It just dawned on me that...

First posted: 23 Nov 2019

The Short Version

Sometimes, it’s more rational to act against your best judgment.

The puzzle

I’m at my desk deliberating whether I should go to watch that new movie my ⊕ Coincidentally, I’ve heard Parasite is pretty good… friends have been raving on about or do some final edits for my term paper due tonight. There’s a lot riding on this term paper, and I know that my papers have always greatly improved from these final touch-ups.

In the end, I decide that it would be best to do some final edits and stay in tonight. But as soon as I reach my decision, one of my friends calls me and asks me if I’m coming. After a moment of hesitation, I agree to come.

What went wrong here? Most people would agree that I’ve done something irrational. My best judgment was to work on my paper, but I acted against it by going to watch the movie.

In general, most (if not all) people seem to assume that acting against your best judgment is always irrational. However, in a surprising move, Nomy Arpaly argues that this assumption is actually wrong.¹ In other words, there are cases where it is actually more rational to act against your best judgment.

A distinction

I need to first clarify exactly what Arpaly is arguing for. Arpaly is not arguing that in some cases like the movie example I should think to myself “Oh, I should act against my ⊕ Assuming that there is a way to figure out if I’m in a case where I should act against my best judgment. best judgment so I should go watch the movie and go with my friends.”

In this sort of case, my best judgment would have flipped from ‘work on the term paper more’ to ‘go watch the movie with friends’. This means I’m not really acting against my best judgment. I’m just switching what my best judgment is. In Arpaly’s words:

Do I offer the advice, then, that we should sometimes act against our best judgments? I do not. (p.491-492)

What Arpaly is arguing is that if we are offering an account of when someone acts rationally or irrationally, we cannot assume that acting against her best judgment is always irrational. In the movie example, this would be accepting the possibility that I could look back the day after the movie and realize going to watch the movie was actually a more rational action than working on the paper.

Consider the following

Arpaly asks us to consider Emily who is getting a Ph.D. in chemistry but for various reasons is feeling a sense of dissatisfaction and lack of motivation to continue her program. Emily’s best judgment is that she should continue pursuing a Ph.D., but it turns out that her dissatisfaction and lack of motivation are caused by good reasons that she should actually quit.

For example, her talents might lie elsewhere and the program might not fit her research interests. All these reasons contribute to her dissatisfaction and lack of motivation, but when she deliberates whether she should continue ⊕ Maybe it’s because she’s suppressing these reasons, but hey, I’m not a psychologist how should I know? the program, she does not consider these reasons.

But one day, “on an impulse,” she quits after these negative feelings grow too much for her to handle (p.504). She might even call her action irrational since she still thinks her best judgment is to stick with the program.

A few years later, now that she has settled into a new job, she realizes why she felt so dissatisfied with the program. Now, when someone asks her why she quit she says that her talents lied elsewhere and that the program did not fit her research interests.

Arpaly thinks that this case shows that Emily is actually more rational in quitting (acting against her best judgment) than sticking with the program by going with her best judgment.

An objection

An immediate objection to the above example is this: Arpaly seems to assume incorrectly that “one can act for good reasons…without knowing that one is acting for good reasons” (p.505). How is it possible to act ⊕ If you’re an externalist about reasons for actions, this is possible, but Arpaly wants her argument to work without being an externalist. for good reasons if I don’t even know I’m acting for good reasons? This seems more like a happy coincidence.

If we follow the objection, in Emily’s case, Emily does not actually act for good reasons because she did not know these reasons (e.g. not a good fit for the program). If we were to ask Emily why she quit on the day she quits, she could not tell us why.

But had she decided to quit after deliberation based on reasons like ‘I’m not a good fit for this program’, then we would consider her to act for good reasons. She can tell us these reasons if asked.

⊕ I wonder how obvious or counterintuitive this idea is. It looks like that acting for good reasons requires deliberation. To act for some reasons means I arrived at my decision through deliberation based on those reasons.

Rational action without deliberation

Arpaly responds to the objection by showing there are plenty of cases where we act rationally without deliberation. This means I can act for reasons that I don’t know.

Fast actions

Arpaly gives the example of a tennis player in a match. The tennis player does not have the time to deliberate on all her actions during the match. Some ⊕ It seems more like an empirical question whether the tennis player really does not deliberate before some of her actions. of her actions happen so quickly that the player does not deliberate before her action.

However, we praise the tennis player for even actions like these where there is no prior deliberation. We might say a player was “brilliant” in one play, meaning we attribute rationality to a player’s action even if there was no prior deliberation.

Dawning

I found this the most interesting set of cases Arpaly considers. Dawning is “cases in which people change their minds, sans [without] deliberation, as a result of a long period of exposure to new evidence” (p.508).²

Arpaly considers an alternative story of Emily. This time Emily realizes at the end of her third year in the program that she should quit. This happens because over the course of her three years she registers in her mind all the right reasons to quit, but she does not include them in her deliberations about whether she should continue the program.

At the end of her third year, this gradual process of registering all the reasons to quit makes her realize she should quit. In other words, it dawns on her that she should quit.

This case is different from before because Emily’s best judgment changes, but she does not deliberate at any point about quitting. Thus, Emily rationally quits but did not deliberate at any point to quit.³

The takeaway

Arpaly seems to have shown that it’s actually harder than we might think to distinguish between when we are acting rationally and when we are acting irrationally. Even if I have deliberated and reached a conclusion about what I should do, I might be ignoring reasons that would convince me the other action is more rational. I have to now seriously ask myself, when I’m deliberating, whether that feeling of dissatisfaction is caused by some good reason I’m not considering.

If Arpaly is right, there’s nothing special about our best judgment when we deliberate about what to do. It could be more rational to act against your best judgment.⁴