Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jon Elster holds the Chaire de Rationalite et Sciences Sociales at the College de France. Among his recent books are "Explaining Social Behavior" and "Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective".

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"Jon Elster's Reason and Rationality is characteristically erudite, elegant, and philosophically sophisticated. It beautifully encapsulates lines of research that Elster has been developing for years, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to his more technical work."--Daniel Weinstock, University of Montreal

"This short book presents a broad synthesis of Jon Elster's work on reason and rationality, and their complex relations to interest and passion. With clarity and elegance, it presents some of the main positions of one of the most important authors on the subject. Reason and Rationality is a pleasure to read."--Dominique Leydet, Université du Québec à Montréal

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"Jon Elster's Reason and Rationality is characteristically erudite, elegant, and philosophically sophisticated. It beautifully encapsulates lines of research that Elster has been developing for years, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to his more technical work."--Daniel Weinstock, University of Montreal

"This short book presents a broad synthesis of Jon Elster's work on reason and rationality, and their complex relations to interest and passion. With clarity and elegance, it presents some of the main positions of one of the most important authors on the subject. Reason and Rationality is a pleasure to read."--Dominique Leydet, Université du Québec à Montréal

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REASON AND RATIONALITY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

On the one hand, there is the tradition that opposes reason to the passions and, more recently, to interests. Seneca's treatise On Anger, for instance, is organized around the opposition between reason and passion, whereas the French moralists of the seventeenth century added the notion of self-interest. La Bruyère, in a famous passage, summed up their mutual relationships this way: "Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but its greatest triumph is to conquer a man's own interest." The idea of reason is intimately connected to that of the common good.

On the other hand, there is the still more recent idea of rational choice, which is opposed to the diverse forms of irrationality. The rational actor is one who acts for sufficient reasons. These reasons are the beliefs and desires in light of which the action appears to be appropriate in a sense that I shall discuss at length. The idea of rationality is often but wrongly related to that of the actor's private good or self-interest in the moralists' sense. Anyone who is pursuing the common good can—and even ought to—do so in a rational manner.

Acting in conformity with reason, in the singular, and acting for good reasons, in the plural, are two different things insofar as reason is objective, whereas reasons are subjective. From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not. From this difference it follows that only rationality can be used for explanatory ends. It is only insofar as the agent has made the demands of reason his own that the latter may give rise to, and possibly explain, specific behaviors. The assessment of the actor and that of the observer need not coincide.

Although they are different, the two norms encounter a common obstacle, namely, the passions. They also have a common component, which is the idea of acting in accord with well-founded beliefs. Finally, they have in common the fact that they are the object of a certain deference on the part of the actor. The origin and nature of this deference are not the same, but in both cases it is a matter of deference with regard to a source of normativity. The operation of mechanisms of deference is complex. For the moment, let it suffice to say that their effect is sometimes to subvert the object of deference.

It might be objected that comparing a principle concerning normative political philosophy with another that concerns the explanation of individual behavior is wrongheaded. One modest but sufficient reply to this objection would be to say that considering the usual confusions on this subject, conceptual clarification is worth pursuing for its own sake.

More ambitiously, I shall reply that clarification also has its place in political debate. Is it true, is it coherent, to say that the common good can be realized only through the pursuit of private goods? Is it true that the more rational actors are, the better reason's demands are met? Or must we see, inversely, the rationality of individuals as an obstacle to reason? Take, for example, the "voter's paradox," which results from the fact that the rational actor has no reason to vote. In fact, the chance of having an influence on the outcome of the election is clearly less than the risk of dying in a traffic accident on the way to the polls. Moreover, those who are in the best position to understand the logic of this line of reasoning—in particular, professional economists—choose the cooperative strategy less often in the "prisoner's dilemma," of which voting is a classical example.

Whereas the theory of rational choice has been elaborated and developed with great precision, the same cannot be said of the idea of reason. The conception that I am going to propose is not based on a canonical definition, because there is none. It represents a personal—but, I hope, not too idiosyncratic—synthesis of classical texts.

Let us begin with a remark of La Bruyère's: "To think only of oneself and of the present time is a source of error in politics." To correct this error, we have to consider both other people and the future. More precisely, we must substitute an impartial attitude for the partial perspectives constituted by egoism and myopia.

