You seem to be using ‘rational’ here to just mean ‘good’. So your point is ‘It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons’.
PhilGoetz’s post is pretty thin but I’m not sure he’s guilty of that specific confusion. He may have made edits since your comment, but at the moment it says
What I find so disturbing about this is that humans need to have a religious justification to act this rationally. No “reasonable” society would encourage women to use sex to seriously motivate what they think needs to be done.
which reads to me not as a use of “rational” to just mean “good”, but a use of “rational” to describe (supposedly) instrumentally rational behaviour. The point PhilGoetz is getting at (if I read him correctly) is less “It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons” and more “It’s disturbing that people need an epistemically irrational basis for being so instrumentally rational”.
Granted, PhilGoetz has shot himself in the foot here by (1) expressing that in a way that’s simultaneously provocative and easy to misinterpret; (2) implying that travelling thousands of kilometres to a war zone to screw soldiers is an efficient (and hence instrumentally rational) way to further the cause of fundamentalist Islam, which I doubt; (3) implying that a reasonable society would “encourage women to use sex to seriously motivate what they think needs to be done”, without acknowledging likely problems with such a strategy; and (4) using an example that could well be BS, since the only source here is Fox News quoting a Tunisian minister who’s vague & imprecise:
“They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100” militants, the minister told members of the National Constituent Assembly [...] He did not elaborate on how many Tunisian women had returned to the country pregnant with the children of jihadist fighters. [...] The minister also did not say how many Tunisian women were thought to have gone to Syria for such a purpose, although media reports have said hundreds have done so.
which reads to me not as a use of “rational” to just mean “good”, but a use of “rational” to describe (supposedly) instrumentally rational behaviour.
That’s what I meant by ‘good’. The articles I linked are about retaining a certain connotation for the word ‘rational’—an association with systematic and general cognitive algorithms that conduce to truth or winning, as opposed to a completely generic association with truth or winning in all its manifestations. The goal is to retain ‘rational’ as a technical term reserved for a specific subject matter, as opposed to letting it evolve into a community shibboleth for anything we like (i.e., prefer, find good, find instrumentally rational). This both makes our discussions easier to comprehend, and makes ‘rational’ more useful (because it signals a more specific topic).
This isn’t so much a point about how we define ‘rational’ as it is a point about tabooing fancy shibboleths away when their content is the same as a simpler synonym. If we just start saying ‘good job being rational!’ when we mean nothing more than ‘good job forming an accurate belief!’ or ‘good job doing something you and I wanted to have happen!’, we’ll send the wrong message and dilute useful jargon.
You lost me. I still have no idea why you think this isn’t an example of rational behavior. Goal: Get more men to become jihadists. What do young men want? Sex. Encourage young women to provide them with sex. There’s no cost to the authorities—there’s a “social cost”, but that’s the social cost as we compute it, not as a hardline mullah computes it. He doesn’t pay anything.
PhilGoetz’s post is pretty thin but I’m not sure he’s guilty of that specific confusion. He may have made edits since your comment, but at the moment it says
which reads to me not as a use of “rational” to just mean “good”, but a use of “rational” to describe (supposedly) instrumentally rational behaviour. The point PhilGoetz is getting at (if I read him correctly) is less “It’s disturbing that people sometimes do good things for bad reasons” and more “It’s disturbing that people need an epistemically irrational basis for being so instrumentally rational”.
Granted, PhilGoetz has shot himself in the foot here by (1) expressing that in a way that’s simultaneously provocative and easy to misinterpret; (2) implying that travelling thousands of kilometres to a war zone to screw soldiers is an efficient (and hence instrumentally rational) way to further the cause of fundamentalist Islam, which I doubt; (3) implying that a reasonable society would “encourage women to use sex to seriously motivate what they think needs to be done”, without acknowledging likely problems with such a strategy; and (4) using an example that could well be BS, since the only source here is Fox News quoting a Tunisian minister who’s vague & imprecise:
he did in fact edit it
That’s what I meant by ‘good’. The articles I linked are about retaining a certain connotation for the word ‘rational’—an association with systematic and general cognitive algorithms that conduce to truth or winning, as opposed to a completely generic association with truth or winning in all its manifestations. The goal is to retain ‘rational’ as a technical term reserved for a specific subject matter, as opposed to letting it evolve into a community shibboleth for anything we like (i.e., prefer, find good, find instrumentally rational). This both makes our discussions easier to comprehend, and makes ‘rational’ more useful (because it signals a more specific topic).
This isn’t so much a point about how we define ‘rational’ as it is a point about tabooing fancy shibboleths away when their content is the same as a simpler synonym. If we just start saying ‘good job being rational!’ when we mean nothing more than ‘good job forming an accurate belief!’ or ‘good job doing something you and I wanted to have happen!’, we’ll send the wrong message and dilute useful jargon.
You lost me. I still have no idea why you think this isn’t an example of rational behavior. Goal: Get more men to become jihadists. What do young men want? Sex. Encourage young women to provide them with sex. There’s no cost to the authorities—there’s a “social cost”, but that’s the social cost as we compute it, not as a hardline mullah computes it. He doesn’t pay anything.