The Dualism of Practical Reason in Practice
How to Reconcile Ourselves with Our Inner Contradictions
Consider the four following half-fictional or well-real cases:
- An intellectual who, in their academic work pushes for egalitarian views and who, through their professional service, literally earned millions of dollars (a variant is the egalitarian economist who is very critical of the regime of private property but nonetheless earns millions by selling books).
- A professor teaching for years in very expensive private business schools who defends in their writings very strong views against private businesses and capitalism in general (a variant is a libertarian academic who has spent their whole career in public universities).
Though they differ in their details, these four cases share a familiar pattern where someone sends two contradictory signals about their values, one through their words and the other through their actions. There are several ways to interpret this kind of apparent inner contradiction. First, we can just analyze them as the product of cynicism and hypocrisy. The cost of virtue signaling is relatively low. It is therefore not surprising that people are prone to make public statements reflecting values that are perceived positively by most of their peers, at least in their epistemic community. On the other hand, personal and private choices can be very costly, especially when one bears most of this cost. Refusing to give paid conferences or not eating meat may have huge opportunity costs, depending on one’s preferences. What is hypocrite, some would say, is the discrepancy between one’s actual personal preferences and one’s stated moral judgments.
There are however more charitable ways to interpret these inner contradictions. We can see these cases as illustrations of what Henry Sidgwick called the “dualism of practical reason”, which is basically a conflict between two modes of practical reasoning, the impartial and impersonal aim of promoting general welfare on the one hand, and the egoistic pursuit of personal interest on the other:
"I do not mean that if we gave up the hope of attaining a practical solution of this fundamental contradiction, through any legitimately obtained conclusion or postulate as to the moral order of the world, it would become reasonable for us to abandon morality altogether: but it would seem necessary to abandon the idea of rationalizing it completely. We should doubtless still, not only from self-interest, but also through sympathy and sentiments protective of social wellbeing, imparted by education and sustained by communication with other men, feel a desire for the general observance of rules conducive of happiness; and practical reason would still impel us decisively to the performance of duty in the more ordinary cases in which chat is recognized as duty is in harmony with self-interest properly understood. But in the rarer cases of a recognized conflict between self-interest and duty, practical reason, being divided against itself, would cease to be a motive on either side; the conflict would have to be decided by the comparative preponderance of one or other two groups of non-rational impulses.”[1]
As this quote indicates, for Sidgwick, there is no rational way to resolve the conflict between egoism and impartiality. One is as rational as the other. These are individuals’ emotions and other impulses that, ultimately, determine what we do. In light of the naturalistic roots of morality, it is not surprising that our behavior deviates from our sincere moral (i.e., impersonal and impartial) beliefs in circumstances where we have no strong private reasons to behave morally. This is not hypocrisy. People may indeed sincerely believe in the values they are signaling by their speech. It’s just that we have not been programmed to behave morally in circumstances where we have nothing to gain by doing so.
The problem with this interpretation is that there are individuals who privately behave in accordance with their moral judgments. This can be due to the fact that, for these individuals, their personal preferences align with their moral views. Some people just hate meat or at least don’t like it enough to override their distaste for animal suffering. Some persons have “cheap” preferences whose satisfaction doesn’t require a lot of money. Another possibility is that some persons are able to commit themselves in the sense Amartya Sen has given to the concept of commitment: an ability to make choices not according to one’s private goals but rather based on others’ or collective goals.[2] It is unclear however whether one’s lack of commitment is irrational or even immoral.
A third interpretation converges with the point I made in my post on the ethics of free-riding. In any choice situation, there are many reasons and values that are potentially relevant. As long as one’s behavior has an insignificant marginal effect on the overall state of affairs and it can be rationally expected that not everyone will behave as one, following one’s private preferences is not self-defeating. It just reveals a trade-off between competing reasons for action and values. I can eat meat because my choice doesn’t make anyway a significant difference while still believing that we have reasons to eat less meat, or even not eat meat at all. It’s just that these reasons are not decisive. Counterfactually, however, I would eat more meat if I weren’t sincerely believing that there is something wrong with this eating practice. That means that my moral belief indeed has an effect on my behavior, even though this effect is not sufficient to override other reasons for actions.
Which interpretation is the most plausible? Obviously, it depends. There obviously are many persons who are just hypocrites and who are publicly preaching things they don’t really believe in just because it is self-serving. But there are also cases where people are sincere in their verbally signaled beliefs but happen to decide against those beliefs. We can then argue whether they have good reasons to do so – again on a case-by-case basis. The point is that it is often too easy to disqualify an individual’s moral views on the ground that their behavior is not consistent with them.
Now, it is true that inner contradictions of the kind I’ve been discussing in this post can be problematic. Because of it, it is, on the surface, very difficult to discriminate between hypocrites and sincere persons on the market for ideas. This may generate a form of adverse selection. Given the fact that we may observe that the large majority of individuals do not behave in full conformity with their stated moral beliefs, it may be tempting to downplay the meaning and significance of mere verbal claims about what is right and wrong. I think we should resist this temptation, at the risk otherwise of making public discussion impossible. That’s why, ideally, our social morality (i.e., the moral rules that we recognize and follow) should be such that, whatever their private reasons, people’s behavior ultimately converges toward what they sincerely believe about what is good and wrong. But we are not living in an ideal society.
[1] Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Hackett Publishing, 1981), p. 508.
[2] Amartya Sen, “Behaviour and the Concept of Preference,” Economica 40, no. 159 (1973): 241–59. Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (1977): 317–44.