I understand, and this is where I disagree. I would say that a course of action can be deemed efficacious dependent on how well it advances one toward fulfillment of his goal, but not necessarily rational. To be rational, the goal itself must be founded on rational premises. If I observe that I need food to live, that food costs money, and that providing my services is a way to obtain money and subsequently do so, at every step my thinking is founded on demonstrable premises; my actions are rational. If I decide that God exists and he wants me to blow innocents to smithereens, my premises are not founded on demonstrable facts, and my actions are not rational -- no matter how efficacious.
My most fundamental claim is that no action is inherently rational or rational withou contingency on any other factor as all actions serve to fulfill a certain goal. I argue that the goal in itself need not be rational in order for actions fulfilling this goal to be considered rational.
What you have in mind is the very antithesis to my conclusion, that the goal in question must be rational in order for the actions advancing an actor towards its fulfillment to be considered rational. For instance, the goals of surviving, eating food and breathing air are rational, yet goals of suicide bombing are not.
I would argue that some goals need be rational, yet others do not. For instance, if your most fundamental goal is to survive, then the goal of finding food is rational whilst the objective of finding a wall against which you want to bang your head is not.
In your post you were working under the assumption that our most fundamental goal is to survive, thus from this premise you have deduced that breathing air is rational yet suicide bombing is not. My question is as follows: is there anything inherently rational about electing survival as our most fundamental goal? It is true that biologically we have been wired in a way that its almost impossible for us to elect any other goal as the most important; however, does this mean that the goal of survival is rational by the nature of itself or inherently rational? I think not, its simply a blind urge that inheres in our very nature. In principle it is possible that a being would exist that has dying as its primary goal, in this case the action of suicide bombing would indeed be a rational choice.
In short, your basic assumption is that in order for an action to be rational, in must be supporting a rational fundamental goal. My rebuttal is that there is no such thing as a fundamentally rational goal, as our most fundamental goals are no more than our deepest desires or things that we'd like to get the most. In the case of a normal human being it is mere survival. From this it follows that a rational action can be defined as one that allows us to achieve our goals and since our goals are but mere desires, we can define an action's rationality in proportion to how well it advances us towards an achievement of our desires. That of course is granted that we have elected the action in question. If it is my goal to get to the bus stop and I merely slip and fall and as a result slide all the way down to the bus station, my action is neither rational nor irrational. The standard of rationality applies only to actions that we have willingly chosen.
With the argument above in consideration, do you have any other objections with regard to why we can't define our chosen action's rationality in accordance to how well it advances us towards reaching our goals or desires?
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To follow up our previous exchange we may ask if going to heaven is the most fundamental goal of a suicide bomber. I would say no because just like all normal human beings he desires to feel well. Hence, he mistakenly assumes that the following notions are true.
1. There is a heaven.
2. He can reach heaven by suicide bombing.
3. Heaven will make him feel good.
These assumptions combined engender a sub-goal of going to heaven which is means to the end of reaching his most fundamental goal of feeling well. Thus the fanatic that you have envisaged is irrational in a sense that all irrational people are as he has elected absurd sub-goals. However, my main point is that his main goal is non-rational, as it is a pure arbitrary desire to feel well. The same goes with respect to all humans. The fact that our most fundamental goal is non-rational does not in any way undermine the rationality of our sub-goals. In principle, its possible to create a robot that has the main goal of destroying itself and he would be behaving in a way that is purely rational (or conducive to fulfillment of the main goal) yet his actions would seem irrational to us as we would be working under the assumption that his main goal was just like ours or to survive.
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All of the above was aimed at defending my thesis that since our most fundamental goals are mere deepest desires of ours and a rational action can be defined in proportion to how much it advances towards an achievement of the goal in question, we may say that an action's rationality is to be appraised in terms of how well it brings us closer to actualizing our most fundamental desires which need not be rational.
Important note: Please pay close attention to the following point. In your post you stated the goal itself must be rational, I argued that this is not so as the most fundamental goal of ours is a mere arbitrary biological drive. Hence, its not possible that our main goal will be rational and it therefore follows that your claim does not apply to all goals. However, the sub-goals or goals that we must reach in order to achieve our main non-rational goal can be appraised as rational strictly to the extent that they advance us towards achievement of the aforementioned non-rational goal.