Do conflicting intuitions have to end in stale mate?

Before I say what I want to say, let me give the same disclaimer I give every time I talk about intuition. I am not using the word in a colloquial sense. Colloquially, people use this word to refer to a feeling or hunch one might have about whether something is true. They just have an inexplicable suspicion that something is true without necessarily being able to put their finger on why. That is not what I'm talking about.

I'm using the word, intuition, in the philosophical sense. Philosophically, intuition is immediate knowledge upon reflection. It's similar to what people used to refer to as "self-evident." It's when you can apprehend the truth of something without inferring it from anything else, but merely by thinking about it, reflecting on it, or "seeing" it with you sense of reason. For example, you can just kind of "see" that if Jim is taller than Dan, and Dan is taller than Bob, that Jim will be taller than Bob. You can "see" that if you had three pumpkins, and you added two pumpkins, that you'd have five pumpkins. You don't need to experiment with pumpkins to know that this is true. That's knowledge by intuition.

What I want to talk about today is what you might do in a situation where you and your buddy have intuitions that tell you different things. Or you have an intuition about something that he lacks, or vice versa. What can you do?

This is a problem because by their very nature, intuitions are the sorts of things that are known a priori. They are not the conclusion of any argument, evidence, or line of reasoning. They are known immediately upon reflection. So if you have a disagreement with somebody about something, and you have no source of authority to adjudicate between you, and you have no argument or evidence you can invoke to settle the issue, it would seem that you're at an impasse.

There are two things I want to say about that. First of all, I would like you to resist the urge to think that because somebody doesn't intuit what you intuit that this is any reason for you to doubt what you intuit. If you see something clearly--if it's self-evident to you--the fact that somebody else doesn't see it just as clearly is no reason for you to have any doubts at all.

Consider some basic geometrical intuitions we have. It's easy for just about everybody to see that if two straight lines intersect, opposite angles will be equal. But it's not as easy to see that the interior angles of any triangle in flat Euclidean space will sum to 180º. One truth is every bit as necessary and certain as the other, yet one is easier to "see" than the other. So it's inevitable that some who intuit the first will not intuit the second. Likewise, it's easier to intuit that 2+2=4 than it is to intuit that 7+5=12. So not everything that can be known by intuition can be known by all people with equal clarity.

So if something seems obviously true to you in an intuitive way, the fact that somebody else doesn't see it with the same clarity should be no reason at all for you to have doubts about it.

The second thing I want to say is that if you find yourself in conversation with somebody who doesn't share your intuition, you need not necessarily throw up your hands as if there's nowhere to go from there and no way to resolve the difference. There are ways of getting people to "see" things without having to prove them, argue for them, show evidence for them, etc.

One way to do it is by pointing to examples and just having them look and think about it. Moral realists do this all the time. If you run into somebody who doesn't think there's any real right and wrong, you can just point to examples of obvious egregious moral evils and ask them what they make of it. I always encourage people to be honest with themselves because we all have a natural tendency to want to say "Nuh uh!" when somebody does this to us. We're all reluctant to concede a point. I'm sometimes amazed by the absurdities people will embrace rather than concede even the most innocent of points.

Another way is to use analogies, stories, scenarios, illustrations, and things like that. Sometimes a person's intuitions just need to be awakened by some stimulus. It's possible to know something without knowing you know it. The information is buried in there somewhere, and somebody just needs to force it to the surface. Illustrations and analogies can do that.

One example of that is when somebody denies the law of non-contradiction. You can just try to imagine scenarios in which the law of non-contradiction isn't true. Aristotle famously pointed out that significant speech and action would be impossible without the law of non-contradiction. Unless the statement, "My dog barks," excludes, as true, the statement, "My dog does not bark," the statement doesn't communicate anything. It's a meaningless statement. Meaning requires the law of non-contradiction, because only if a statement excludes it's negation can it be a meaningful statement. Notice this doesn't prove the law of non-contradiction. It just illustrates it. It shows how it applies to the real world. Illustrations like this can cause the light to come on in the other person's head. Suddenly, they "see" that it's true just as you do.

It may not always be possible to find the right illustration or example to cause a person's intuition to awaken. These are just some suggestions. And even with the techniques, you can't convince everybody. Sometimes, two people disagree on some fundamental notion about reality, and it's just not going to be resolved. You don't have to stay up all night just because there are people who are wrong on the internet. It's okay to go to bed.

