A reason need not cause anything, and beliefs and actions need not be caused by reasons constituting a justification. But when beliefs or actions are so caused, we are in the domain of the rational. The more extended examples in the following sections should further clarify when beliefs and actions are rationally caused and when not.
5. Justifications
The reasons forming a justification relate to each other as premises and conclusions, for a justification is an argument. But unlike some other arguments, a justification solicits a commitment to a belief or an action. In theoretical reasoning, a justification seeks belief, in practical reasoning, action.11 A justification implicitly claims to be decisive, or, at least, worthy of commitment all things considered. It suggests that after subarguments have been summed and counterarguments weighed, its deliverances ought to be accepted. Only an argument which is understood as soliciting belief or action in accordance with its conclusion is a justification.12
Like any argument, and on the same basis as any argument, a purported justification can be sound or unsound. Its premises may or may not be true, and, if true, they may or may not entail or provide strong support for its conclusion. Therefore, we must further refine the notion of rationality; rationality is a sensitivity to sound justifications.13 It is an inclination to believe the conclusion of a sound theoretical justification or to act in accordance with the conclusion of a sound practical justification.
This conceptualization is an idealization. It describes Reason when it is successfully being itself. But, what passes for Reason, is often not the thing itself. We colloquially refer to failed attempts at reasoning as a kind of rationality. We feel rational when we are sincerely trying to be rational, that is, whenever we are moved by an (usually implicit) argument. Alas, sensitivity to unsound purported justifications is common among the creatures we call rational—and indeed, this quasi-rationality may be as close as we usually get to true rationality. I think we are frequently moved by justifications, but because rationality is sensitivity to sound justification, our actions are rarely fully rational. Vague, if not outright false premises, often undermine full rationality, and even when all the premises are precise and accurate, the arguments that motivate us are usually too complex to be supposed free of faulty inferences. Even with the best epistemic will in the world, we will more often than not act with less than full justification. Quasi-rationality is the rational faculty gone astray, but this is not necessarily the faculty’s fault. We often lack the resources to discover the flaw in a purported justification. “Quasi” in quasi-rationality simply means a mistake is being made, and mistakes lurk in all unsound justifications, or they would not be unsound. However, mistakes are often guiltless and unavoidable. Our inability to be perfectly rational no more makes us irrational than our (related) inability to be perfectly good makes us evil. Still, in the complete absence of a capacity to respond, on occasion, differentially to sound and unsound justifications, or at least to understand the distinction, we would not even have this quasi-rationality. An aspiration to rationality is an essential ingredient of rationality.
At least as common as quasi-rationality, but more distantly related, is pseudo-rationality. We often construct justifications, whether sound or unsound, to decorate our beliefs or actions, although these proffered justifications play absolutely no role in generating the belief or action. We call this “rationalizing,” pretending rationality, rather than being rational. To adapt an epigram, rationalizations are the compliments that prejudice, habit, feeling, and instinct pay to Reason. Our approval and pride in rationality is demonstrated by how often we assign our beliefs and actions rational parentage, regardless of the true circumstances of their birth. Sometimes pseudo-rationality is meant to fool others. More often, we are after self-delusion. Frequently, both self and other are the target dupes. A politician may use bad arguments to persuade voters to elect him, but these arguments are probably most effective at persuading the politician that he ought to be elected. It is pleasant for him to think that Reason caused him to seek office, regardless of the true cause. This is pseudo- rather than quasi-rationality, because the politician is not running as a result of mistaking an unsound argument for sound. Rather the argument played no role at all in his seeking office. Whether sound or unsound, the argument, causally speaking, was pure window dressing.
Surely many of our beliefs and actions are not caused by justifications, let alone sound justifications, and so our rationality is very partial. We can act and believe without reason, for no reason at all, even against reason, and we often do. We can act and believe in accord with reason, although we might not be acting from reason when we do so. That too is surely common. Still, if with sufficient frequency, we believe or act because of Reason, or perhaps more importantly, if at any given time we are liable to be moved by reasons, we are capable of Reason. Capabilities need not be exercised to exist, but it is consoling to note, that our rational capabilities, however underutilized, are not left completely idle. Justifications, including some which may be sound, do cause us to believe things and do things—at least once in a while.
An illustration may be helpful: it is raining and I put on my boots. The rain, in company with a number of other elements, is a reason for me to put on my boots, because there is at least one justification for my wearing boots that includes the rain.14 But that justification which includes the rain may have nothing to do with how I dress. It may happen that I put on my boots as a fashion statement in complete ignorance of the rain. In that case, the rain would still be a reason for me to wear boots; however, I would not have acted from that reason. Indeed, the rain may not be a reason causing me to put on the boots even if it causally contributed to my wearing the boots and is a reason for me to put on the boots. Maybe the rain sounded like hoof-beats on my roof, which caused me to dream of cowboys, which caused me to wear my boots. So the rain, while being a reason for me to wear boots, and a cause of my wearing boots, in this instance would not have been, in its role as a reason, a cause of my wearing boots. I was not acting rationally when I put on the boots (although, because the rain did justify boot-wearing, I was acting in accord with reason). A reason is a constituent of a justification, and rationality is the capacity to believe or act because of a justification. The justification for my putting on boots that included rain was not why I wore boots.
This description of believing or acting out of reason does not require consciousness of the role that reason may be playing. A justification, in whole or in part, might be causally effective without one’s being conscious of it. Indeed, we philosophy teachers are often engaged in excavating and bringing to consciousness justifications which have shaped our students’ beliefs and actions. This is not to deny that we probably spend considerably more time constructing justifications for beliefs and actions whose causes are quite other than that those dialectically constructed justifications. But these rationalizing processes should not to be sneered at. Building a sound justification is a first step in being moved by it.
Benjamin Franklin quipped that the advantage of being a rational animal is that you can rationalize anything.15 It was not meant as a compliment, and the cynical construction of insincerely offered rationales are indeed a vice. But our rational aspirations, the capacity and penchant to construct and be moved by justifications and to judge ourselves by standards of rationality, are unavoidably accompanied by their natural, although perverted, cousins—sophistical rationalizations. Pseudo-rationality honors the real thing even as it betrays it.
The inclination to believe the conclusion