Faulty Reasoning and the Intellectual Conscience

           Ever met someone so much smarter than you that it just makes you feel dumb? Anyone who has knows it can be a harrowing experience. You know how the story goes: while meeting a new acquiantance, a discussion of some topic surfaces, and after mounting a defense of your beliefs, you come to find that your positions aren’t quite as reasonable as you thought. Excitement is replaced with apprehension and confidence dissolves. 

            That’s been the story of my life for the last few days. I’ve had the pleasure of conversing with a brilliant gentleman studying political science, and I’ve been challenged in a number of ways, mostly in providing well researched analysis and establishing causality in support of my beliefs.  During these conversations, I’ve found myself embarrassed with my inability to defend my positions, and have more than once identified with how Thrasymachus must have felt debating justice with Socrates.

            Still, for all of my ignorance and embarrassment, these conversations have been overwhelmingly positive. For one, it has sparked in me an obsession with logically validating the ideas that I have throughout the course of my day. After some thought, I realized a striking resemblence between the active validation of ideas and the validation of moral decisionmaking. So, I’ve decided to label the habit of logical validation the development of intellectual conscience.

            Let me explain what I mean. The common use of “conscience” involves moral consideration—or, put more simply, it is the little voice in your mind that gives you moral suggestions. What I’ve learned recently is that although my moral conscience is healthy and strong, my intellectual conscience with relevance to logical consistency is not. With some of my beliefs, it seems that my enthusiasm for their underlying first principles has led me to make faulty assumptions and logical leaps. To illustrate this, I’ll use an example from one of my recent conversations regarding capital gains taxes.

            In an op-ed that I wrote on the capital gains tax, I claimed that a decrease in the capital gains rate would pay for itself and actually provide a net increase in government capital gains revenue. My Socratic friend asked me to elaborate and support my beliefs, and after a brief discussion, I found that although many of my facts dealing with the 1997-2005 tax revenues were correct, I had made an assumption on the causality of lower rates and historical increases in revenue. In my enthusiasm for free market economics, I had silenced my intellectual conscience, that little voice in the back of my mind that upon introduction to the Laffer theory once asked, “aren’t there other factors at play here?” Unfortunately, it also seems that just as the moral conscience can slowly fade by being ignored, so it is with the intellectual conscience.

            The painful accountability of the discussion described above showed me that I need to have an intellectual conscience loud enough to hold me to logical consistency just as I need a moral conscience loud enough to keep me making the right ethical decisions. I’ll continue to weed out bad assumptions and faulty logic,  and maybe learn to heed my intellectual conscience as urgently as I try to obey my moral one.

~ by Matthias on May 28, 2009.