Sibling rivalry again - whether to hold on or not

I saw this quote today

"Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great." ~John D. Rockafeller

I don't know if he said that or not, but that's who the quote was attributed to. Anyway, the first thing that popped in my head was, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

That's sibling rivalry. These two sayings don't get along.

How tidy is the distinction between the physical and non-physical?

For a long time now, I've been a little suspicious of the tidy distinction philosophers make betweeen the physical and the non-physical, or between the material and the spiritual, or the body and the mind (or soul). I still consider myself a substance dualist because I think there is definitely a distinction. What I'm suspicious of is that the distinction is as tidy as philosophers have made it out to be, especially since Descartes.

The whole mind/body problem was born out of the way Decartes distinguished the mind and the body. He said the body was an extended non-thinking thing, and the mind was a non-existended thinking thing. "Extension," I think, was Descartes' way of referring to anything that's part of the physical material world. Since then, dualists have kind of equated the mind with the soul and the spiritual in general. But surely, there must be more to the spiritual than mere first person subjectivity.

Anyway, this tidy distinction in dualism gave rise to the interaction problem. If the physical world and the mental or spiritual world have no properties in common, then how do they interact? This problem can be formulated in a number of ways, but I'm not going to go into that.

This morning, I was thinking about a video I saw on YouTube yesterday on the PBS SpaceTime channel. Matt was talking about the difficulty of detecting neutrinos and how many neutrinos there are. I was thinking this morning about how some physical objects are easier to detect than others. A table is easier for us to detect than a magnetic field. Neutrinos are nearly impossible to detect because they hardly interact with anything. There are supposedly trillions of neutrinos traveling through your body every second, and nary a one is interacting with you. In the video, Matt said if you shot a beam of neutrinos through a wall of lead one light year thick, only half of the neutrinos would be attenuated.

Neutrios aren't the only things that are hard to detect. There's also dark matter. Dark matter doesn't interact with light. The only reason we know it's there is because of its gravitational effects on large scales. We can tell from the way galaxies rotate that they are surrounded by a cloud of dark matter. Some have speculated that maybe dark matter doesn't exist, and the solution lies in updating our current theory of gravity (general relativity). From what I gather, most physicists seem pretty sure that dark matter is composed of some kind of exotic particles, though, so they don't think the problem is with our theory of gravity.

Then there's dark energy, which we only know about because the expansion of the universe is accelerating for no obvious reason. We call its cause "dark energy," which is a way of saying I-Know-Not-What.

So the physical universe is full of surprises. There's a whole range of detectibility, which makes me think this range must extend beyond the detectable. If there's something as elusive as a neutrino (which is part of the standard model), then maybe there are other things slightly more elusive. They are just beyond the horizon of what we, made of standard model particles, can detect or interact with. The standard model doesn't account for everything.

To me, this kind of blurrs the distinction bewteen the physical and the non-physical. Suppose there are two particles, A and B, that cannot interact with each other. But suppose there's third particle, C, than can interact with both. So there is a way for A and B to interact with each other indirectly through C. This sort of thing may tie all physical things together even if some can't interact with others.

Suppose C didn't exist, though, or was at least extremely rare. What if there were people made of A-type particles, and other beings made of B-type particles. If each considered themselves "physical," wouldn't they consider the other "non-physical," or "non-existent" if they knew about each other at all?

Imagine there being physical things that don't interact with anything else at all, not even indirectly. This might raise questions about what it even means to exists. J.P. Moreland once said that to exists is to have properties. But what sorts of properties would something have that couldn't interact with anything? It's hard to imagine. But lack of imagination isn't a good reason to say it doesn't exist. Maybe we could say that for all practical purposes it doesn't exist since it plays no roll in the development of the universe.

But anyway, if there are these physical things that don't interact or that interact weakly or with very few other things, then why call them physical at all? What does it mean to be physical?

I remember when I was a kid being told that matter is anything that has mass and takes up space. Shortly after that, I was told there was this distinction between matter and energy. Light, I was told, was a form of energy since it doesn't have mass. But as you delve into the physics, you learn that a photon is just another particle in the standard model, and there is no tidy distinction between mattere and energy. In fact, they can be converted to and from each other. Some even say energy is just a number and isn't a substance at all.

I learned later on that even space and time itself are "stuff." They are physical. They can bend and be manipulated. The more we learn through physics, the more we have to tweak what it means to be physical in order to accomodate what we know to be out there. If there were more out there, like particles that don't interact, and we were somehow able to discover them (how is a mystery), then I suppose we'd have to tweak the meaning of physical even further.

