First, can you clarify what you mean by rational persuasion, if you are distinguishing it from logical proof?
I don’t mean to distinguish it from logical proof in the everyday sense of that term. Rational persuasion can be as logically rigorous as the circumstances require. What I’m distinguishing “rational persuasion” from is a whole model of moral argumentation that I’m calling “logical argumentation” for the purposes of this post.
If you take the model of logical argumentation as your ideal, then you act as if a “perfect” moral argument could be embedded, from beginning to end, from axiomatic assumptions to “ought”-laden conclusions, as a formal proof in a formal logical system.
On the other hand, if you’re working from a model of dialectical argumentation, then you act as if the natural endpoint is to persuade a rational agent to act. This doesn’t mean that any one argument has to work for all agents. Harris, for example, is interested in making arguments only to agents who, in the limit of ideal reflection, acknowledge that a universe consisting exclusively of extreme suffering would be bad. However, you may think that you could still find arguments that would be persuasive (in the limit of ideal reflection) to nearly all humans.
Do you mean that we can skip arguing for some premises because we can rely on our intuition to identify them as already shared? Or do you mean that we need not aim for deductive certainty—a lower confidence level is acceptable? Or something else?
For the purposes of this post, I’m leaving much of this open. I’m just trying to describe how people are guided by various vague ideals about what ideal moral argumentation “should be”.
But you’re right that the word “rational” is doing some work here. Roughly, let’s say that you’re a rational agent if you act effectively to bring the world into states that you prefer. On this ideal, to decide how to act, you just need information about the world. Your own preferences do the work of using that information to evaluate plans of action. However, you aren’t omniscient, so you benefit from hearing information from other people and even from having them draw out some of its implication for you. So you find value in participating in conversations about what to do. Nonetheless, you aren’t affected by rhetorical fireworks, and you don’t get overwhelmed by appeals to unreflective emotion (emotional impulses that you would come to regret on reflection). You’re unaffected by the superficial features of who is telling you the information and how. You’re just interested in how the world actually is and what you can do about it.
Do you need to have “deductive certainty” in the information that you use? Sometimes you do, but often you don’t. You like it when you can get it, but you don’t make a fetish of it. If you can see that it would be wasteful to spend more time on eking out a bit more certainty, then you won’t do it.
“Rational persuasion” is the kind of persuasion that works on an agent like that. This is the rough idea.
I don’t mean to distinguish it from logical proof in the everyday sense of that term. Rational persuasion can be as logically rigorous as the circumstances require. What I’m distinguishing “rational persuasion” from is a whole model of moral argumentation that I’m calling “logical argumentation” for the purposes of this post.
If you take the model of logical argumentation as your ideal, then you act as if a “perfect” moral argument could be embedded, from beginning to end, from axiomatic assumptions to “ought”-laden conclusions, as a formal proof in a formal logical system.
On the other hand, if you’re working from a model of dialectical argumentation, then you act as if the natural endpoint is to persuade a rational agent to act. This doesn’t mean that any one argument has to work for all agents. Harris, for example, is interested in making arguments only to agents who, in the limit of ideal reflection, acknowledge that a universe consisting exclusively of extreme suffering would be bad. However, you may think that you could still find arguments that would be persuasive (in the limit of ideal reflection) to nearly all humans.
For the purposes of this post, I’m leaving much of this open. I’m just trying to describe how people are guided by various vague ideals about what ideal moral argumentation “should be”.
But you’re right that the word “rational” is doing some work here. Roughly, let’s say that you’re a rational agent if you act effectively to bring the world into states that you prefer. On this ideal, to decide how to act, you just need information about the world. Your own preferences do the work of using that information to evaluate plans of action. However, you aren’t omniscient, so you benefit from hearing information from other people and even from having them draw out some of its implication for you. So you find value in participating in conversations about what to do. Nonetheless, you aren’t affected by rhetorical fireworks, and you don’t get overwhelmed by appeals to unreflective emotion (emotional impulses that you would come to regret on reflection). You’re unaffected by the superficial features of who is telling you the information and how. You’re just interested in how the world actually is and what you can do about it.
Do you need to have “deductive certainty” in the information that you use? Sometimes you do, but often you don’t. You like it when you can get it, but you don’t make a fetish of it. If you can see that it would be wasteful to spend more time on eking out a bit more certainty, then you won’t do it.
“Rational persuasion” is the kind of persuasion that works on an agent like that. This is the rough idea.