great point -- I think I largely agree -- but there may, still, be some disanalogy between the two cases (the Irish legend v. 'God') -- namely once you begin describing God's various attributes (omnipotence, creator, goodness, etc.) then it may well be plausible to seek independent/direct evidence of his existence in the world around you, independent that is of the 'source' of the 'tale' itself -- and that might not be equally true, or true to the same degree, as in the Irish legend case -- after all, you may not need to know who thought of the idea of a 'Creator' God first in order to evaluate, perfectly rationally, whether the world around us exhibits any evidence of intelligent design or creation -- of course, when you do learn more about the 'source' of the idea of God that may increase your skepticism about the truth of the claim that God exists, but it does seem to me that claim may also be evaluable independently of its sources --

best,

Andrew

just to supplement Charles's very fine response: first, yes human beings are very irrational, but you can find irrational humans in every domain, theist and atheist ... if you're looking for 'rationality,' or at least approximations thereof, or at least 'reasonableness,' you probably don't want to be listening to local preachers (or even local 'atheists', whatever that means) -- you want to be talking to more philosophically inclined people (which is more or less what Charles is getting at) -- and there are plenty of deep, engaging, provocative things to think about, with respect to religion -- not merely the existence of God but many related topics -- even when you constrain yourself to trying to be 'rational' ... (I've tried to collect a number of these in my recent book 'The God Question,' which presents what a lot of famous philosophers have said on the subject of religion ...)

hope that's helpful -- best,

AP

A traditional version of this puzzle is referred to as 'Buridan's ass'. It postulates that a donkey put equidistant between two identical stacks of hay might starve out of inability to choose between them. If reason says that they are equally qualified for the position and either will do just fine, then any (morally acceptable) arbitrary criterion would do. So, I would simply flip a coin. I don't think the puzzle shows anything disturbing about the limits of reason. After all, you merely stipulated that the candidates were identically qualified.

Procrastination sometimes occurs because our immediate, short-term desires prevail over our calculations concerning longer-term costs and benefits. This does not make us into what Frankfurt calls "wantons", since we are still capable of reflective reasoning and we are still capable of being guided by such reasons. It just means that we sometimes suffer from a 'weakness of will'. (Explaining weakness of the will would require a much longer discussion.)

Procrastination is sometimes quite reasonable, though. First, because the farther we project into the future, the lower the probability of the anticipated costs and benefits. Doing a chore now, while I am alert and happy might be less onerous than doing it later, when I am tired and crabby; but the farther I project into the future, the more doubts I should have about whether I will be tired and crabby when I do the chore, whether the chore will still be annoying, and whether it will even need doing. The current pleasure of doing something else instead is much more certain. Furthermore, we should realize that our priorities change over time, so what now looks like long-term cost or benefit now may not look so in the future. I may lose my job because of my procrastination but that may no longer seem so bad when it actually happens. Insofar as I am making choices for my future self, I should recognize that that future self may not share my current priorities.

Short as it is, this question is tricky because of two ambiguities.

1. "rational" could be understood in the sense of choosing what are foreseeably the most effective means to given ends, or it could be understood in a more ambitious sense that would allow the commitment to certain combinations of ends, or even single ends, to be irrational as well.

2. for each of the disambiguations for 1, the word "rational" could be understood to mean "rationally permitted" or "rationally required".

I will read your "to be immoral" as shorthand for "to act in a way that is morally wrong."

Suppose your overriding end in life is to make your sister happy. Her greatest wish is for a golden necklace that you cannot afford to buy. But you have a way of stealing it. This theft would be immoral. But it it rationally permitted and even required on the thin notion of rationality: stealing is the foreseeably most effective means for you to attain your end.

This answer remains adequate even if we allow that combinations of ends may be irrational (by excessively interfering with one another's attainment). We may simply suppose that you have no interfering ends -- or, even cleaner, no other ends at all.

Might your sole end -- making your sister happy -- be irrational? The only option I see for supporting this is to claim that it would be irrational for you not to have the end of being in compliance with morality and not to make this latter end overriding. But this claim would stretch the ordinary sense of "rational" beyond recognition. And there is a further problem: Through a somewhat strange upbringing, you might have come to believe that making your sister happy is the one and only end that you morally ought to be pursuing. So you may have the end of being in compliance with morality and you may be committed also to make this end overriding, but, because of what you sincerely believe about the content of morality, you think that the whole content of morality is that you ought to make your sister happy no matter what it takes. In this case, I think, you would be rationally (permitted and even) required to go ahead and steal the necklace even though this is, unbeknownst to you, a morally wrong action.

So, despite the ambiguities, the answer is Yes across the board.

Implicit in this answer is that it can be irrational to be moral: it would be irrational for you to refrain from the theft).

Two questions still open are whether it can ever be rational to do what one believes to be morally wrong and whether it can ever be irrational to do what one believes to be morally required.

I know several people who believe such things, or at least say they do.

One group thinks that there are true contradictions that involve very special cases. The usual example is the so-called liar sentence, "This very sentence is not true". There is a simple argument that the liar sentence is both true and not true, and some people believe just that.

Other people, though, think there are contradictions involving much less special cases. An example would be what are called "borderline cases" of vague predicates, like "bald". People often want to say that there are some people who aren't bald and aren't not bald either. But the so-called De Morgan equivalences entail that this is equivalent to saying that the person is both bald and not-bald (or, strictly, both not-bald and not-not-bald).

People who hold such views are known as "dialetheists". See this article for more.

Good question. I suspect that the answer is 'yes', but we need to be clear that there are some puzzles about so-called 'self-deception' that need to be avoided. It's not plausible that I could lie to myself, fully knowing that I'm doing so, and also believe what I'm telling myself. Instead, we often *shroud* lots of what we tell ourselves in such a way that its untruth is not self-evident. So here I am with a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies. I like them a lot, and although I know on some level that I shouldn't eat very many, I'm *extremely* clever at coming up reasons why I can have just one more. (Had a rough day, will run an extra mile tomorrow, raisins are pretty good for you, you know the drill.) So I might convince myself that I can clear the plate. But to do that I have to somehow shroud the fact that I know on some level that I shouldn't.

The upshot is that a direct answer to your question is: Some people (maybe most of us) believe things that we know on some level are lies (but usually when we do we--usually temporarily--lose sight of the fact that we know this). It's only afterwards that we admit to ourselves, faced with the empty cookie plate, that what we told ourselves was bull!

By the way, _Madame Bovary_ is (among other things) a brilliant case study of this phenomenon.

Mitch Green