Maybe you saw John McCumber’s excellent look at The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy in the Times’ Stone column a few weeks back. Don’t be put off by the academic tone – this is concrete stuff and very much worth your time, especially with July 4th approaching. McCumber traces that most precious tenet of American individualism, that we are free agents making rational choices, casting it as the national dogma that (still) shapes our economic and governmental realities – despite the myriad and increasingly self-evident philosophical misgivings about its validity. If it sounds like a chapter from The Social Animal, that’s because it sort of is. The ethical implications that McCumber outlines are particularly relevant, as is his invocation of Hegel’s appeal to community as the arbiter of meaning/value. Essentially, the language of choice is both deceptive and deceived, ignoring both the randomness of nature and the compromised human will (or, as we might say, the providence of God and the broken/bound creature). It’s not doing us any favors, in other words:
One prominent component of America’s basic vocabulary is ”individualism.” Our society accords unique rights and freedoms to individuals, and we are so proud of these that we recurrently seek to install them in other countries. But individualism, the desire to control one’s own life, has many variants. Tocqueville viewed it as selfishness and suspected it, while Emerson and Whitman viewed it as the moment-by-moment expression of one’s unique self and loved it.
After World War II, a third variant gained momentum in America. It defined individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one’s preferences. This differed from “selfish individualism” in that the preferences were not specified: they could be altruistic as well as selfish. It differed from “expressive individualism” in having general algorithms by which choices were made. These made it rational…
Once established in universities, rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and government (aided in the crossing, to be sure, by the novels of another Rand—Ayn). Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices. Wars have been and are still being fought to bring such freedom to Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Grenadans, and now Libyans, with more nations surely to come.
At home, anti-regulation policies are crafted to appeal to the view that government must in no way interfere with Americans’ freedom of choice. Even religions compete in the marketplace of salvation, eager to be chosen by those who, understandably, prefer heaven to hell. Today’s most zealous advocates of individualism, be they on Wall Street or at Tea Parties, invariably forget their origins in a long ago program of government propaganda.
Rational choice philosophy, to its credit, made clear and distinct claims in philosophy’s three main areas. Ontologically, its emphasis on individual choice required that reality present a set of discrete alternatives among which one could choose: linear “causal chains” which intersected either minimally, trivially, or not at all. Epistemologically, that same emphasis on choice required that at least the early stages of such chains be knowable with something akin to certainty, for if our choice is to be rational we need to know what we are choosing. Knowledge thus became foundationalistic and incremental.
But the real significance of rational choice philosophy lay in ethics. Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them. Rational choice philosophy seems to maintain this ethical neutrality (see Hans Reichenbach’s 1951 “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy,” an unwitting masterpiece of the genre); but it does not. Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!
…Rational choice theory came under fire after the economic crisis of 2008, but remains central to economic analysis. Rational choice philosophy, by contrast, was always implausible. Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us; and ethical life correspondingly consists, not in pursuing wealth and power, but in integrating ourselves into the right kinds of community.
If philosophers cannot refrain from absolutizing choice within philosophy itself, they cannot critique it elsewhere. If they did, they could begin formulating a comprehensive alternative to rational choice philosophy — and to the blank collectivism of Cold War Stalinism — as opposed to the specific criticisms advanced so far. The result might look quite a bit like Hegel in its view that individual freedom is of value only when communally guided. Though it would be couched, one must hope, in clearer prose.
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11 responses to “American Individualism and the Slow Death of Rational Choice Philosophy”
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The fact that you’re taking this article seriously is not a good sign. As Tyler Cowen said, it took me a while to realize this is not satire. Aside from the fact that many of the phrases used here just don’t have any meaning, I honestly can’t see in what way it’s grounded in fact. I’m not aware of anyone who has ever seriously subscribed to anything like the “rational choice theory” described here.
“Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices.”
Give me a break.
“Ontologically, its emphasis on individual choice required that reality present a set of discrete alternatives among which one could choose: linear “causal chains” which intersected either minimally, trivially, or not at all.”
What does that even mean?
“Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them.”
Why don’t you ask an actual economist whether this stuff is meaningful?
