What does it mean to be irrational? Believing against reasons

I'm sure there are many components to irrationality, as all substantive philosophical terms have layers.

Here's one layer: To be irrational is to believe against reason.

You have 'reasons' plural and you have 'reason,' sometimes spelled with a capital R. Reason (capital R) is related to reasons, but for now I'll focus on reasons. To be irrational is to believe against reasons. Reasons are answers to why questions and are marked by reason-markers. The standard English reason-marker is 'because.' Why did you [do, say, think, believe, desire] X? Because... [insert reason].

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-internal-external/

The Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM): "Desires are necessary and beliefs are not sufficient for motivation."

Counterfactual Motivation version of reasons-internalism (CM): "An agent has no reason to do A if there is no possibility of her being motivated to do A."

From these two, it follows:

The Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR): "If there is a reason for someone to do something, then she must have some desire that would be served by her doing it."

I reject HTR. So, I must reject either HTM, CM, or both. I agree that desires are necessary for motivation and that beliefs are not enough by themselves. I'm not sure whether beliefs are necessary for motivation. It seems like primitive animals have desires and thus motivations, but they don't have beliefs, at least not propositional ones. I imagine a creature that is complex enough to have desires, which requires consciousness, would be complex enough to have at least non-propositional beliefs. So I accept HTM, reject CM.

 

I accept Moral Rationalism (MR), which says: "if something is morally wrong then there must be a reason not to do it."

 

I accept Moral Absolutism (MA): "Some actions are morally wrong for any agent no matter what motivations and desires they have."

 

I want to clarify MA. I slightly take issue with this exact phrasing from the SEP article. My version is more like:

 

MA*: Motivating reasons are not always justifying reasons. If the real reasons to refrain from an action outweigh the real reasons to perform that action, then performing that action is wrong no matter what motivations or desires a person might have for performing that action.

There are internal reasons and external reasons. Internal reasons are the actual reasons a person would give for doing, saying, thinking, believing, or desiring something. Then you have external reasons, which are judgment-independent reasons for doing, saying, thinking, believing, or desiring something. When your internal reasons match external ones, you are being rational. When your internal reasons fail to match external ones, you are being irrational.

 

This is closely related to explanationism in knowledge. If the truth of the proposition explains your belief, then you have external justification. So external reasons and external justification refer to the same idea.

 

External reasons are mysterious. Are they abstract objects floating about mysteriously in some Platonic Realm?
 
If someone says there are no good reasons to believe that the earth is round, that is a false claim about external reasons. If you believe you are going to heaven because someone said you were, that's not a good reason to believe this, unless there was something very special about this person, such as them claiming to be God and performing miracles that only God could perform.

 
Inevitably, it seems like we are forced to, in some way, disparage the quality of the person (qua organism) who believes against reasons. Of course, we can do this is a judgment-free way. This is easy when you already reject free will and thus reject personal blame. Without personal blame, there is no internal irrationality. That is, no person (qua subject) can be blamed for their believing against reasons. Either they believed against reasons because they were ignorant of the reasons to believe, or did not possess the cognitive capacity needed to understand the reasons to believe, or because they had been brainwashed or indoctrinated, or so on. All these factors are beyond the person's control. It's no one's fault that their internal reasons fail to match up with external reasons whenever there is such a mismatch.
 
Inevitably, to make sense of external reasons, it also seems that we are forced to appeal to what smart people believe or would believe, or what a person would believe were they a smarter version of themselves.

 

Graham Oppy has said that he believes in "doxastic permissivism," which is the view that there are multiple, incompatible positions that can be rationally taken on an issue. So he says that belief in God is rational, if anything because there certainly are people who are intelligent, rational, well-informed, who are genuine truthseekers, etc., who genuinely believe that God exists. But he also says there are no good arguments for God. He also says he is virtually certain that God does not exist.
 
First, it doesn't make sense to say that there are two opposing rational positions on an issue. If reasons are such that they pull equally in two opposing directions, then the rational thing to do is to be agnostic. You shouldn't be confident in either position. If there are reasons that pull in two opposing directions, but most of the weight is in favor of one side, then it makes sense to favor that side.
 
Two, it doesn't make sense to say that belief in God is rational despite there being no good arguments for belief in God. A good argument for God would expose good reasons to believe in God, the kind of reasons that would explain why people well-connected to reality (through their intelligence and knowledge) believe in God.
 
If there are no good indications that belief in God is caused by the existence of God, then belief in God is not rational, especially if there are good indications that belief in God is caused by other things.
 
Justification is that connection between belief and cause of belief that allows you to see that 1) it must be the case that reality is causing your belief, or 2) that reality's causing your belief is the best explanation for your belief, or 3) that it's very likely that reality is causing your belief, depending on how we define justification.

 

That connection is made up of reasons. So good reasons are those reasons that fashion the right kind of connection, a connection that won't lead you astray. Bias causes us to believe for bad reasons, which is why there is such a taboo around bias (i.e., accusations of bias feel harsh).