Jason D’Cruz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at University at Albany, SUNY. He works in multiple areas of moral psychology, include trust, promises, imagination, self-deception, and rationalization.
A post by Jason D’Cruz.
My own cheating just levels the playing field a bit. Most people cheat even more.
I simply couldn’t meet the deadline. It’s so hard being a perfectionist.
I just had to fudge those charitable donations because last year I overpaid my income taxes.
Spurious and self-justifying rationalization is such a commonplace that it is easy to miss just how finely wrought it can be. In recent years, both philosophers and psychologists have paid closer attention. (Fiery Cushman’s new target article – “Rationalization is Rational” – in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, together with 26 commentaries, is sure to ignite more research).
Rationalization is a remarkable cognitive achievement. It consists of the mental processes of crafting and rehearsing a narrative that has the credible appearance of genuine reasoning, but whose narrative arc inevitably bends toward exculpation or self-justification. The causal effect of rationalization is typically to mitigate negative feelings of guilt or shame and clear away hurdles of conscience. In contrast to truth-directed inquiry, rationalization is an inherently creative undertaking.
While rationalization often promises an “easy way out” (do bad yet feel good!), it is by no means a simple affair. Notice that rationalizers do not simply arrive at their conclusions “at will” in the way you could, for example, simply decide to imagine something. I cannot decide that it’s ok for me to cheat because the sky is blue. This kind of sham reasoning wouldn’t engage desire, thought, or emotion in the right way. Rather, the rationalizer must work skillfully with the available evidence. This is a formidable constraint. Successful rationalization must manifest – to borrow a term from Stephen Colbert – truthiness.
In previous work, I proposed that rationalization should be modeled as the negotiation of two compatible but interacting aims: the aim of reaching a conclusion that is desirable, and the aim of getting there with a story that is believable (D’Cruz 2014 and D’Cruz 2015). By “believable” I don’t mean “able to be believed” but rather “amenable to being richly imagined” (imagined in a way that engages desire and emotion). These aims, taken individually, are often pursued sub-optimally, since it is often impossible to construct a sufficiently “truthy” account that leads to the most desirable conclusion.
My favorite example comes from the opening pages of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Here is the context: On his deathbed, Mr. Dashwood elicits a promise from his son, John, to use his inherited fortune to take care of his half-sisters. John and his wife Fanny consider the matter of exactly how much is owed to the half-sisters. Earlier, John had decided that a lump sum of £3,000, as recommended by his father, would secure his sisters’ financial security and discharge his promissory obligation to his father. But over the course of a conversation with his wife, his just and magnanimous feelings give way to his wife’s meanness. By the end of their conversation, Fanny and John are collusive co-rationalizers.
The diminishment of the requital from £3, 000 to mere “neighborly acts” is accomplished through masterful rationalization. Austen’s dialogue illustrates the distinctive repertoire of strategies that rationalizers deploy to reach their desired conclusions. Rationalizers often distract themselves and others by adducing considerations that have only the appearance of relevance to the deliberative question. For instance, Fanny objects to paying the sisters an annuity because “it raises not gratitude at all”. (Of course, the question of what would make the sisters feel grateful is orthogonal to the question of what is owed to them). John Dashwood chimes in with a pseudo-reason of his own, insisting that an annuity “would only enlarge their style of living.” By the end Fanny canvasses the hilarious (to the reader) conjecture that “people always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.” What all of these strategies have in common is that they foster the appearance of genuine reasoning while still affording crucial flexibility regarding the conclusion.
This virtuosic aspect of the rationalizing mind features prominently in the work of Dan Ariely on the rationalization of dishonesty. Ariely proposes that “the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not.” (2012, 197). He proposes that “the more creative we are, the more able we are to come up with good stories that help justify our selfish interests.” (197)
In a new paper of my own (D’Cruz forthcoming), I bring the literature on imaginative resistance (Gendler 2000) to bear on the phenomenon of rationalization. Roughly speaking, the term “imaginative resistance” refers to “psychological difficulties otherwise competent imaginers experience when engaging in particular imaginative activities prompted by works of fiction.” (Tuna 2020) What interests me are various kinds of “blockages” to creative rationalization, and the ways those blockages may be overcome. Journeymen rationalizers are stymied by such imaginative obstructions; maestro rationalizers have the skills to work around them.
Earlier I said that rationalization is a remarkable cognitive achievement. While that’s true, there’s no denying its moral and practical hazards. Empirical work by Shalvi et al (2015) suggests that self-justifications that take place temporally prior to ethical violations enable people to continue to feel good about themselves while doing things they know or suspect to be immoral. "Pre-violation” rationalizations serve to defuse the anticipated threat to the moral self. Rationalization can also get in the way of effective practical agency because it allows a person to remain “in denial”, failing to face up to difficult but important truths.
Many tantalizing questions remain. What disrupts rationalization and what catalyzes it? What does a propensity to rationalization say about a person’s moral and intellectual virtue? If rationalizers merely imagine the contents of their rationalizations to be true, how is this mode of imagining related to more familiar varieties that don’t get us in the same moral and practical trouble?
References:
Ariely, Dan. 2012. The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How we Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves. New York: HarperCollins.
Cushman, Fiery. 2020. Rationalization is rational. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, E28.
D’Cruz, Jason. 2014. “Rationalization as Performative Pretense.” Philosophical Psychology 28 (7): 980–1000.
D’Cruz, Jason. 2015. “Rationalization, Evidence, and Pretense.” Ratio 28 (3): 318–331.
D’Cruz, Jason. Forthcoming. “Rationalization and Imaginative Blockage.” In Reason, Bias, and Inquiry: New Perspectives from the Crossroads of Epistemology and Psychology (eds. N. Ballantyne & D. Dunning). Oxford University Press.
Gendler, Tamar. 2000. “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 55–81.
Shalvi, Shaul, Francesca Gino, Rachel Barkan, and Shahar Ayal. 2015. “Self-Serving Justifications: Doing Wrong and Feeling Moral.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24 (2): 125–130.
Tuna, Emine Hande, "Imaginative Resistance", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/imaginative-resistance/>.