Rung Four: Human beings are poor thinkers

Our collector of Franklin thoughts, George L. Rogers, thought about how a person with certain beliefs might “make many choices different from those who do not.”

Those beliefs covered in Rung Three might include:

• that one God governs the world through Providence

• that one God is worthy of adoration, prayer and thanksgiving

• that mankind is all one family and service of God is doing good to others

• that there is a future state where wrongs will be righted.

Franklin, while largely skipping public worship, was so enamored by the importance of these beliefs that he crafted his own mini-prayerbook.

God is important, Franklin says. Some sense of divinity, religious belief, and practical effects of such belief is crucial to human endeavor.

This brings us to both the fallibility and importance of human reason in Rung Four: “Correct action is dependent upon correct opinion.” For instance, above, one can argue that, because you believe mankind is all one family, and that there is a kind God who rewards our virtuous action, then doing service to others is encouraged, incentivized and happens more often.

This chapter begins with anecdotes from Franklin on epistemic humility, really: the failure of human reason. We want certain things to be true, so we use our reason to justify and rationalize. Others do it, as Franklin points out. But he explains how he does it himself.

The first chapter of this section, then, is a bit of a tease. It presents the problem.

You decide to do something for moral reasons, but you like the alternative. So, you reasonably (but self-servingly) rationalize away your moral stance. Example? Benjamin Franklin’s vegetarianism. Here’s the anecdote:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon, the taking of every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and when this came hot out of the frying pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Franklin explains his moral stance, his yearning to do the wrong thing, and how his “helpful” human reason gets him out away from his “principle” to satisfy his “inclination.” We are like this, Franklin says—himself included.

He goes on to give more examples: Native Americans justify their drunkenness to Franklin after a violent, embarrassing night of tribal carousing (“Now, when [the Great Spirit] made rum, he said, ‘Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,’ and it must be so.”). Experts say a post-chaise behind the horses tilted forward makes the horses go faster after Franklin points out that the overhand also covers his view of the surroundings (they don’t, but they rationalize their custom). Clergy refuse to see the need for Franklin’s lightning rods at the tops of their steeples, even though experimental science has proven they prevent fires; that’s not surprising, writes Franklin, because “we see how long even philosophers, men of extensive science and great ingenuity, can hold out against the evidence of new knowledge that does not square with their preconceptions.”

It can be so bad, Franklin says at the end of an excerpt about poor reasoning, that he wishes sometimes “that mankind had never been endowed with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it, and so often mislead themselves by it, and that they have been furnished with a good sensible instinct instead of it.”

Sheesh, Franklin says—better everyone had a bigger dollop of common sense and animal instinct and lost their human reason altogether.

Well, you might say, that’s not proper reason. That’s bad reasoning! Franklin agrees, and in the next sections of this chapter Rogers will share what he sees as Franklin’s advice for cultivating “good” judgment and not self-justifying, rationalizing reason.

Questions to Maybe Ask During Rung Four

1. What do you believe, because it suits you—because you like that it’s true?

2. Do you experiment to discover whether your beliefs are true or not? Is it painful or aggravating to do so? (I think it is!)

3. Are there ways your incorrect opinion about things leads you to incorrect action?