The rational mind is capable of both spectacular achievements and absolute disasters. It becomes a dangerous tool when not grounded in morality. And morality is beyond the rational, it cannot be derived from science. It's been tried on many occasions in the 20 centry and it failed. You want to try again?
Morality in my opinion is super-rational. It's what is best for yourself and others based on consequences of any particular action. There is no objective morality in my opinion because there is no way to determine what is best for everyone with any strong degree of accuracy but you can determine what you prefer for your own life and you can help others to help you help yourself.
Morality is something I've posted about when discussing AI, Tauchain, etc, in my blog posts. I just have the opinion that rationality and morality converge.
Effective applied ethics being an ethics shown to produce consistently good results for those who follow it. If we are discussing any principle, law, rule, moral, it's value is in the result is produces and not the ideological beliefs it produces. If a law produces very negative results, then it doesn't matter to me if the law came from a Marxist, a Capitalist, it simply is a bad law. And a good law, the ideology which generated is irrelevant to me, it's either good or bad law. Same for best practices, if you arrive at best practices it's because it's what works and you can have humans of many different cultures and ideologies arrive at the same best practices over time by rational means of trial and error.
I suppose where we disagree is your statement that morality is beyond rational. I don't agree with that because no absolute morality can produce consistently good outcomes. Any rule will produce a good or bad outcome depending on particular circumstances. Any best practice is only for certain narrow circumstances, such as what to do if x or what actions to take to prevent y. But the way we discovered those best practices is by the rational mind, by someone doing it and people seeing the consequences of it.
What's rational about taking others into consideration? Isn't a psychopath the most rational human being one could imagine?
Or I could reverse the question: tell me what is irrational about being a psychopath?
If I offer some help to a stranger that's quite irrational because chances are I'll never get anything back for my trouble. While a psychopath doesn't have this problem, all his/her acts are 100% rational.
No, psychopaths clinically are impulsive, lack empathy, and are no more rational than anyone else. The distinguishing feature of a psychopath is the lack of empathy but when psychopaths act impulsively on anger then it's not rational.
It's rational to take others into consideration because cooperation is more effective (long term) than competition. If you compete with everyone, then it's everyone vs everyone, and it's a state of constant war with no peace. In an environment like that then everything becomes more expensive because no one wants to cooperate with you because you could be competing with them. In the prisoners dilemma cooperation if it can be coordinated is more efficient than competition but if you cannot coordinate well enough to cooperate then it becomes more efficient to betray by default.
Why would you betray by default if you can cooperate by default and be guaranteed to never lose across many games? If you betray by default you might win this game, but eventually you'll be on the losing end.
Reciprocity is rational. If you believe you'll never in life be in the position of the stranger in need of help then perhaps it's not rational to help a stranger. If you could imagine a future instance of yourself in a position where you might need help, then helping the stranger promotes an environment beneficial to you being helped at some point in the future. This is rational as I mentioned, it's superrationality and is reciprocity.
Your assumption that psychopaths are 100% rational is extremely flawed. No human is 100% rational and psychopaths are no more or less rational than anyone else. Humans aren't 100% rational and psychopaths simply act on different emotions rather than empathy.
If a human acts on rationality then it's still possible to arrive at the conclusion to help others based on "enlightened self interest" which is to say that you want to create a trend, or a culture where people help each other and cooperate. A cooperative culture could be something you want to create for your own selfish reasons because it's more beneficial to you. Maybe it lowers your blood pressure to not have to be stressed, and so you think you'll live a longer life if you have less competition, and promoting cooperation is a way to reduce the competitiveness of life.
In my opinion competition shouldn't be the first resort. If an individual can get what they want from life through cooperation (and if you're smart about it then often you can), then there is no reason to force a competition. If you can give a stranger something they want, you never really know what the next person can do for you in the future or how that stranger is connected to you. The unknown interconnections between strangers encourages people (for rational reasons) to help complete strangers, but of course it depends on the kind of help. It's probably not rational to help any stranger at your own expense, so I'm not saying it's rational to run into a burning building to save the life of a stranger unless it's your job to do that.
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Absolutely wrong. A psychopath knows exactly what the other person feels and is able to play those emotions to his own advantage.
A proper psychopath never acts impulsively or is driven by his own anger. That's why he can be so manipulative and powerful.
Psychopaths aren't capable of empathy. Having knowledge of something doesn't mean having an understanding. I know how you feel if you tell me how you feel. I don't understand how you feel unless I relate it to how I felt when in your position.
Of course the above experiment is a bit flawed but it does indicate that psychopaths do not experience empathy in the way neurotypicals do. It is equivalent to saying that psychopaths have a diminished capacity for understanding certain cues and signals.
Psychopaths by definition are impulsive or they wouldn't be clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. Also, the human you describe doesn't exist. Any psychopath is also a human. Any human also has emotions, and which emotions the human will respond to differs from person to person. A psychopath without a short temper might easily get jealous, or may be tempted in many other ways away from rationality. The fact is, the idea of "proper psychopath" like you see in series like Dexter is not based off reality. If you look at actual clinically diagnosed psychopaths, you will never find a "proper psychopath" immune to being manipulated.
Finally I will note, anyone can be manipulative and powerful. Psychopaths do not have a monopoly on being manipulative and powerful. Manipulative is a learned skill, and power is acquired. Terrorists and gangsters can be manipulative and powerful, but not necessarily psychopaths or rational.
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The only important thing here is that psychopath knows what you feel and makes use of this knowledge to his own advantage. And my point is that in statistical terms this is the most rational behavior one could imagine.
My point is everyone does that, not just psychopaths. Psychopaths simply manipulate in a particularly callous way is the main difference. But just as every person has told a lie, every person has manipulated someone else. And who doesn't use knowledge to their own advantage?
So unless there are people who never lied and who never use knowledge to their own advantage, I guess I don't see the point to bringing psychopaths into it. Sure psychopaths manipulate but so do law enforcement investigators/interrogators.
My point is you can be rational or irrational without being a psychopath so really that doesn't have anything to do with being rational. You can also be ethical or unethical being a psychopath or not so that doesn't have much to do with ethics.
You still don't get the point why we started talking about psychopaths. The point is this: their behaviour is morally bad yet can be perfectly justified on the rational ground.
All this is to prove the point that morality cannot be derived from rationality. Even worse, moral acts which receive the most admiration are completely irrational.
To give a simple example: if I find a wallet in the street the moral thing to do is to try to find the owner and return it to him. Yet the rational thing to do is to keep the wallet and spend the money.
Unless you can to prove that being egoistic in this case is irrational. Good luck with that! It's morally bad but not irrational.