I wouldn’t suggest that people’s response to dilemmas like Singer’s is rationalization. Rather, I’d say that people have principles but are not very good at articulating them. If they say they should save a dying child because of some principle, that “principle” is just their best attempt to approximate the actual principle that they can’t articulate.
If the principle doesn’t fit when applied to another case, fixing up the principle isn’t rationalization; it’s recognizing that the stated principle was only ever an approximation, and trying to find a better approximation. (And if the fix up is based on bad reasoning, that’s just “trying to find a better approximation, and making a mistake doing so”.)
It may be easier to see when not talking about saving children. If you tell me you don’t like winter days, and I point out that Christmas is a winter day and you like Christmas, and you then respond “well, I meant a typical winter day, not a special one like Christmas”, that’s not a rationalization, that’s just revising what was never a 100% accurate statement and should not have been expected to be.
I wouldn’t suggest that people’s response to dilemmas like Singer’s is rationalization. Rather, I’d say that people have principles but are not very good at articulating them. If they say they should save a dying child because of some principle, that “principle” is just their best attempt to approximate the actual principle that they can’t articulate.
If the principle doesn’t fit when applied to another case, fixing up the principle isn’t rationalization; it’s recognizing that the stated principle was only ever an approximation, and trying to find a better approximation. (And if the fix up is based on bad reasoning, that’s just “trying to find a better approximation, and making a mistake doing so”.)
It may be easier to see when not talking about saving children. If you tell me you don’t like winter days, and I point out that Christmas is a winter day and you like Christmas, and you then respond “well, I meant a typical winter day, not a special one like Christmas”, that’s not a rationalization, that’s just revising what was never a 100% accurate statement and should not have been expected to be.