Reasoning under Scarcity

ABSTRACT

Practical deliberation consists in thinking about what to do. Such deliberation is deemed rational when it conforms to certain normative requirements. What is often ignored is the role that an agent's context can play in so-called ‘failures’ of rationality. In this paper, I use recent cognitive science research investigating the effects of resource-scarcity on decision-making and cognitive function to argue that context plays an important role in determining which norms should structure an agent's deliberation. This evidence undermines the view that the norms of ‘ideal’ rationality are necessary and universal requirements on deliberation. They are a solution to the problems faced by cognitively limited agents in a context of moderate scarcity. In a context of severe scarcity, the problems faced by cognitively limited agents are different and require deliberation structured by different norms. Agents reason rationally when they use the norms best suited to their context and cognitive capacities.

KEYWORDS:

• rational requirements
• practical reasoning
• rationality

Notes

¹ I will use ‘deliberation’ and ‘reasoning’ interchangeably throughout, for rule-guided thinking concerned with deciding what to do or believe.

² The view I offer here is similar to that proposed in psychology by Gerd Gigerenzer [1991, 1996] and his collaborators [Todd and Gigerenzer 2000; Goldstein and Gigerenzer 2002; Todd and Gigerenzer 2007]. However, their account is based on an evolutionary argument; my view is not.

³ Recent work in this area has focused on whether the requirements of practical reason are narrow or instead wide in scope—whether they require you to adopt particular attitudes in virtue of having other attitudes (i.e. to intend what you believe to be the necessary means to your ends) or to avoid certain combinations of attitudes (i.e. satisfying the requirement by either intending the necessary means, giving up on the end, or changing your belief concerning the connection between the means and the end). I follow the wide-scope formulation, although I do not argue for it here (see Broome [2007]).

⁴ I use ‘practical norms’, ‘rational requirements’, and ‘normative requirements’ interchangeably throughout the paper.

⁵ Bratman's [1987] earlier work also seems to endorse such a view.

⁶ However, we might engage in a new kind of deliberative process employing different norms.

⁷ Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point.

⁸ Mullainathan and Shafir give a colloquial definition of scarcity as ‘having less than you feel you need’ [2013: 4].

⁹ A Raven's Matrix is a non-verbal test in which a subject is asked to select a picture to complete a pattern given by a series of pictures. It is used to test problem-solving skills. A Stroop test measures cognitive control by asking, for example, a subject to name the colour of a series of letters that spell the name of a different colour. There are many variations of this test; in most, the subject is required to exert cognitive control when faced with incongruent stimuli.

¹⁰ Given that the participants are offered financial incentives to do well, it appears that this effect on their problem-solving in turn affects their capacity to respond to the financial incentives.

¹¹ The difficulty in disentangling these elements appears to affect even the results of tests that purport to test only fluid intelligence, such as IQ tests [Duckworth, Quinn et al. 2011].

¹² To reiterate, my focus in this paper is on practical rationality, not theoretical rationality.

¹³ Angry Birds is a game in which participants accumulate points by shooting a bird at a target.

¹⁴ It should be noted that the experiment recreated conditions of scarcity in the lab setting, but did not use participants (as far as I know) who were themselves resource-poor outside the lab setting.

¹⁵ According to Holton, resolutions are policies that are formed precisely to avoid temptation. There is little evidence in these cases that the agents have formed such resolutions or that they see their short-term goals as ‘temptations.’

¹⁶ Thanks to Gerard Vong for this suggestion.

¹⁷ Here I follow the model of creature reconstruction deployed by Michael Bratman [2000] and inspired by H.P. Grice.

¹⁸ I have offered a defence of this view elsewhere [2010].

¹⁹ See note 2.

²⁰ Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify these connections.

²¹ Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to draw this connection explicitly.

²² Some might be tempted to argue that, if the customer is sufficiently well-off, then she is not being irrational in failing to deliberate in a cost-efficient way. However, if, by the customer's own lights, she would rather pay less for the same product, then she is deliberating in a way that is at odds with her own preferences and is thus, according to standard theories of rationality, irrational.

²³ Thanks to Geoff Sayre-McCord for the analogy.

²⁴ An analogous point could be made about the person who engages in long-term deliberation but finds herself in an exceptional resource-scarce situation in which short-term efficiency is favoured. ‘Thank you’ to an anonymous referee for this point.

²⁵ An additional consideration that I cannot develop here is the issue of recalcitrance. If agents cannot significantly alter the norms that they use in reasoning, then we would have to take this into account in our evaluation. However, if agents cannot alter at all the way they deliberate, then there would be no room for a genuinely normative theory of rationality. Fortunately, the evidence I have presented suggests that this is not the case: agents do deliberate differently, depending on factors such as availability of resources. ‘Thank you’ to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this point.

²⁶ Compare this with the critique of ideal theories of justice by Charles Mills [2005]

²⁷ Some interpret Marx and Hegel as having a similar position, but it is not prevalent in the contemporary literature on practical reasoning.

²⁸ I'm grateful to the two anonymous referees for this journal, Luc Bovens, Erin Beeghly, Michael Bratman, Rachel Fredericks, Elizabeth Harman, Judith Lichtenberg, Hanti Lin, Geoff Sayre-McCord, Michael Smith, and Sarah Paul for their insightful feedback, and to Jason Anderson for editing assistance. I'm indebted to audiences at the Princeton Workshop in Normative Philosophy, Fordham University's Ethics and Epistemology Workshop, the Mentoring Project for Pre-Tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy, the St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, the NYC Early Career Ethics Workshop, the CUNY Junior Philosophy Faculty Research Group, the CUNY Graduate Center Philosophy Colloquium, and the Binghamton University Philosophy Colloquium for their questions and comments. Research for this paper was carried out while I was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty fellow at the Princeton Center for Human Values with additional support from the CUNY Scholar Incentive Program. The final stage of this project was supported by a Philosophy and Psychology of Self-Control Grant [# 49684] from the Templeton Foundation.

Additional information

Funding

City College of New York [Scholar Incentive Award]; John Templeton Foundation [49684]; University Center for Human Values, Princeton University [Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow].