Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.
—Peter Singer1
Offering reasons why rationality matters is a bit like blowing into your sails or lifting yourself by your bootstraps: it cannot work unless you first accept the ground rule that rationality is the way to decide what matters. Fortunately, as we saw in chapter 2, we all do accept the primacy of reason, at least tacitly, as soon as we discuss this issue, or any issue, rather than coercing assent by force. It’s now time to raise the stakes and ask whether the conscious application of reason actually improves our lives and makes the world a better place. It ought to, given that reality is governed by logic and physical law rather than deviltry and magic. But do people really suffer harm from their fallacies, and would their lives go better if they recognized and thought their way out of them? Or is gut feeling a better guide to life decisions than cogitation, with its risk of overthinking and rationalization?
One can ask the same questions about the welfare of the world. Is progress a story of problem solving, driven by philosophers who diagnose ills and scientists and policymakers who find remedies? Or is progress a story of struggle, with the downtrodden rising up and overcoming their oppressors?2 In earlier chapters we learned to distrust false dichotomies and single-cause explanations, so the answers to these questions will not be just one or the other. I will, though, explain why I believe that exercising our godlike reason rather than allowing it to “fust in us unus’d” can lead to a better life and a better world.
Are the fallacies and illusions showcased in the preceding chapters just wrong answers to hard math problems? Are they brainteasers, gotchas, trick questions, laboratory curiosities? Or can poor reasoning lead to real harm, with the implication that critical thinking could protect people from their own worst cognitive instincts?
Certainly many of the biases we have explored would seem to be punished by reality, with all its indifference to our irrational beliefs.3 We discount the future myopically, but it always arrives, minus the large rewards we sacrificed for the quick high. We try to recoup sunk costs, and so stay too long in bad investments, bad movies, and bad relationships. We assess danger by availability, and so avoid safe planes for dangerous cars, which we drive while texting. We misunderstand regression to the mean, and so pursue illusory explanations for successes and failures.
In dealing with money, our blind spot for exponential growth makes us save too little for retirement and borrow too much with our credit cards. Our failure to discount post hoc sharpshooting, and our misplaced trust in experts over actuarial formulas, lead us to invest in expensively managed funds which underperform simple indexes. Our difficulty with expected utility tempts us with insurance and gambles that leave us worse off in the long run.
In dealing with our health, our difficulty with Bayesian thinking can terrify us into overinterpreting a positive test for an uncommon disease. We can be persuaded or dissuaded from surgery depending on the choice of words in which the risks are framed rather than the balance of risks and benefits. Our intuitions about essences lead us to reject lifesaving vaccines and embrace dangerous quackery. Illusory correlations, and a confusion of correlation with causation, lead us to accept worthless diagnoses and treatments from physicians and psychotherapists. A failure to weigh risks and rewards lulls us into taking foolish risks with our safety and happiness.
In the legal arena, probability blindness can lure judges and juries into miscarriages of justice by vivid conjectures and post hoc probabilities. A failure to appreciate the tradeoff between hits and false alarms leads them to punish many innocents in order to convict a few more of the guilty.
In many of these cases the professionals are as vulnerable to folly as their patients and clients, showing that intelligence and expertise provide no immunity to cognitive infections. The classic illusions have been shown in medical personnel, lawyers, investors, brokers, sportswriters, economists, and meteorologists, all dealing with figures in their own specialties.4
These are some of the reasons to believe that failures of rationality have consequences in the world. Can the damage be quantified? The critical-thinking activist Tim Farley tried to do that on his website and Twitter feed named after the frequently asked question “What’s the Harm?”5 Farley had no way to answer it precisely, of course, but he tried to awaken people to the enormity of the damage wreaked by failures of critical thinking by listing every authenticated case he could find. From 1970 through 2009, but mostly in the last decade in that range, he documented 368,379 people killed, more than 300,000 injured, and $2.8 billion in economic damages from blunders in critical thinking. They include people killing themselves or their children by rejecting conventional medical treatments or using herbal, homeopathic, holistic, and other quack cures; mass suicides by members of apocalyptic cults; murders of witches, sorcerers, and the people they cursed; guileless victims bilked out of their savings by psychics, astrologers, and other charlatans; scofflaws and vigilantes arrested for acting on conspiratorial delusions; and economic panics from superstitions and false rumors. Here are a few tweets from 2018–19:
What’s the harm in conspiracy theories? FBI identifies “conspiracy-driven domestic extremists” as a new domestic terror threat.
