological constraints. Certainly this has been argued before, at least with regard to moral constraints. However, previous attempts to prove that moral constraints are rational constraints have typically run into various difficulties. In this chapter, I will argue that these difficulties have arisen out of certain shared misunderstandings regarding the nature of rationality. First, too many philosophers have thought that the individual action is the basic unit of rationality. That is, in questions of means—end rationality, it has too often been thought that we must examine and evaluate individual actions, and determine each isolated action’s rationality in terms of how well that individual action promotes the end in question. I will argue that this is a mistake, and that often strategies, not individual actions, are the basic units of rationality. That is, the rationality of individual actions often cannot be determined in abstraction from the strategy they constitute. Second, philosophers have too often thought of rationality as individualistic.KeywordsIndividual ActionCooperative StrategyMoral RuleCooperative RationalityCollective PreferenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.