If the whole point of the article was to say, “Hey, it’s wrong to just care about increasing your wealth and power,” well, this could be couched, one must hope, in clearer prose…
“Ontologically, its emphasis on individual choice required that reality present a set of discrete alternatives among which one could choose: linear “causal chains” which intersected either minimally, trivially, or not at all.”
What does that even mean?
If I’m not mistaken, it means that life presents us with clear, easily comprehensible alternatives among which we have the ability to choose. As a matter of fact, I’ve just been engaged in another discussion online in which someone asked why in the world a certain group of smart people would make a certain dumb choice. I think rational choice philosophy presumptions shape the thinking of many modern people even if they haven’t read the straight stuff or even heard its name.
The history of the idea of rational choice seems to me to demonstrate that the innate desire to control one’s life becomes a belief that such control could be possible only when a person has a certain level of wealth and power, and so the choice that gives more of either or both of these is driving one’s decisions, and we are not free at all.
I appreciate very much the point that the illusion of free choice is sustained by the belief that there is one way above others that leads to happiness, and that a person has the ability to discern it and direct himself that way. My life has so far has shown the opposite of both these statements.
“Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them.”
Why don’t you ask an actual economist whether this stuff is meaningful?”
Hi Jameson!
Not an actual economist here as I elected to work in the real economy and sign paychecks every other week, but maybe I’ll suffice to reply?
Our $1 billion apartment management company spends a tidy sum each year tracking consumer behavior to recognize how a consumer will make decisions about where, when, and how to rent an apartment. Each one of those decisions works to maximize the marginal utility of the renters’ own home. And wouldn’t you know it, “What choice would a rational consumer make?” is precisely the question that our CEO writes at the top of every development meeting agenda! When we began to notice a correlation between length of leases residents would renew and the quality of school districts as measured in test scores, we shifted our acquisitions focus to properties in the highest-scoring school districts of the major metropolitan areas in our footprint. The growth generated by this decision alone has nearly doubled our asset valuation in a single year and is currently propelling our firm’s IPO.
“Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices.”
Give me a break.
I can’t give you a break, but I can give you a tip based on more than a little exposure to economic theory: every company you buy from, with the possible exception of the locally-owned, “mission-oriented” coffee shop on the corner, is tracking your behavior to predict precisely which rational consumer choice you will make for the express purpose of presenting you with what you’re likely to choose before you even know you want it. Facebook has never had a subscription fee or made a profit off its advertisers, but investors are so desperate for Facebook shares that a company making a tiny purchase of its stock yesterday morning doubled in value once a rumor of that purchase floated down Wall Street. Facebook’s IPO will be a Rorschach test writ large, but the one thing every analyst agrees on is this: Mark Zuckerberg will make an ungodly sum by selling insight into the rational consumer choices of 750 million active Facebook users’ rationale choices as exemplified by what the profess to “Like!”.
Whether Cowen takes issue with the philosophical underpinnings of the argument is irrelevant. Based on the blog post you’ve cited, I would suggest that Cowen’s actual objection is to implied notion that philosophy departments are of equal value to law firms, irrespective of precisely the rational consumer choices that are shuttering Arts programs while promulgating twice as many law school grads as law firms have openings (per yesterday’s Times). Knee-jerk reactions to an idea that utility can be divorced from value is what defines economists. Suffice it to say, the objections you are citing are not the objections he is citing.
If the whole point of the article was to say, “Hey, it’s wrong to just care about increasing your wealth and power,” well, this could be couched, one must hope, in clearer prose…
If you think this is the point of the article, then you clearly spent insufficient time reading it. The point is that we have arrived a socio-historical moment in which the individual through his choice is the sole arbiter of value, and value is understood exclusively in terms of economics. Value in this system cannot be intrinsic. Period. Value is assigned by individual estimation. The economists you are appealing to believe this is precisely as it should be, as the formula for relating cost to value necessarily implicates everyone involved in the transaction, whether they have been asked to appraise the value involved or not.
Christianity is nothing if not bad economics, as that which has the most infinite marginal utility to me comes at cost to someone else. Free market economics is grounded entirely on eradicating precisely this transaction.