What’s the harm in getting health advice from an #herbalist? A 13-year-old died after being told not to take insulin. Now the herbalist is headed to jail.
What’s the harm in a #faithhealing church? Ginnifer fought for her life for 4 hours. Travis Mitchell, her father, “laid on hands” and the family took turns praying as she struggled to breathe and changed colors. “I knew she was dead when she didn’t cry out anymore,” Mitchell said.
What’s the harm in believing in supernatural beings? Sumatran villagers killed an endangered tiger because they thought it was a shape-shifting “siluman.”
What’s the harm in seeing a #psychic? Maryland “psychic” convicted of scamming clients out of $340K.
As Farley would be the first to note, not even thousands of anecdotes can prove that surrendering to irrational biases leads to more harm than overcoming them. At the very least we need a comparison group, namely the effects of reason-informed institutions such as medicine, science, and democratic government. That is the topic of the next section.
We do have one study of the effects of rational decision making on life outcomes. The psychologists Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Andrew Parker, and Baruch Fischhoff developed a measure of competence in reasoning and decision making (like Keith Stanovich’s Rationality Quotient) by collecting tests for some of the fallacies and biases discussed in the preceding chapters.6 These included overconfidence, sunk costs, inconsistencies in estimating risks, and framing effects (being affected by whether an outcome is described as a gain or a loss). Not surprisingly, people’s skill in avoiding fallacies was correlated with their intelligence, though only partly. It was also correlated with their decision-making style—the degree to which they said they approached problems reflectively and constructively rather than impulsively and fatalistically.
To measure life outcomes, the trio developed a kind of schlimazel scale, a measure of people’s susceptibility to mishaps large and small. Participants were asked, for example, whether in the past decade they had ruined clothes by not following the washing instructions on the tag, locked their keys in their car, taken the wrong train or bus, broken a bone, crashed a car, driven drunk, lost money in stocks, gotten into a fight, been suspended from school, quit a job after a week, or accidentally gotten pregnant or gotten someone pregnant. They found that people’s reasoning skills did indeed predict their life outcomes: the fewer fallacies in reasoning, the fewer debacles in life.
Correlation, of course, is not causation. Reasoning competence is correlated with raw intelligence, and we know that higher intelligence protects people from bad outcomes in life such as illness, accidents, and job failure, holding socioeconomic status constant.7 But intelligence is not the same thing as rationality, since being good at computing something is no guarantee that a person will try to compute the right things. Rationality also requires reflectiveness, open-mindedness, and mastery of cognitive tools like formal logic and mathematical probability. Bruine de Bruin and her colleagues did the multiple regression analyses (the method explained in chapter 9) and found that even when they held intelligence constant, better reasoners suffered fewer bad outcomes.8
Socioeconomic status, too, confounds one’s fortunes in life. Poverty is an obstacle course, confronting people with the risks of unemployment, substance abuse, and other hardships. But here, too, the regression analyses showed that better reasoners had better life outcomes, holding socioeconomic status constant. All this still falls short of proving causation. But we do have some of the needed links: a high prior plausibility, two major confounds statistically controlled, and reverse causation unlikely (getting into a car crash shouldn’t make you commit cognitive fallacies). This entitles us to vest some credence in the causal conclusion that competence in reasoning can protect a person from misfortunes in life.
Though the availability bias hides it from us, human progress is an empirical fact. When we look beyond the headlines to the trend lines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in decades and centuries past.9
Having documented these changes in two books, I’m often asked whether I “believe in progress.” The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don’t believe in anything you have to believe in. Though many measures of human well-being, when plotted over time, show a gratifying increase (though not always or everywhere), it’s not because of some force or dialectic or evolutionary law that lifts us ever upward. On the contrary, nature has no regard for our well-being, and often, as with pandemics and natural disasters, it looks as if it’s trying to grind us down. “Progress” is shorthand for a set of pushbacks and victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe, and is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.
The explanation is rationality. When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows (as opposed to other dubious pursuits like glory or redemption), and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others’, they occasionally succeed. When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate, and we call the big picture progress.
We can start with the most precious thing of all, life. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, life expectancy at birth rose from its historic resting place at around 30 years and is now 72.4 years worldwide, 83 years in the most fortunate countries.10 This gift of life was not dropped onto our doorsteps. It was the hard-won dividend of advances in public health (motto: “Saving lives, millions at a time”), particularly after the germ theory of disease displaced other causal theories like miasmas, spirits, conspiracies, and divine retribution. The lifesavers included chlorination and other means of safeguarding drinking water, the lowly toilet and sewer, the control of disease vectors like mosquitoes and fleas, programs for large-scale vaccination, the promotion of hand-washing, and basic prenatal and perinatal care such as nursing and body contact. When disease and injuries do strike, advances in medicine keep them from killing as many people as they did in the era of folk healers and barber-surgeons, including antibiotics, antisepsis, anesthesia, transfusions, drugs, and oral rehydration therapy (a salt and sugar solution that stops fatal diarrhea).
Humanity has always struggled to grow enough calories and protein to feed itself, with famine just one bad harvest away. But hunger today has been decimated in most of the world: undernourishment and stunting are in decline, and famines now afflict only the most remote and war-ravaged regions, a problem not of too little food but of barriers to getting it to the hungry.11 The calories did not come in heavenly manna or from a cornucopia held by Abundantia, the Roman goddess of plenty, but from advances in agronomy. These included crop rotation to replenish depleted soils; technologies for high-throughput planting and harvesting such as seed drills, plows, tractors, and combine harvesters; synthetic fertilizer (credited with saving 2.7 billion lives); a transportation and storage network to bring food from farm to table, including railroads, canals, trucks, granaries, and refrigeration; national and international markets that allow a surplus in one area to fill a shortage in another; and the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which spread productive and vigorous hybrid crops.
Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth. For most of human history, around 90 percent of humanity lived in what we today call extreme poverty. In 2020, less than 9 percent do; still too high, but targeted for elimination in the next decade.12 The great material enrichment of humanity began with the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. It was literally powered by the capture of energy from coal, oil, wind, and falling water, and later from the sun, the earth, and nuclear fission. The energy was fed into machines that turn heat into work, factories with mass production, and conveyances like railroads, canals, highways, and container ships. Material technologies depended on financial ones, particularly banking, finance, and insurance. And neither of these could have been parlayed into widespread prosperity without governments to enforce contracts, minimize force and fraud, smooth out financial lurches with central banks and reliable money, and invest in wealth-generating public goods such as infrastructure, basic research, and universal education.
The world has not yet put an end to war, as the folk singers of the 1960s dreamed, but it has dramatically reduced their number and lethality, from a toll of 21.9 battle deaths per 100,000 people in 1950 to just 0.7 in 2019.13 Peter, Paul, and Mary deserve only some of the credit. More goes to institutions that were designed to reduce the incentives of nations to go to war, beginning with Immanuel Kant’s plan for “perpetual peace” in 1795. One of them is democracy, which, as we saw in the chapter on correlation and causation, really does reduce the chance of war, presumably because a country’s cannon fodder is less keen on the pastime than its kings and generals. Another is international trade and investment, which make it cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and make it unwise for countries to kill their customers and debtors. (The European Union, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, grew out of a trade organization, the European Coal and Steel Community.) Yet another is a network of international organizations, particularly the United Nations, which knits countries into a community, mobilizes peacekeeping forces, immortalizes states, grandfathers in borders, and outlaws and stigmatizes war while providing alternative means of resolving disputes.
Brainchildren of human ingenuity have also underwritten other historical boosts in well-being, such as safety, leisure, travel, and access to art and entertainment. Though many of the gadgets and bureaucracies grew organically and were perfected through trial and error, none was an accident. People at the time advocated for them with arguments driven by logic and evidence, costs and benefits, cause and effect, and tradeoffs between individual advantage and the common good. Our ingenuity will have to be redoubled to deal with the trials we face today, particularly the Tragedy of the Carbon Commons (chapter 8). Brainpower will have to be applied to technologies that make clean energy cheap, pricing that makes dirty energy expensive, policies that prevent factions from becoming spoilers, and treaties to make the sacrifices global and equitable.14
Progress consists of more than gains in safety and material well-being. It consists also of gains in how we treat each other: in equality, benevolence, and rights. Many cruel and unjust practices have declined over the course of history. They include human sacrifice, slavery, despotism, blood sports, eunuchism, harems, foot-binding, sadistic corporal and capital punishments, the persecution of heretics and dissidents, and the oppression of women and of religious, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.15 None has been extirpated from the face of the earth, but when we chart the historical changes, in every case we see descents and, in some cases, plunges.