The idea that reason requires an impartial treatment of individuals corresponds to well-known principles. To resolve the questions of distributive justice, Leibniz proposes the following maxim: "Put yourself in the place of everyone." In recent theories, this amounts to saying that the choice of a just organization of society must take place behind a "veil of ignorance," an idea that can be interpreted in several ways. For utilitarianism, each individual must count as one, and none as more than one. For John Rawls, we have to choose the form of society that favors the least advantaged, whoever they might be. Another impartial idea is that of universal rights, embodied in the two declarations of 1776 and 1789.

Less emphasis has been put on the idea, which is just as important, that reason requires impartial treatment of temporal instants. In itself, no date can be accorded special privilege. Let us take first an absurd example: always preferring goods that come on Thursdays to those that come on Wednesdays, solely because of a preference for that particular day of the week. As we shall see, this is not contrary to the principles of rational choice, but it is certainly contrary to reason. The simple preference for Thursdays is a reason, but reason also demands the reason for that reason. And obviously there is none.

Let us now take a less absurd example: preferring to receive a hundred dollars today rather than two hundred dollars a year from now. This preference is not necessarily contrary to reason. If my life expectancy is less than a year, it is perfectly well founded. If on the other hand it results simply from the fact that our "telescopic faculty" is deficient, as economists say, it is contrary to reason. From an objective point of view, a person who takes into account the long-term consequences of present actions has a better chance of leading a long and happy life than one who considers only immediate effects. We shall see that this fact has no relevance from a subjective point of view.

We can consider in this perspective the idea of "interest properly understood" such as it is used by Tocqueville, for example. Once again, in view of the absence of explicit definitions in classical authors, we must attempt a synthesis of their ideas. It seems to me that interest properly understood includes at least two components.

On the one hand, it considers the long-term consequences of action. In technical language, it corresponds to a low rate of discounting of the future. On the other hand, it is based on well-founded beliefs, in a sense that I shall explain later.

Characterized in this way, interest properly understood is an amalgam of objective and subjective elements. An entirely objective conception would substitute true beliefs for well-founded beliefs. But it is impossible to make political decisions dependent on the possession of truth. At most we can demand that they be founded on rational beliefs, that is, beliefs that result from unbiased processing of an optimal quantity of information, to sum up a complex idea that will be developed in a moment. Let it suffice here to say that since the optimum quantity of information depends on the discount rate, the objective constraints that influence this rate also introduce an objective element into the optimum.

In this reconstruction, the idea of reason comprises three elements: impartiality with regard to persons, temporal impartiality, and rational or well-founded beliefs. No doubt we should add goodwill, in order to exclude impartial malice. Sometimes we encounter the suggestion that the first element (impartiality with regard to persons) is redundant, since it follows from the second (temporal impartiality). From Descartes's correspondence with Princess Elisabeth to the theory of repeated games, it has often been observed that farsighted egoism is capable of mimicking altruism. However, the conditions under which one can count on the operation of this invisible hand are relatively restrictive.

* * *

The theory of rational choice is first of all normative, and only secondarily explanatory. It begins by stating how agents should act in order to realize their goals, and then proposes to explain their actions on the hypothesis that they actually behave in that manner (see fig. 1).

Desires and beliefs are reasons for action. A rational actor chooses the action that will realize his desire as well as possible, given his beliefs and the totality of his other desires. These are sufficient reasons, which determine in a unique manner what must be done. I shall return to the possibility of non-uniqueness, but for the moment I limit myself to the ideal case.

Desires include both preferences that might be called substantial, such as preferring apples to oranges, and formal preferences, such as one's attitude toward risk and the future. An individual may prefer the certitude of having 100 dollars to a lottery that offers equal chances of winning 90 or 120 dollars. He may also prefer 100 dollars today to 110 tomorrow. Under precise and quite reasonable conditions, these preferences can be represented as a utility function that assigns each option a numerical value. This will then allow us to say that the rational agent maximizes his utility.

This expression does not imply egoism, as is sometimes said. Any coherent desire, whether egoistic, altruistic, or malicious, is compatible with the demands of rationality. Only incoherent desires are excluded, such as the wish that everyone earn more than average or the desire to be present at one's own funeral in order to hear one's eulogy, like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. For Sartre, the latter contradiction, the desire to be both in-itself and for-itself, defines human existence. While this desire can no doubt give rise to actions, they do not fall within the domain of the rational.

