Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Rationality, Moral Responsibility, And Desire

Even extreme passion and intense longing are not irrational on their own for two reasons.  First of all, no desire can force a person to believe anything except that they have the desire in question or remove a person's ability to grasp the necessary truths of logic.  All emotions and psychological experiences, desire included, do not stop someone from exercising rationality and understanding reason unless the person allows them to.  Second, not all desires are voluntary or even what someone might wish to have; it is impossible for a person to be irrational for having experiences they do not even want or could not will away even if they tried.  If only one of these was true, desire would not and could not be what makes someone rational or irrational, and yet both of them are true by logical necessity, i.e. these truths could not have been any other way and are dependent on the inherent truth of logic rather than anything else.

Suppose a person has the desire to murder others for some reason.  The desire to murder could be accompanied by the stronger desire to not murder.  In addition to this, conflicting desires are not logically impossible and conflicting desires do not make someone have contradictory beliefs.  A person might be morally concerned about murder, desire to commit it, and still refuse to act on it anyway, letting their desire to not murder for the sake of morality triumph over their desire to illicitly kill and never having any conflicting beliefs in the process.  Of course, if someone was to believe that murder or anything else is evil because of conscience, because of subjective horror towards it or because of the personal desire for it to be immoral, than that is irrational.  The mere desire to murder or not murder, still, is not rational or irrational in itself.  What someone actually believes and does is by necessity either one or the other (whether they believe things on the basis of logical proof and do act for the sake of truth is what would make these them rational).

This is all true of other examples besides murder.  No one has morally erred by just having the desire to commit adultery or to physically assault someone, if these desires are not chosen, that is, as well as if adultery and assault are evil in the first place.  Different people might find various acts that are immoral or probably immoral appealing or experience the desire to carry them out, with some people having no interest in some acts while desiring to perform others, and with other people perhaps never desiring to perform any specific immoral act at all (no, this is not logically impossible, just something most people cannot relate to with almost any holistic moral ideologies of different religions or societies).  It is not as if everyone even struggles or seriously thinks about or wants to commit all of the same acts whether or not these behaviors are evil.  Either way, it is not desires besides those which are shaped by rational or irrational beliefs that people could possibly be morally responsible for.

It is logically impossible for involuntary desires of any kind to even be morally upright or evil, but the beliefs, priorities, and actions of a person can be controlled even if raging desire without any other motive alongside it would have someone take their worldview and behavioral life in an irrationalistic direction.  Since these things are necessarily true, it is only a fool who believes anything to the contrary.  It is not the case that simply having certain desires is enough to make someone rational and it is not the case that having certain desires could make someone evil.  Following from these truths, there is no such thing as select involuntary desires that render someone irrational or deserving of moral condemnation and other involuntary desires that do not.  This, like so many other things, is all or nothing.

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