Good/bad (Value) vs good/bad (Success)

Introduce a pluralism about badness/goodness. Good (Value) refers to intrinsic goods, extrinsic goods, and saving goods. These are objective, undeniable, judgment-independent, and mistake-making in a non-goal sense.

That is, if a certain intrinsic good takes place, and someone denies that it takes place, then the denier is wrong. They are mistaken. And they are mistaken regardless of anyone's judgment as to whether they are mistaken. They are mistaken relative to a non-goal fact.

A failure, by contrast, is a mistake relative to a goal fact. Epistemic mistakes are failures, though in some cases they can be bad too. For example, it's bad to believe p without evidence that p. This is bad (failure), and may also be bad (value).

A mistake is to regard p as true when p is not true, where 'regarding' is some minimal doxastic attitude.

So just as physical facts (e.g. the earth is round) are mistake-making in a non-relative sense, value facts are mistake-making in a non-relative sense. Value facts include facts about happiness and pain, which are instantiations of intrinsic good and intrinsic evil. Depending on philosophy of mind, value facts are physical facts. Or you could say there are goal facts and non-goal facts (world facts). Both physical facts and value facts are world facts.

Good / bad (success) is when something is a success / failure with respect to some goal. 

If I write 'snuflowre', that's a mistake relative to the goal of spelling 'sunflower' correctly. Snuflowre is bad (success) spelling, but not necessarily bad (value).

The problem with only having value facts is that there are epistemic facts that are undeniable mistakes, but they don't necessarily constitute extrinsic or depriving evils. So we have to introduce a second kind of badness.

This seems to cut against monoaxiology. There is, in fact, more than one kind of badness / being wrong. Failure is not necessarily intrinsically bad, extrinsically bad, or a depriving bad. Depending on the system, failure can be intrinsically, extrinsically, and/or a saving good.

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).

Ambiguity of rationality in addiction behavior

As follow up to this post: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/03/stream-of-consciousness-doxastic.html

I want to revisit an idea. I said that in theory a perfectly rational person is immune to addiction, because a perfectly rational person would be perfectly sensitive to reasons. The reasons to refrain from the addiction behavior would cause the perfectly rational person to be so bothered by engaging in the addiction behavior that this bothering would overpower the bother from the withdrawal symptoms, and so always successfully resist the urges generated by the addiction.

This would seem to mean that, technically, addiction always disparages the rationality of the person addicted. But this is not the case. If all a person's addiction says about them is that they are not perfectly rational, then effectively this says nothing because all humans are not perfectly rational. What we really want to know is whether a person's irrationality is a special cause of their addiction behavior.

There could be two addicts who have identical levels of rationality, and yet one engages in the addiction behavior far more than the other. How could this be? The answer is that susceptibility to addiction depends on one's genetics, brain structure (especially the "reward centers" of the brain), hormones, chemical balances, and so on. Alcoholism is famously strongly genetically correlated.

So if one person is in the throes of an addiction, it's ambiguous to what degree this disparages the addict's rationality. The addict might simply be very unfortunate to be attached to a body and brain that comes with the absolute perfect combination of genetic factors to render them highly susceptible to addiction to the point that even a highly rational person will have their sensitivity to reasons overruled by the pleasure/pain calculation caused by their addiction.

However, if the addict has a strong desire to overcome their addiction, and can express recognition of the reasons to refrain from the addiction behavior, then this is evidence that it’s not the case that this person’s irrationality is a special cause of their addiction behavior, and it's more of their unfortunate biological susceptibility that is driving the addiction behavior.

But if the addict shows no signs of recognition of the reasons to refrain from the addiction behavior, and even expresses a delight or approval of their behavior, or denies that they are addicted or denies any wrongness of the behavior, then this suggests it's more of the innate irrationality of the addict that is driving the behavior rather than the susceptibility of the addict.

This is a bit silly, because no one chooses to have the "innate irrationality" that drives engagement in addiction behavior anymore than anyone chooses to have the genetics that drives engagement in addiction behavior. So both addicts are equally blameless in their addiction. Of course, I don't believe in free will, so I believe that everyone is blameless anyway and is a mere victim of circumstance.

But victimhood comes in different forms, and it's useful to know what kind you are dealing with. A victim-to-genetics, or a rational addict, is someone who can be worked with and is more likely to overcome their addiction. A victim-to-irrationality (which also is to be a victim to genetics, as rationality is partially grounded in genetics, though also grounded in one's upbringing, social environment, access to education, etc.) is someone who is much harder to work with and is less likely to overcome their addiction.