Excellent point, Jeff–Economics does take as its fundamental principle the assumption that all human choice aims to maximize utility and is rational. There’s a new branch of economics that challenges this assumption (Behavioral econ.) and uses insights from psychology to show how humans often fail to make utility-maximizing choices–ordering Hotel Rwanda, for example (search Netflix phenomenon).
Economists would explain the netflix phenomenon by making a distinction between decision utility and experienced utility–in other words, we enjoy choosing Hotel Rwanda but enjoy watching something closer to You’ve Got Mail.
This turn towards examining human irrationality–which is new for economics, at least–recognizes human irrationality and limitation. It’s academics finally revising the modern rational-choice anthropology to something closer to what we Christians believe in.
I think it’s an insightful piece, and that it makes a lot of sense. Jameson, the idea that nobody is expressing this stuff, or operating with it as their philosophical baseline is, I think, a bit naive. Americans are currently obsessed with “choice”. It’s the bottom line philosophy of every Hollywood movie. See it, for example, in the trailer for the newest Transformers 3 movie, coming straight out of the mouth of Optimus Prime. Or you can find it present in every John Galt bumper sticker, and in the mouth of every liberatarian. That a critique of “choices” is viewed as an attack, only reveals the depth of insight, rather than the abstraction, of the material. It touches a deep place, a shot to the heart; it does not whizz by like a bullet in the Matrix.
I personally think that Christian philosophy speaks very powerfully in the way that it critiques a Pelagian approach to life. The overlaps of Pelagius and “Rational Choice Theory” are unmistakable because they are so similar in essence. The unfortunate reality is that people lack compassion for others to the exact extent that they are holding onto these kinds of (untrue) ideas about human nature (that it is grounded in choice). There is no more sympathetic critique/refutation of rational choice theory than Paul’s in Romans 7, which we are reading this week. I really appreciate the material from Wegner along the same lines (http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Conscious-Will-Bradford-Books/dp/0262232227). Or Freud for that matter.
No matter how you slice it, reality (e.g., day-to-day life) affirms that people are not, at their core, simply making rational choices in the way that modern day American individualism is still trying to uphold. It’s romantic and overly simplistic. There are so many different factors that inform a person’s behavior (unconscious and conscious, from within and without), and rationality is at the end of the line. It serves primarily to justify the decisions we have found ourselves to be making, not to make them in the first place. This is ground where the empirical data, the ancient wisdom of Christianity, and modern psychology and philosophy are all in huge agreement.
“A person must lose his life in order to find it”. The loss of a life has a huge amount to do with letting go of “choice” as the way one makes sense of one’s own behaviors and that of other people in the world (more accurately, it is forced out of you by suffering and by grace). Desperation and self-interest (and hopefully, on occasion, God’s intervenient grace) as the primary decision-making motivators makes much more sense of the data of day-to-day life than the trite notion of choices. Can we re-run “the free will song” video again?
Here’s a quote from Moltmann that points to the same thing: “The Gospel is death to action-consequence (read: “causal chains”) thinking.”
What this article does well is identify one of the single most important problems with humanity, as specifically demonstrated in US Political philosophy. And, yes, I’ll make the generalized statement, because to think that individualism is restricted to only the “right” or “conservative” politics in America is a huge misnomer. From the very beginning our politic has been centered on the individual, “my right,” as JAZ articulated “my choice”. From coast to coast, through all of our political and economic leanings, America is steeped in choice and the protection of those choices and rights. This is the classic definition of America’s liberalism (an no i don’t mean the term typically used to describe the Democrat party). America, through and through is liberal in that to be liberal is to elevate the individual. All of vary on this spectrum liberalness…and so has the history of America’s politics and economics; this is why Rands philosophy finds very fertile soil (for some, my former life included ;D). Even the current trend of our political and economic shifting toward a welfare state is still couched in terms of rights, choices, and (i’ll add a new word here) entitlement.
So the article poses a very insightful diagnosis about the state and reality of our condition, specifically in America; and is accurate, specifically from a Gospel perspective.