A desire may also exhibit pragmatic incoherence, in the sense that the means for realizing the desired state prevent it from being realized. As Paul Veyne has written, "only an expression that is not trying to produce an effect produces one." But before Veyne, there was already Proust: "Each great artist seems to be the citizen of an unknown homeland which he has forgotten [...] It is not that musicians can remember this lost homeland, but each always remains unconsciously in tune with it; he is overcome with joy when he sings the songs of his country, he may sometimes betray it for the sake of glory, but when he seeks glory in this way he moves further away from it, and only finds it when he turns his back on it."

We could analyze in the same way fruitless attempts to overcome, by a mere effort of the will, insomnia, sexual impotence, or stuttering. This does not exclude the possibility of realizing the desired states in an indirect way, as is shown by the existence of sleeping pills and Viagra. To remain within the Sartrean tradition, we could also mention paradoxical injunctions such as "be spontaneous." In a religious register, theologies often teach that an action undertaken with the sole purpose of gaining access to Paradise cannot provide that access. We might add that from the moral point of view, certain French Nazi collaborators' efforts to redeem themselves in 1944 through acts of resistance carried out solely to that end should not have caused the charges against them to be dismissed, as they sometimes did.

Desires may also be incoherent in a third sense, if their internal structure subverts their realization. To illustrate this idea, let us take the example of intertemporal choice. In a general way, we can represent the present value of a future good as a function of the time separating the present from this future. In the classical conception, an exponential future discount is stipulated, which implies that the curves corresponding to two distinct future goods, one small and immediate, the other large and more remote, never intersect. According to more recent research, however, it seems that this discount typically takes a hyperbolic form. As the agent moves through time, a moment will arrive when the remote good that initially seemed to him more desirable will cease to be so, leading him to choose the lesser but closer good (see fig. 2).

The beliefs involved in this calculation concern either particular facts or causal relationships. On the one hand, the agent can choose only among the options that he thinks are available to him. The objective existence of an option superior to those he is aware of cannot influence his action. On the other hand, the agent chooses among the options of which he is aware according to the possible consequences he attributes to them and his estimate of the probability that they will occur. Thus the utility of the options is deduced from the utility of the consequences, weighted by their probability and reduced to a present value by the agent's discount rate.

For action to be rational, the beliefs on which it is based must themselves be well founded. In turn, this requirement is divided into two parts. On the one hand, the beliefs must be unbiased with respect to the information the agent possesses; on the other hand, he must gather an optimal amount of information.

Even though an agent may make errors, he must not do so systematically. Since biases are countless, it would be desirable to be able to propose a positive definition, but no one has succeeded in offering one. That is because the formulation of beliefs frequently includes an irreducible element of judgment or subjective appreciation of the relative importance of the diverse, often heterogeneous bits of information that are at the agent's disposal. Thus it has been said that the former head of the Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan, had an almost intuitive knowledge of the markets unequaled by any economic theoretician.

Biases are either "hot" (that is, produced by the agent's motivational system) or "cold" (more similar to optical illusions). The former, which we may call "motivated beliefs" and which are indicated by the barred arrow in figure 1, have always been known. They are summed up in numerous sayings such as La Fontaine's observation, "Everyone finds it easy to believe what he fears and what he desires." The tendency to believe what one fears shows that motivated beliefs do not necessarily assume the form of "taking one's desires for realities." Consider, for instance, two jealous husbands like M. de Rênal and Othello, the former believing what he desires and the latter believing what he fears, neither with any justification in the facts.

Cold biases also have a long history. Here, for example, is how Montaigne explains the errors in reasoning that lead people to believe in the accuracy of divinations: "That explains the reply made by Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, when he was in Samothrace: he was shown many vows and votive portraits from those who have survived shipwrecks and was then asked, 'You, there, who think that the gods are indifferent to human affairs, what have you to say about so many men saved by their grace?'-'It is like this', he replied, 'there are no portraits here of those who stayed and drowned—and they are more numerous!'" Modern psychology has identified a large number of similar errors that, for obvious reasons, lend themselves better to experimentation than do hot errors.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from REASON AND RATIONALITYby Jon Elster Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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