How did we come to enjoy this progress? Theodore Parker, and a century later Martin Luther King Jr., divined a moral arc bending toward justice. But the nature of the arc and its power to pull the levers of human behavior are mysterious. One can imagine more prosaic pathways: changing fashions; shaming campaigns; appeals to the heart; popular protest movements; religious and moralistic crusades. A popular view is that moral progress is advanced through struggle: the powerful never hand over their privileges, which must be wrested from them by the might of people acting in solidarity.16
My greatest surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino was a reasoned argument.17 A philosopher wrote a brief which laid out arguments on why some practice was indefensible, or irrational, or inconsistent with values that everyone claimed to hold. The pamphlet or manifesto went viral, was translated into other languages, was debated in pubs and salons and coffeehouses, and then influenced leaders, legislators, and popular opinion. Eventually the conclusion was absorbed into the conventional wisdom and common decency of a society, erasing the tracks of the arguments that brought it there. Few people today feel the need, or could muster the ability, to formulate a coherent argument on why slavery is wrong, or public disembowelment, or the beating of children; it’s just obvious. Yet exactly those debates took place centuries ago.
And the arguments that prevailed, when they are brought to our attention today, continue to ring true. They appeal to a sense of reason that transcends the centuries, because they conform to principles of conceptual consistency that are part of reality itself. Now, as we saw in chapter 2, no logical argument can establish a moral claim. But an argument can establish that a claim under debate is inconsistent with another claim a person holds dear, or with values like life and happiness that most people claim for themselves and would agree are legitimate desires of everyone else. As we saw in chapter 3, inconsistency is fatal to reasoning: a set of beliefs that includes a contradiction can be deployed to deduce anything and is perfectly useless.
Wary as I must be of inferring causation from correlation, and of singling out just one cause in a crisscrossing historical mesh, I cannot claim that good arguments are the cause of moral progress. We cannot do a randomized controlled trial on history, with half of a sample of societies exposed to a compelling moral treatise and the other half given a placebo filled with high-minded mumbo jumbo. Nor do we have a large enough dataset of moral triumphs to extract a causal conclusion from the network of correlations. (The closest I can think of are cross-national studies showing that education and access to information in one era, which are indicators of a readiness to exchange ideas, predict democracy and liberal values in a later one, holding socioeconomic confounds constant.)18 For now I can only give examples of precocious arguments that historians tell us were influential in their day and that remain unimpeachable in ours.
Let’s begin with religious persecution. Did people really need an intellectual argument to understand why something might be a wee bit wrong with burning heretics at the stake? In fact they did. In 1553 the French theologian Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) composed an argument against religious intolerance, noting the absence of reasoning behind John Calvin’s orthodoxies and the “logical outcome” of his practices:
Calvin says that he is certain, and [other sects] say they are; Calvin says that they are wrong and wishes to judge them, and so do they. Who shall be judge? Who made Calvin the arbiter of all the sects, that he alone should kill? He has the Word of God and so have they. If the matter is certain, to whom is it so? To Calvin? But then why does he write so many books about manifest truth? . . . In view of all the uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself. Calvin would have to invade France and all other nations, wipe out cities, put all the inhabitants to the sword, sparing neither sex nor age, not even babies and the beasts.19
The sixteenth century saw another precocious argument against a barbaric practice. Today it seems obvious that war is not healthy for children and other living things. But for most of history, war was seen as noble, holy, thrilling, manly, glorious.20 Though it was only after the cataclysms of the twentieth century that war ceased to be venerated, the seeds of pacifism had been planted by one of the “fathers of modernity,” the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), in his 1517 essay “The Plea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity against War.” After giving a poignant account of the blessings of peace and the horrors of war, Erasmus turned to a rational-choice analysis of war, explaining its zero-sum payoffs and negative expected utility:
To these considerations add that the advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and reach great numbers; while in war, if any thing turns out happily . . . the advantage redounds only to a few, and those unworthy of reaping it. One man’s safety is owing to the destruction of another; one man’s prize is derived from the plunder of another. The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. Whatever is unfortunate in war is severely so indeed, and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness, deriving its existence from another’s woe. Indeed, at the conclusion, it commonly happens that both sides, the victorious and the vanquished, have cause to deplore. I know not whether any war ever succeeded so fortunately in all its events but that the conqueror, if he had a heart to feel or an understanding to judge, as he ought to do, repented that he ever engaged in it at all. . . .