So if it turns out there are these things called spirits, souls, disembodied minds, etc. that populate the spiritual world and that can, on occasions and in very weak ways, interact with the physical world, then wouldn't we just tweak the meaning of physical even further to accomodate them?

Just as there are physical things that have properties we may not know about, maybe the spiritual world does, too. And maybe it's in the murky areas in the fringes of their detectability or knowability that they share properties with physical things and can interact with each other. Of course if they can interact, then they are at least in principle detectable. But they may not be detectable in practice.

When the mind interacts in the brain, the interaction could be very subtle. One small interaction at the subatomic level could cause an avalance of causes in the brain. The avalanche can be detected, but the initial cause is lost in a sea of apparent quantum randomness. Finding it might be like finding Waldo or even worse.

But I am skeptical of the notion that spirits or disembodied souls don't have any physical properties at all--that there's a tidy distinction between them and everything we know to be physical. I suspect, but am far from certain, that spirits can have location, for example. If they can be located within spacetime, then they probably have a size as well. Contra Descartes, they can have extension. If they have location, extension, and size, then perhaps they can interact with spacetime itself. After all, if something has spacial properties, and you can bend spacetime, then this would surely affect that thing. By interacting with spacetime, a spirit can interact indirectly with quantum fields, and therefore through the particles that emerge in quantum fields, which would include all the standard model particles. Maybe spacetime is the "C" that bridges the causal gap between the spiritual and the rest of the physical world.

I don't know, though. Maybe what we think of as location when it comes to spirits, angels, etc., has more to do with where in the physical world they interact rather than where they are themselves. We think my spirit is in my body and yours is in yours because that's where they interact, not because they are physically located within us.

This is all speculation, of course. This is the sort of thing I think about when taking a shower or going for a walk. I suspect, though I cannot argue, that if we could exhaustively know all the properties that are had by all things that exists that there'd be this range--this spectrum--in which we go from the hard physical world to the non-physical world, and somewhere in that range, there would be a murky area in which is isn't clear whether we are talking about something that's physical or non-physical.

Don't get the wrong idea, though. I am not an idealist, a physicalist, or a pan-psychist. I am still very much a substance dualist. Just as there is a distinction between a pile of dirt and a hill, or baldness and having hair, in spite of there being a gray area, so also do I think there is a distinction between the physical and the spiritual, even if there is a gray area.

The most important, basic, and fundamental questions in philosophy

I'm starting to read a new book this evening. It's called The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All?, edited by John Leslie and Robrert Lawrence Kuhn. It's a collection of essays. I haven't gotten to even the first one yet (still reading the intro stuff), but it did make me think to write this blog post.

There are two questions or issues in philosophy that I think are the most fundamental issues in philosophy. The two most fundamental subjects, broadly speaking, are ontology (what there actually is and why) and epistemology (what we can know and how we can know it).

The most fundamental question in ontology is why anything at all exists. I suppose one might say a more fundamental question than that is whether anything at all exists, and I would agree if I thought that was actually a problem.

The most fundamental question or problem in epistemology is the problem of the criterion. Since the basic questions of epistemology are "What do we know?" and "How do we know it?," and since the problem of the criterion deals with these two questions, I think it is the most fundamental problem in epistemology. There's nothing more basic than that.

I think the most important subject, broadly speaking, in philosophy or any other field of interest is ethics and morality. How should we live? Or is there a "should" at all? Although I think it's the most important issue, I don't think it's the most fundamental since we have to address epistemology before we can even begin to look at ethics and morality.

If I were to design an intro to philosophy class, those are three main sections it would contain. I'd probably begin with epistemology since you need that to address any other subject. Then I'd go to ontology, then ethics. These things are related, though.

In my own intro to philosophy, I don't think we covered ontology at all. At least not as a subject all its own. I mean when we talked about dualism vs. idealism, that was ontology. But we talked about dualism more in the context of the mind/body problem, and we talked about idealism more in the context of epistemology (specifically in the context of the problem of the external world).

In my section on ontology, besides talking about whether anything at all exists, I would probably want to cover what I think are the three or four major worldviews--naturalism, idealism, dualism, and maybe pan-psychism.

And now I think I'll read some in this book, then go to sleep.