And, as JAZ pointed out by eloquently quoting Jesus, the individual must suffer death. And here is where the article leaves you hanging. The conclusion that one infers is: well if individualism is bad then I should be communal in my attitudes, ethics, etc. But one problem, one can’t just do this. The individual must suffer a death. In order for me to be oriented outside of myself toward another, I must suffer a death and be brought into a new life; this is the event of the individual being encountered by the cross. For me to truly be ‘others-focused’ I must lose myself; if we take the Gospel seriously, that loss only occurs at the foot of the cross…At the foot of the cross I am made aware of my need (serious need) for an Other who is Jesus and in this outward directedness towards Christ, I am directed toward others.
Thus, the remedy to American hyper-individualism lies not solely in a transformation of our political and economic philosophies (though this seems to be always needed), but in the proclamation of the Gospel AND how those who have heard reflect that one-way love that loved us first, those who have heard forgive as they have been forgiven. One-way Love and forgiveness are radical and contradict individualism precisely in that I cannot do this on my own nor do I have the power of ‘rational choice’ to conjure such emotions and that both are focused not on me but on another.
Interestingly, “individual” and “individualism” don’t need to be thrown out in the same bath water. In that Jesus says that to find my life I must lose it, is the statement not just of the death of the self but of the giving back of the self as well (maybe more properly defined as the “correctly re-oriented self”). There is plenty in Scripture to point to the necessity of the individual that participates in forming the body…Truly the gospel will give us BOTH true community that is others-focused and give us ourselves…
I suspect Jameson is right and that the article suffers from a tissue of confusions (in spite of not having read it–Im sure David summarizes it properly). Rational choice theory is not a “philosophy” insofar as that word is intended to imply a normative take on human behavior. It is merely a tool economists make use of to describe such behavior. That such theory works pretty darn well in describing behavior in markets explains its power and continuing sway among economists. See a piece by Steven Levitt in the journal “Science” a couple of years ago explaining why neoclassical economists remained undismayed by the rise of behavioral economics. One can have a Christian take on human psychology and still admit the explanatory power of economic theory in the realm it seeks to explain.
The strand of political philosophy that values human autonomy and choice in a normative way seems to me to be social contract theory. People like Rawls are the one’s who want to pitch society as it should be as a product of autonomous human choices made from a pre-social standpoint.
I’m really questioning how a lot of you guys (including the author of the article in question) are using the word “rational.” I would say most of our major institutions–particularly the government and major corporations–assume that we’re actually pretty dumb, and make decisions based on pretty dumb things. Of course they’re right. Put your item at eye level at the super-market, and you’ll sell more of that item. Shower your audience with flowery pictures and colorful rhetoric, and they’ll go with that. Moreover, we live in a time when government already has plenty of unnecessary, obtrusive, and overall quite detrimental controls on our lives. And now some people are calling for more, while others are calling for less. In what sense is any of this new? How does this signal the decline of a philosophy?
The economists you claim support this hyper-individualism which you find insidious are actually among the quickest to critique it. I can’t recommend highly enough an essay by F. A. Hayek, called, “Individualism: True and False.”
Overall, however, I think what’s going on in these comments is an over-conflation of too many disparate economic, social, and theological issues. This is what worries me in general when Christians talk about our political and social values. It gets so tangled up in theological mantras that precision is completely lost.
Jameson, it’s certainly true that to speak of the death of a philosophy is to apply a broad-brush to history for the benefit of one’s argument. The shift away from rationalist presuppositions in many senses has been a long time coming.
To clarify my terms, when I saw rationalist I generally mean the french enlightenment, as opposed to the British enlightenment – which David Brooks views much more favorably. That said, I’m not sure I’d say that if something is irrational it means that someone is being “dumb”. Irrationality has its many virtues, as well as vices. So, it’s not so much that irrationality is an enemy, since it overturns rational choice and willing, but rather that irrationality can have harmful outcomes.
But, I’m actually not really sure what your objection is. In what way is there a lack of precision of terms? What’s your preferred definition for rational, and how should it be used? Do you think that a the turn away from rationality to subrationality is harmful? Help me out here!