If we were to calculate the matter fairly, and form a just computation of the cost attending war and that of procuring peace, we should find that peace might be purchased at a tenth part of the cares, labors, troubles, dangers, expenses, and blood that it costs to carry on a war. . . .
But the object is to do all possible injury to an enemy. A most inhuman object . . . And consider whether you can hurt him essentially without hurting, at the same time, and by the same means, your own people. It surely is to act like a madman to take to yourself so large a portion of certain evil when it must ever be uncertain how the die of war may fall in the ultimate issue.21
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a font of arguments against other kinds of cruelty and oppression. As with religious persecution, we are left almost speechless when asked what’s wrong with the use of sadistic torture for criminal punishment, such as drawing and quartering, breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, or sawing someone in half from the crotch up. But in a 1764 pamphlet the economist and utilitarian philosopher Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) laid out arguments against those barbarities by identifying the costs and benefits of criminal punishment. The legitimate goal of punishment, Beccaria argued, is to incentivize people not to exploit others, and the expected utility of wrongdoing should be the metric by which we assess punitive practices.
As punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like fluids always adjust to the level of their surroundings, become hardened, and the ever lively power of the emotions brings it about that after a hundred years of cruel tortures, the wheel causes no more fear than prison previously did. For a punishment to serve its purpose, it is only necessary that the harm that it inflicts outweighs the benefit that the criminal can derive from the crime, and into the calculation of this balance, we must add the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good produced by the crime. Anything more than this is superfluous, and therefore tyrannical.22
Beccaria’s argument, and those by fellow philosophes Voltaire and Montesquieu, influenced the prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments” by the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution. In recent years the amendment continues to be invoked to chip away at the range of executions in America, and many legal observers believe it’s only a matter of time before the entire practice is ruled unconstitutional.23
Other forms of barbarism were also targeted during the Enlightenment by arguments that remain pungent to this day. The other great eighteenth-century utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), composed the first systematic argument against the criminalization of homosexuality:
As to any primary mischief, it is evident that it produces no pain in anyone. On the contrary it produces pleasure. . . . The partners are both willing. If either of them be unwilling, the act is not that which we have here in view: it is an offence totally different in its nature of effects: it is a personal injury; it is a kind of rape. . . . As to any danger exclusive of pain, the danger, if any, must consist in the tendency of the example. But what is the tendency of this example? To dispose others to engage in the same practises: but this practise for anything that has yet appeared produces not pain of any kind to any one.24
Bentham also stated the argument against cruelty to animals in a way that continues to guide the animal protection movement today:
The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity [hairiness] of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum [tailbone] are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?25
Bentham’s juxtaposition of the morally irrelevant differences in skin color among humans with the differences in physical and cognitive traits among species is no mere simile. It is a goad to question our instinctive response to the superficial features of the entities we are being asked to consider (the reaction from System 1, if you will) and to reason our way to coherent beliefs on who is deserving of rights and protections.