How to make outstanding fajitas

Fajitas are probably the number one most delicious thing in this whole world to me. Why, without your fajitas, the whole darn shooting match can go arse over tea kettle. Here is how I make them (mostly taken from these two videos but adapted for my own preferences):

Fajitas: I use this guy's marinade and sometimes his refrigerator drying technique.

Flour tortillas - I don't use the same ingredient proportions, but this is the best video I've seen on technique, though it's long.

1. Purchase your meat
1. Skirt steak, and/or. . .
2. Chicken breast
1. Put your chicken breast between a couple of pieces of plastic wrap
2. Beat it with a mallet or rolling pin or something to make it thinner and an even thickness throughout.
2. Get you a yellow onion and a red bell pepper.
3. Pico de gallo and avocado/guacomole is optional.
4. Don't get sour cream. That's gross.
5. Make your marinade
1. 1/2 cup olive oil
2. 1/4 cup lime juice
3. 1/4 cup soy sauce
4. 1 teaspoon salt
5. 1/2 teaspoon chile powder
6. 1/2 teaspoon ground cummin
6. Put the chicken and/or beef in a 1 gallon freezer bag with the marinade, and put that in the refrigerator for two hours (or however long you feel like).
7. Make the tortillas
1. Turn on your oven light.
2. Make the tortilla dough
1. Put some water in a small pot, and put that on the stove on a low setting (like 3 if you're using an electric stove). This is just to warm the water up a bit.
2. 200g flour
3. 3g salt
4. Just a pinch of baking powder. (More often than not, I don't put any baking powder in there at all; it's supposed to make the tortillas softer but the problem is that if you put too much, it makes them harder to roll out and get thin without snapping back.)
5. 33g of lard or butter (I prefer butter).
6. With your hands, work the lard/butter into the flour until the flour has the consistency of beach sand where it kind sorta kinda hold its shape when you squeeze some of it in your hand.
7. Pour in 112g of the warm water.
8. Mix it up with your hand, then use a bowl scraper to scrap it all out onto the counter.
9. Knead it for five minutes or until you get tired of kneading it.
10. Put it back in the bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and put it in the oven for 20 minutes or so. The light from the oven should make it the perfect warmth.
11. Cut the dough in half, cut those halves in half, and cut those half halves in half (you should have 8 pieces altogether [You could double all the ingredients if you're making these for your family]).
12. Tuck each piece under itself over and over so you kind of stretch the other side, then place the seam side down, and roll it around under your hand (There are YouTube videos showing how to do this. You're just trying to make balls.)
13. Dip the balls in flour, and put them on a plate. Cover it with plastic wrap, and put them back in the oven for another 20 minutes.
3. Cook the tortillas
1. Heat your cast iron skillet (or griddle if you have one) up to medium (like 5 on an electric stove).
2. Roll your dough balls out as thin as you can get them.
1. I cut a plastic grocery bag up, put that on a tortilla press, and put the dough balls between the plastic, and smash them to get started. The dough won't stick to the plastic bag. The tortilla press is unnecessary. You can just start rolling the ball out. I like to get it started with the tortilla press because it helps me keep them round.
2. Put some flour on your counter and put the dough on there, and start rolling it out with a rolling pin. There's a technique to it to make the tortillas perfectly round, and there are YouTube videos showing how.
3. Put the dough/tortilla in the skillet (there's a technique for this, too).
4. When it starts to bubble up, turn it over. Use a spatula to push it down when it keeps bubbling up. Once it's done, put it on a plate, a towel, a tortilla warmer, or whatever.
8. Cut the onion and bell pepper up.
9. Cook the meat
1. Take the beef/chicken out of the marinade and put them between paper towels to take off the excess liquid. One trick I've tried is to put them on a wire rack in the refrigerator for another two hours to let them dry a little before cooking. Having them somewhat dry makes it easy to form a nice crust when you cook them, but it's not necessary. You can just dried them off with a paper towel. If you use a grill, you don't have to dry them off at all.
2. Put your stove on medium high (like 7 on an electric stove), and heat your cast iron skillet up until it's smoking hot.
3. Put your meat in (if you're using the skirt steak, put the fattiest side down first).
4. Cook that for maybe 3 minutes on each side, then put it on a cutting board.
10. Cook the onions and bell peppers
1. Put your onions and bell peppers in the same skillet with the residue from the meat.
1. If you used chicken instead of beef, add a little oil. It's probably not necessary to add oil if you used beef with a little fat on it.
2. Cook that until the onions start to get soft, and put in a little salt and pepper.
11. Cut your meat against the grain into strips.
12. Now put your fajitas together and enjoy.