So while it's true that there are no good reasons for judging addicts (or anyone for that matter), there are good reasons to view one addict as having different qualities than another, and that can affect different approaches to treatment. An irrational addict requires more medical-based treatments while a rational addict can be cured using therapy-based approaches.

Doxastic psychology and addiction

Doxastic psychology says we can explain human behavior, in part, through what humans believe. If someone believes that life is meaningless, then we can explain their depression-behavior (lack of motivation, excessive sleeping, inability to enjoy anything, etc.) by this belief.

One question for this idea is from addiction. If someone is addicted to smoking, and yet wants to quit, one option is to say that this person believes against their behavior but the addiction causes them to act contrary to their belief.

Another option is to say that their behavior is in line with their belief, because the addiction causes them to believe that smoking is all-things-considered worth it. If someone wishes they did not have the addiction, then their second-order belief is against their first-order belief. You can believe something but wish you didn't.

Hypocrisy is when you say one thing but do another, like telling your kids that you shouldn't smoke while being a smoker yourself. The smoker has an option: either I be consistent and say smoking is (at least in some cases, such as in my case) worth it, or be a hypocrite and say it's wrong. I'm morally obligated to say it's wrong (to protect my kids), so I'm morally obligated to be a hypocrite.

But is the smoker really a hypocrite here? They could believe that smoking is wrong, and the addiction causes the behavior against the belief. It's exactly because smoking causes you to act against what you know to be right that is one of the reasons why you shouldn't start.

And so belief in some cases does not help us predict or explain behavior. People can behave opposite their beliefs.

And yet, it sounds crazy that someone could perform a voluntary action, like smoking a cigarette, while at the same time not having some belief in the action. There is pleasure in the addictive act, and the pleasure explains the motive behind the act. But the agent has to believe that the act is in fact pleasurable to engage in it. People absolutely can and do have conflicted beliefs, but that doesn't mean one belief doesn't win out at the end of the day. I believe eating junk food is bad for you. I also believe it tastes good. Sometimes the "tastes good" belief is just strong enough to beat out the "is bad for you" belief. How can you tell which belief has won out? By the behavior.

So the smoker really is a hypocrite when they tell their kids not to smoke. You believe smoking is not worth it, hence warning your kids, and yet you believe it's worth it, hence your continued smoking.

But not so fast. The smoker does believe, if only barely, that smoking is worth it, hence the continued smoking. The parent warns their kids because the addiction causes the pleasure to rise to a level so strong that it's able to beat out, if only barely, the belief that you shouldn't smoke. Without the addiction, the irrational belief wouldn't be there, and the addiction behavior wouldn't be there either.

To have a second-order belief that runs against the first-order belief is to believe that the first-order belief is irrational, and yet cannot be shaken (by addiction, genetics, social conditioning, or what have you). Addiction is evil not because it causes you to behave against your first-order beliefs, but because it causes you to take on irrational first-order beliefs, such as the irrational belief that smoking is all-things-considered worth it. I know eating junk food is all-things-considered not worth it. Often I still eat it anyway because I hold an irrational belief, even if just for a moment, that it is worth it, caused by the sneaky chemicals in junk food. In the moment you are engaging in the addiction, your brain is saying "Yeah, this is worth it", even though you know it's not. This is why second-order beliefs (or second-order desires) can run against first-order beliefs (or first-order desires). (You could argue it's not the chemicals in junk food that causes the irrational belief that it's worth it, but our own akrasia, or weakness of will. Or it's just our own irrationality in general. But if that were true, then we wouldn't have a second-order desire that runs contrary to the first-order desire.)

So doxastic psychology is safe. When someone believes smoking is worth it, because of addiction, we can predict that this person will continue smoking. When someone believes smoking is worth it, and yet believes that this belief is irrational, then we can predict that they will warn others against smoking, or will try to quit. This person is not being hypocritical (hypocrisy is always wrong; there can never be a moral obligation to hypocrisy); when engaging in the addiction behavior, they are behaving according to their (irrational) first-order belief, and when giving their warning they are behaving according to their second-order belief.

