Opinions

This is a response, hopefully fairly brief, to a lecture I read recently by G.A. Cohen called "Paradoxes of Conviction." His main thesis is basically this: many people believe certain things only because they were raised to believe them, and furthermore some of those people know that this is so, and yet they continue to believe; this, he argues, is irrational, or might be. The idea is that if you know that you don't have better epistemological grounds for believing p than someone else does for believing q, and that the only reason you believe p and they believe q and not vice-versa is your respective upbringings, then you don't actually believe that there is better reason to believe p than q, and so you are almost contradicting yourself. So what gives?

I have, I think, a partial answer. Rationality cannot touch every concept. If I say that my favorite color is red, am I being rational? What could that even mean? If I say that I love Indian food, is that irrational? Well, maybe from certain health perspectives (I don't think it is, by the way!), but from a purely aesthetic perspective, how can it be? Is my liking of the New York Mets, or Rocco Mediate, or Bobby Jones, a matter of rationality? Well, no, of course not. (One can argue about my disliking of the Yankees, as I have done in the previous post. I think that is within the scope of rationalism, but only marginally.)

So let's say that we posited a hypothetical long-lost twin of mine who had been raised in a conservative household and was, accordingly, conservative. Obviously I recognize that this is not an implausible situation. (Cohen uses this device in his lecture.) Is it true to say that we have "equally valid" epistemological grounds for our respective beliefs? I could try to argue that conservativism is simply less well rationally or empirically grounded than liberalism, and of course I believe that; I have to believe it, being a liberal, don't I? But I only somewhat believe it, and I don't think it's important, at least not in this context.

Logical systems need postulates. All of them do. And those postulates, by definition, cannot be proven within the logical system. You have to make some assumptions to get going. That is why, incidentally, science never rigorously proves anything: it has no postulates. But I think this relates to matters of conviction just as well; in fact, this is a big part of my philosophy, and a big part of my problem with the philosophy of rationality. I think, and this is an idea born of experience and many, many heated arguments, that the difference between me and a conservative is not a matter of our proceeding differently within the same logical universe. We simply have different postulates. These "moral postulates," one could call them, might be bedrock moral convictions, like my belief in an all-pervading kindness. Is that belief "rational"? Well, no, but neither is it irrational, because it is not a belief about the way the world is. Now, perhaps I could argue my kind of kindness as rational based on some other moral postulate, and I think I can in fact do this, but that's really beside the point. This also means that one cannot really critique Nazis or the Klan as "irrational," per se, because with the right (or in this case, very very wrong!) moral postulate one can make almost anything one wants become logically correct. One can critique them as unreasonable, which is really an attack on their postulates themselves, and obviously I think this is a correct attack, but of course "unreasonable" doesn't really mean what it sounds like it means; it means "not fair or sensible," which I think any possible bedrock postulate for Nazism must be considered.

So yes, I am a liberal because I was raised liberal, but this really means that I believe in kindness because I was raised to believe in kindness, and this is okay. I don't have a better reason for believing in kindness than my hypothetical twin does for believing in whatever their bedrock postulate is, because neither of us has a logical reason for believing either, and nor do we need one. This is also why I feel like it can be a waste of time for, say, me to argue with a conservative, say Christian Drappi: we're just not going to agree, because we aren't in the same logical universe. We could argue about whose postulates are more reasonable, and when we happen to share a conviction we might be able to proceed from there. But I think this is an answer to how it can be rational to hold a belief even if you know you only hold it because you were raised that way: not every belief is within the jurisdiction of rationality, and that's okay.

Incidentally, Cohen observes that one way or another, someone who believes something they know they only believe due to upbringing must also believe that they were lucky to be brought up that way, and sure enough, I do, though that's not the only reason why I think I got a little lucky in my allocation of ancestors.