Rational Philosophy

Today:

In a CNN poll, 65% said that the UAW workers didn’t have the right to strike after a breakdown in talks with GM. In a Best Buy poll 90% of consumers said they didn’t fully understand high definition TVs. And after rallying in the wake of the fed’s cut in the lending rate last week, stocks dropped back as consumers began to worry again about the economic outlook.

Each of these statistics seem to point to a very interesting philosophical problem — sufficient understanding. I first encountered this concept in reading Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer rests the foundation of his philosophy on what he calls “the principle of sufficient reason,” by which he means that we cannot know everything, but we can draw conclusions from a solid ground of knowing (and no more).

In many aspects of life, it seems to me, the critical and the trivial, we just don’t know enough to form a valid opinion, or make a determination. Do the union representatives know enough about the complex repercussions of GM’s business strategy to determine that it will ultimately benefit their members to strike for a better deal? And do the respondent’s to CNN’s poll understand enough to say that it is wrong to strike? Clearly most consumer’s don’t understand enough about high definition technology to make an informed purchase decision (and yet we go out and buy HDTVs anyway). And can anyone claim to know enough about the hugely mysterious workings of the stock market to be able to accurately predict whether, even after a half percent cut in the minimum lending rate, it would be better to buy or sell.

We tend instead to approach these kinds of questions by parsing the broad principles at work, such as: GM’s plans to succeed in the free market must be better overall for workers and consumers than the union’s objective to do well for its members. HDTV is new technology and seems to synonymous with thin panel TVs so it must be worth buying. The lending market is in trouble so a cut in lending rates will be good for the market.

As I think about these kinds of things, I often wonder whether we can ever know enough about the questions at hand to form and draw sufficiently educated conclusions. And perhaps the broad brush stroke approach is the best we can do. Certainly, when we’re buying a new TV it is philosophically acceptable to assume that the newer technology has some merit and, depending on how much we value TV, is worth the money. After all, what’s the downside? Likewise, when we invest in the stock market, we know that we are engaging in an ultimately risky practice, and gauge our investments accordingly. But what about the UAW and its members? What about GM?

After all, the advent of unions was critically important to society in the early decades of the industrial revolution. Without unions, workers were at the mercy of their employers. Today it sometimes seems that the companies are at the mercy of the unions. Certainly, the equation is more balanced.

I’m not trying to draw a conclusion here, but just to point out that each problem requires that we attempt to dig deeply to find the appropriate principles at work. And we can’t arrive at these principles without considerable reflection and research. Too often, perhaps, we hold opinions based on a simplistic and tenuous understanding.

This, I think, is partly because the questions we’re faced with are many and varied, huge and sophisticated; how can we possibly know enough to draw sufficiently reasoned conclusions about the myriad complex questions of the day? And why then do we attempt to do just that? A fair answer would be that if we don’t somebody else will…