Nothing Rational About It


“It is one thing to accept something in practice, another to justify it rationally.”
-         Isaiah Berlin

It’s no secret that rationality can’t always give you reasons for deciding what’s right and what’s wrong (Though rationality can help you decide whether or not to follow what is termed by the majority as right or wrong). In most cases, that doesn’t matter. Is stealing ok? You don’t need rationality to provide an answer to accept that it’s not ok. Morality, social norms, jail time are acceptable reasons (well ok, jail time would be a rational cost-benefit analysis based reason, but even the others are acceptable reasons to not steal).

But what about something like athletes taking steroids to win? Lance Armstrong is the poster boy for drugs in sports these days. He is getting stripped of his many wins and the runner up declared the new winner (As an aside, that “solution” made me wonder: in sports like cycling or shot-put, everyone competes with everybody else. So if the winner turns out to be a cheat, you just push everyone else’s rank up by one and some degree of justice can claim to be done. But what about sports like tennis? If it turns out, say, Roger Federer was taking drugs, who is shown to be the winner? After all, Federer beat 7 guys for each of his Grand Slam trophies. Every one of those 7 guys is entitled to say he might have gone on to win the title…but that’s a topic for another blog, perhaps).

Coming back to rationality not always being enough, I like this xkcd comic  copied below that shows how irrational our disapproval of doping is:


Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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