You're welcome.

Jehovah's Witnesses on the morality of blood transfusions

I argued in another post at another time that there's a difference between moral objectivism and moral absolutism. Moral absolutism is the view that moral principles are absolute in the sense they allow no exceptions. If something is wrong, then it's wrong at all times, in all places, for all people, under all circumstances, with no exceptions. Moral objectivism is the view that there are moral principles that are true independently of our preferences and beliefs, but one can be a moral objectivist and still believe there are exception to moral principles.

I was just thinking about how the question of whether there are exceptions to moral rules really depends on the granularity of the moral principles we're talking about. With the exception of a-moral choices (if there be any), you could state a moral rule for every single circumstance a person could possibly be in. But a moral rule book that contained all those statements would be impossibly long. Out of convenience, we speak of morality more generally than that. Instead of saying, "If you are in such and such situation, here's what you should do," we say, "You should be kind to people." Then we apply those more general principles to specific circumstances. We say that in general we should be kind to people, and since Bob is a person, we should be kind to Bob. Or we say since helping Bob move his furniture would be a kind gesture, we should help him move his furniture.

But there are degrees of generalization vs. specificity, which is what I mean by "granularity." If you had a really fine-grained moral rule book, then you might have one rule for each choice it's possible to make (e.g. when Jim drops his wallet this afternoon, you pick it up and give it to him). If you had a really course-grained moral rule book, you might just have two rules (e.g. Love God, and Love your fellow man). What occured to me as I was thinking about this was that the finer the granularity of your rule-book, the fewer exceptions we should expect their to be. If it were as fine as possible, then there wouldn't be any exceptions at all. At the same time, the more course the ganularity of your moral rule book, the more exceptions we should expect their to be.

As long as the Bible is, it's nowhere near as long as it would have to be for it to be a maximally fine-grained rule book. Instead, the Bible expresses moral principles in a general way. Some moral principles are more general than others. But that also means we have to allow for the possibility that some of the moral principles have exceptions.

Jesus explicitly taught this. While it is wrong to work on the Sabbath, for example, that rule can be overridden by a greater good--the good of saving life or healing. Just as it's right for you to rescue your mule even if it falls in a well on the Sabbath day, so also is it right for Jesus to heal on the Sabbath day.

There have to be exceptions to moral principles since there are such things as moral dilemmas. In general, it's wrong to lie, but if you're faced with lying to save somebody's life, or telling the truth and ending a life, you are probably justified in lying under those circumstances.

The Bible explicity forbids eating or drinking blood both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Jehovah's Witnesses interpret this prohibition as meaning that we shouldn't ingest blood in any way. So not only should we not take it into our bodies through our mouths, but we shouldn't take it into our bodies via tranfusion either. Personally, I think this is reading into the scripture something that isn't there at all, but let's suppose they are right, at least in a general sense. Let's suppose that at least in general it's wrong to take blood into your body through a needle inserted in your veins.

Nevertheless, this strikes me as being exactly the sort of thing Jesus was talking about. If a blood transfusion can save a life, then the value of the human life should trump the command to abstain from blood. The Jehovah's Witness refusal to allow for an exception to the general rule about blood drives them to what strikes me as being an immoral position--to allow people to die in order to observe the command to abstain from blood consumption. If we have an obligation to preserve life, then at the very least, this creates a moral dilemma since there are circumstances under which you can either preserve life or abstain from blood, but you can't do both. Which do you choose? If a Jehovah's Witnesses chooses to abstain from blood, are they not violating the principle to preserve life?

I haven't talked to a Jehovah's Witness or read their literature in a long time, but they used to answer arguments like these by saying there are alternatives to blood transfusions. So they attempt to avoid the moral dilemma by claiming you don't have to make that choice after all. I'm no medical professional, but from what I understand, they were just believing a myth. There is no artificial blood substitute that's just as good as blood. If there were, there wouldn't be all these desperate blood drives all the time. Blood transfusions are sometimes necessary to save life.

But let's suppose I'm wrong. Even so, this answer is evasive because the question remains: If blood tranfusion was necessary to save the life of your loved one (a child or parent), and you had to make the decision on their behalf since they've been in an accident and can't make the decision themselves, what should you do? In that case, you have to decide whether it's better to save a life by violating the prohibition against blood consumption, or to observe the prohibition against blood consumption by allowing somebody to die who you could've saved.