This does place a limit on doxastic psychology: behavior reveals first-order beliefs, but not necessarily second-order beliefs. As Frankfurt argued (roughly), it's really the second-order beliefs (or desires) that reveal the moral qualities of the person.

If someone has a first-order desire to smoke, but a second-order desire to quit, then the second-order desire places pressure against the first-order desire. Eventually, this pressure may reach a critical mass where the irrationality of the addiction act is felt strongly enough by the agent to where the desire against it wins out, allowing them to break free from the addiction. But if someone has no such second-order desire, then there is no internal pressure against the behavior, and so the irrational behavior is more likely to be permanent. If the irrational belief were caused by addiction, that speaks less against the quality of the agent than if the irrational belief were caused by the agent's innate irrationality.

Whenever there is apparent hypocrisy, there might not be hypocrisy, but a mismatch between first- and second-order beliefs. The addict believes in the addiction act, but believes they shouldn't believe it.

But am I contradicting myself here? I'm saying that if a person truly believed against the addiction act, then they wouldn't engage in it. But if that's true, then wouldn't a person who truly believed against believing in the addiction act not believe in the addiction act? I said you can't act against belief, because act entails belief. But then how could someone believe against belief?

The addiction forces the irrational belief upon the addict. The act follows the belief. So the addiction indirectly forces the act. The act depends on belief(1) (first-order belief), and so the act entails belief(1). Belief(1) obviously entails belief(1), and in that sense you can't believe against belief. But belief(1) does not depend on belief(2) such that the former entails the latter. So you can believe(2) against belief(1). And you can act(2) against act(1), like warning someone to not smoke while smoking yourself.

First-order beliefs and second-order beliefs can come apart, exactly because of things like addiction. But addiction doesn't allow first-order and first-order beliefs to come apart, which is what believing(1) against an act would mean. So you can believe(2) against an act, but you can't believe(1) against an act.

It sounds like I'm saying there can be a clash of mixed-ordered beliefs, but not a clash of first-order beliefs. But then what is hypocrisy, or self-contradiction, if not a clash of first-order beliefs?

I'm not saying you can't have both belief and non-belief. Let's say someone believes that they should not phi. They phi. So they believe that they should not phi and that they should. Contradiction. But in the case of self-contradiction, there is no mismatch between first- and second-order beliefs. The hypocrite believes(1) that they should phi and not phi, and believes(2) that they should believe that they should phi and not phi. (Or at least doesn't believe that they should not believe that they should phi and not phi.)

Often, hypocrisy is not taken to just be self-contradiction. Rather, it's special pleading – when a person makes themselves an exception to a personal rule without good reason for doing so. Hypocrisy is not a failure to recognize contradiction in this case, but a failure to recognize that there is no relevant difference between your case and others' case. Though the contradiction reintroduces itself when the hypocrite would not accept the same special pleading from others. (Which then returns to a relevant difference case when the hypocrite doesn't see the special pleadings as the same. I guess this could go on forever.)

Other than addiction, I wonder if social conditioning could force irrational beliefs the way addiction can? Someone who is raised around extreme ableist language and attitudes might find themselves stuck with that way of looking at things, while believing that such attitudes are irrational.

Or someone raised in a very strict household is stuck with the belief that they should never cuss. But then later comes to the belief that this belief is irrational, and yet is still stuck with it.

Or someone who works a job that they hate might be forced by survival pressures to hold the belief that they ought to work the job, even though they believe that the belief that they ought to do the job is false. Actually, this example is a reverse, where the person desires(1) against the act of doing the job, but desires(2) to desire to do the job so that they would be less miserable (unless they approve of their hatred of the job). But hang on, how can someone do a job they don't believe in? Doesn't act entail belief? That's simple: they believe in the job for its extrinsic rewards, but they don't believe in the job per se.

Summary:

