Fernando Aguiar

RATIONALITY AND IDENTITY: A CRITIQUE OF ALESSANDRO PIZZORNO

In a series of articles, A. Pizzorno has critically reviewed rational choice theory and developed an alternative to it. In certain academic environments, his work has become a clear referent of the sociological reaction against that paradigm. In this paper, we review and offer a critique of Pizzornos contribution. Firstly, we reconstruct what we think to be the theoretical core of his position, as based on three main concepts: multiple identity, individuals as ‘strings of selves’ and ‘circles of recognition’ as mechanisms reducing identitary uncertainty. Secondly, we criticise this core as lacking philosophical rigour and as being underdeveloped. Thirdly, we analyse Pizzornos theory as an alternative to the rational choice paradigm. Here we argue that social scientists – and Pizzorno is no exception – often make a double mistake when they oppose methodological individualism and rational choice models.

Rational Choice, Social Identity, and Beliefs about Oneself

Social identity poses one of the most important challenges to rational choice theory, but rational choice theorists do not hold a common position regarding identity. On one hand, externalist rational choice ignores the concept of identity or reduces it to revealed preferences. On the other hand, internalist rational choice considers identity as a key concept in explaining social action because it permits expressive motivations to be included in the models. However, internalist theorists tend to reduce identity to desire—the desire of a person to express his or her social being. From an internalist point of view, that is, from a viewpoint in which not only desires but also beliefs play a key role in social explanations as mental entities, this article rejects externalist reductionism and proposes a redefinition of social identity as a net of beliefs about oneself, beliefs that are indexical, robust, and socially shaped.

Moral Distance and Moral Motivations in Dictator Games

We perform an experimenta linvestigation using a dictator game in which individuals must make a moral decision - to give or not to give an amount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire in which the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision shows that, at least in this case, moral motivations carry a heavy weight in the decision: the majority of dictators give the money for reasons of a consequentialist nature. Based on the results presented here and of other analogous experiments, we conclude that dicator behavior can be understood in terms of moral distance rather than social distance and that it systematically deviates from the egoism assumption in economic models and game theory.

Whose Impartiality? An Experimental Study Of Veiled Stakeholders, Involved Spectators And Detached Observers

We present an experiment designed to investigate three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice. We consider a first-person procedure, inspired by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, an involved spectator and a detached observer. First-person veiled stakeholders and involved spectators are affected by an initially unfair distribution that, in the stakeholders’ case, is to be redressed. We find substantial differences in the redressing task. Detached observers propose significantly fairer redistributions than veiled stakeholders or involved spectators. Risk preferences partly explain why veiled stakeholders propose less egalitarian redistributions. Surprisingly, involved spectators, who are informed about their position in society, tend to favour stakeholders holding the same position as they do after the initial distribution.

Tolerating the Intolerant

We model a community of individuals whose relationships are governed by the rules of the so-called Heider balance theory, but modified to address the impact of tolerating intolerant individuals. To consider tolerance toward a different group, the elements are assigned one of the two flags, A or B, and the elements of each group can be tolerant or intolerant. Two additional parameters, p and q, respectively, characterize the propensity of elements to cooperate and the propensity of tolerants to reject intolerant attitudes. We find that (1) parameter q does not affect the degree of conflict at the micro level, but has an important influence on the degree of conflict in the whole system; (2) segregation into two cliques occurs whenever there exists intolerants in both groups; (3) when intolerants are present in only one of the groups, segregation can be avoided for appropriate combinations of parameters p and q that depend on the fraction of intolerants and the size of the groups; (4) as the size of the system increases, two balanced solutions dominate: segregation into two cliques or the isolation of intolerants; and (5) endemic partially balanced configurations are observed in large systems.

Robust Intuitions, Experimental Ethics, and Experimental Economics: Bringing Reflective Equilibrium into the Lab

Among the recent proposals for philosophical reform, none has generated as much controversy as experimental philosophy. Despite its originality and the suggestiveness of some of its results, experi-mental philosophy has been criticized almost from its very beginnings. In this chapter, we focus on a methodological objection due to Antti Kauppinen (Kauppinen, 2007). According to Kauppinen, experimental philosophy (in any of its possible formulations) would not be able to identify the robust conceptual intuitions of speakers. In this chapter, we counter Kauppinen’s criticism by highlighting the relevance of experimental economics to identify the behavioral dimension of our conceptual competence. To the extent that experimental economics is particularly well equipped to identify the behavioral aspect of our conceptual competence, experimental ethics would do well in enriching its methodology (based on questionnaires and vignettes, and an overly linguistic bias) with behaviorally-oriented experiments. This would permit us to more clearly define the contours of our conceptual competence in the contexts that are relevant for our discussion — attribution of moral responsibility, fairness, etc. Importantly, experimental work on this behavioral dimension of our conceptual competence will also contribute to experimentally modeling processes of reflective equilibrium that would justify our princi-ples and normative standards.