The prodding of cognitive reflection by analogizing a protected group with a vulnerable one is a common means by which moral persuaders have awakened people to their biases and bigotries. The philosopher Peter Singer, an intellectual descendant of Bentham and today’s foremost proponent of animal rights, calls the process “the expanding circle.”26
Slavery was a common frame of reference. The Enlightenment hosted a vigorous abolitionist movement, initiated by arguments from Jean Bodin (1530–1596), John Locke (1632–1704), and Montesquieu (1689–1755).27 With the latter two, their case against slavery also underlay their criticism of absolute monarchy and their insistence that governments are legitimately empowered only by the consent of the governed. The starting point was to undermine the assumption of a natural hierarchy: any ranking of aristocrat and commoner, lord and vassal, owner and slave. “We are born free,” Locke wrote, “as we are born rational.”28 Humans are inherently thinking, sentient, volitional beings, none possessing a natural right to dominate any other. In his chapter on slavery in Two Treatises of Government, Locke elaborates:
Freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.29
The keystone idea that equality is the default relationship among people was co-opted by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) as the justification for democratic government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
While Locke may have anticipated that his writings would inspire one of the great developments in human history, the rise of democracy, he may not have anticipated another one it would inspire. In her 1730 preface to Some Reflections upon Marriage, the philosopher Mary Astell (1666–1731) wrote:
If absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so in a Family? or if in a Family why not in a State? Since no reason can be alleg’d for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other. . . . If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?30
Sound familiar? Astell shrewdly appropriated Locke’s argument (including his phrase “the perfect condition of slavery”) to undermine the oppression of women, making her the first English feminist. Long before it became an organized movement, feminism began as an argument, picked up after Astell by the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft not only extended the argument that it was logically inconsistent to deny women the rights granted to men, but argued that any assumption that women were inherently less intellectual or authoritative than men was spurious because of a confound between nature and nurture: women were raised without the education and opportunities afforded to men. She began her book with an open letter to Talleyrand, a major figure in the French Revolution, who had argued that, égalité shmégalité, girls don’t need a formal education:
Consider, I address you as a legislator, whether, when men contend for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge for themselves, respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner best calculated to promote their happiness? Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?
In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful. Do you not act a similar part, when you force all women, by denying them civil and political rights, to remain immured in their families groping in the dark? For surely, sir, you will not assert, that a duty can be binding which is not founded on reason? If, indeed, this be their destination, arguments may be drawn from reason; and thus augustly supported, the more understanding women acquire, the more they will be attached to their duty, comprehending it, for unless they comprehend it, unless their morals be fixed on the same immutable principle as those of man, no authority can make them discharge it in a virtuous manner. They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.31
And speaking of slavery itself, the truly commanding arguments against the abominable institution came from the writer, editor, and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). Himself born into slavery, Douglass could searingly engage his audiences’ empathy for the suffering of the enslaved, and as one of history’s greatest orators, he could stir them with the music and imagery of his speech. Yet Douglass deployed these gifts in the service of rigorous moral argumentation. In his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), Douglass apophatically rejected any need to provide arguments against slavery using “the rules of logic” because, he said, they were obvious, before proceeding to do exactly that. For example:
There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.32
Douglass continued, “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed,” and he then confronted his audience with a copious inventory of inconsistencies in their belief systems:
You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. . . .
You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country.
And foreshadowing Martin Luther King more than a century later, he held the nation to its founding declaration:
You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.
That Douglass and King could approvingly quote Jefferson, himself a hypocritical and in some ways dishonorable man, does not compromise the rationality of their arguments but reinforces it. We should care about people’s virtue when considering them as friends, but not when considering the ideas they voice. Ideas are true or false, consistent or contradictory, conducive to human welfare or not, regardless of who thinks them. The equality of sentient beings, grounded in the logical irrelevance of the distinction between “me” and “you,” is an idea that people through the ages rediscover, pass along, and extend to new living things, expanding the circle of sympathy like moral dark energy.
Sound arguments, enforcing a consistency of our practices with our principles and with the goal of human flourishing, cannot improve the world by themselves. But they have guided, and should guide, movements for change. They make the difference between moral force and brute force, between marches for justice and lynch mobs, between human progress and breaking things. And it will be sound arguments, both to reveal moral blights and discover feasible remedies, that we will need to ensure that moral progress will continue, that the abominable practices of today will become as incredible to our descendants as heretic burnings and slave auctions are to us.
The power of rationality to guide moral progress is of a piece with its power to guide material progress and wise choices in our lives. Our ability to eke increments of well-being out of a pitiless cosmos and to be good to others despite our flawed nature depends on grasping impartial principles that transcend our parochial experience. We are a species that has been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope. They awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that.