• Doxastic psychology says that because behavior is grounded in belief, we can psychoanalyze and understand someone's behavior in light of their beliefs.
• A challenge to doxastic psychology arises: there are cases, like addiction, where folks can hate their own behavior and believe against it, and yet find themselves falling into the behavior anyway. So behavior doesn't always entail belief, and so we cannot always explain someone's behavior in terms of what they believe. (Which, by the way, of course we cannot understand all human behavior in terms of belief. That would be a silly suggestion. Doxastic psychology is simply an additional tool in the psychoanalyst's toolbox.)
• Obsessive-compulsive behavior, hypocrisy, and self-contradiction are further candidates for when people behave in one way and either lack a belief in that behavior or even believe against it.
• But this challenge runs into its own challenge: how could it be possible for someone to will a voluntary action while simultaneously holding no belief in the action whatsoever? How could the action even be psychologically possible?
• Suggestion: Actions require belief. Some actions are conflicted, meaning that there are considerations pulling in opposite directions for the belief that grounds the action. When the agent acts, their action proves which belief won out in the end, even if it only just barely won out.
• Continuing the suggestion, the badness of addiction is found in, among other things, not the fact that it causes someone to act contrary to what they believe, but because it causes such pain in withdrawal, and such satisfaction in the addiction act, that it forces the person to believe, at least in the moment, that satisfying the addiction is worth it all-things-considered when engaging in the addiction behavior is decidedly not worth it. Therefore, addiction causes irrational beliefs. 
• An addict can recognize the irrationality of these beliefs caused by the addiction, leading to a higher order belief that they ought not believe what they do. The addict desires the object of their addiction, but desires to be rid of this desire. 
• This mismatch between first- and second-order desires (and beliefs) reveals a moral quality in some folks. The irrational behavior of the addict is grounded in the irrationality of the belief caused by the addiction and not caused by the irrationality of the addict per se. The fact that the addict can recognize the irrationality of their first-order beliefs goes a long way in 1) Showing that this person is sensitive to reasons, and 2) Generates internal reason-based pressure against the addiction behavior. This pressure shows potential for the individual to one day feel the pressure generated by this reason-sensitivity strongly enough to one day kick the habit.
• Contrast this with an addict whose second-order beliefs are in line with their first-order ones. This addict fails to display the same sensitivity to reasons, and fails to generate the same internal pressure against the irrational behavior, significantly reducing the chances of overcoming the addiction in the long term.
• But if you cannot act without believing in the act, then how could someone believe without believing in the belief? How could the belief be psychologically possible?
• The belief is psychologically possible for reasons mentioned: the satisfaction of the addiction act. The (reasons-sensitive) addict sees the reasons for abstaining from the addiction act, and sees how these reasons would win out if it weren't for the addiction causing the satisfaction from the addiction act to overpower the addict's sensitivity to reason.
• This irrationality is not subjective (the psychosomatic reasons are real) but objective (the reasons to abstain from the addiction act are real). You could say then that the irrationality is external, imposed by the addiction, and not internal, from the addict's innate capacities. In theory, the more rational someone is, the harder it is for their sensitivity to reasons to be defeated.
• So an addict genuinely believes that the addiction act is worth it, as otherwise engaging in the addiction behavior would not happen. And yet, the (reasons-sensitive) addict believes that the addiction behavior is not worth it (and will thereby warn against it). Is this self-contradiction, or hypocrisy?
• One option would be to say that this is a contradiction, and addiction causes the reasons-sensitive addict to self-contradict. But it's weird that reason-sensitivity would cause contradiction when it should do the opposite.
• Compare two addicts, one that is sensitive to reasons and one that is not. The one who is not does not contradict itself; its lower and higher order beliefs are in sync. The one who is does contradict themselves, because their rationality forces them to believe that the addiction behavior is not worth it, while the addiction behavior forces them to believe it is. So ironically, the more rational addict is the one that self-contradicts. This would suggest that there are cases where self-contradiction is more rational than not.
• Another option is to say that it's totally consistent to have a desire and yet to desire for yourself to not have that desire. You can believe P and yet wish you did not believe P, because you know P is objectively irrational, but subjectively rational because of addiction (i.e. addiction gives you reasons to engage in the addiction behavior. The irrationality of the addiction behavior is not grounded in the subjective irrationality of the behavior, but in the fact that the objective reasons are good reasons for abstaining from the behavior while the "it feels good" reasons are not good reasons for engaging in it, and are mere motivating reasons).
• But if one cannot act without belief and cannot believe without belief, then how is self-contradiction possible?
• Absolutely one can believe P and believe ~P, contradicting oneself. Because act entails belief, one could act, entailing belief in P, while internally holding ~P, generating the contradiction. The mistake is in thinking that acting entails a lack of counter-belief. I do not say this, only that acting entails the positive belief needed to ground the action.
• We might think of hypocrisy as different from simple self-contradiction, but an instance of special pleading where the hypocrite makes themselves an exception to a rule when there are no good reasons for doing so.