The irony in all of this is that the reason the Old Tesatment gives for why it's wrong to consume blood is because it's the blood that makes things alive. Blood has value because it symbolically represents life itself, and life is valuable. Well, if life is so valuable that we have to even respect that which gives life--blood--then it is the height of irony and madness to forfeit life in order not to consume blood. It's like being a general who surrenders his country in order to save his country's flag.

A pro-choice inconsistency

Most people I've talked to are neither 100% pro-life nor 100% pro-choice. They all make exceptions under some circumstances. A pro-life person might make exceptions in the case of rape or incest. A pro-choice person might make an exception in the case of viability.

Arguments from bodily sovereignty are the strongest arguments the pro-choice side has going for them. As an honest pro-lifer, I have to admit that they carry some weight. I think we do have a right to bodily sovereignty. The question for me is whether that right is absolute. In other words, are there exceptions to it, and is the preservation of human life one example of an exception?

An inconsistency I've seen in a number of pro-choice people is to insist that the right to bodily sovereignty is absolute, but then to turn around and argue that abortion is morally permissible and should be legal up to viability, but it's immoral and should be illegal beyond viability. If abortion is something a woman does with her own body, and the right to bodily sovereignty is absolute, then to be consistent, shouldn't a pro-choice person who subscribes to these ideas advocate for the morality and legality of abortion right up until birth?

If you think Judy Jarvis-Thompson's violinist argument (or one like it) is a sound argument, then you're essentially saying that abortion would be permissible even if the unborn are full members of the human family. But if you make that argument, then it's inconsistent to turn around and say you think viability should be the cut-off point, and abortions should not be permissible beyond that.

Reasons vs. Justifications vs. Excuses vs. Rationalizations

I was just thinking about these things on my way home today while reflecting on a YouTube video I saw recently. It was a police interrogation, and the person who posted the video would pause it every now and then to give his own commentary. Although I don't remember anything else about the video, one part of it jumped out at me. The person being interrogated explained why he did whatever it is he did. The YouTuber paused the video and commented by saying something like, "He tried to justify his actions by saying. . ." Wait a minute I thought. All he did was explain his reason for acting. He didn't offer that reason as a justification.

As I was thinking about that on my way home, I began to recall times in my life where I've tried to explain why I did something only to have somebody respond by claiming I was making an excuse when that wasn't my intention at all. So I was thinking about the differences and similarities between reasons, justifications, excuses, and rationalizations, and thought, "Hey, I could blog about that!" So that's what I'm doing.

A reason for why you did something is nothing more than an explanation. You can explain your behavior in terms of your desires, your motivations, or whatever. If my reasons for committing a murder is so I can collect insurance money, and I'm open and honest about that, it doesn't mean I'm trying to justify it. I'm just telling you the reason I did it. Everything we do on purpose, we do for some reason, whether we had a good reason for it or not. So you can't automatically assume that if a person is explaining their reason for doing something that they are trying to justify it.

A justification is a kind of reason, though. Hadley Arkes talked about this a lot in his book, First Things. He thought the whole enterprise of morality was rooted in giving reasons for our behavior that are meant to serve as justifications for our behavior. A justification is a reason that's meant to explain why what you did was either good or at least not bad.

Rationalizations are like justifications. They are also reasons that are intended to serve as explanations for why what you did was right or at least not wrong. I think what makes something a rationalization instead of a mere justification, though, is in whether it's being offered honestly. When a person explains that they did something with some supposed good purpose in mind, but the person knows good and well that the purpose they had doesn't really justify their behavior, then it's a rationalization. It's a pretend justification. Sometimes the rationalization is just as much to convince ourselves as it is to convince others. Knowing that we are in the wrong about something makes us feel uneasy, especially if it involves a behavior we really like. It makes us feel even more uncomfortable if somebody else knows about it. So we attempt to rationalize in order to save face in front of others and in order to supress our own feelings of shame and guilt.

An excuse can be a justification or a rationalization. It all depends on how we use it. After all, there are good excuses and bad excuses. The word is mostly used with a negative connotation, though. For example, when somebody says, "That's just an excuse," they mean, "That's just a rationalization." After all, you'd never say, "That's just a justification." If it's legitimate justification, then we take the word, "just," out, and say, "That's a justification."

It's not always easy to tell when somebody is rationalizing and when they are offering a good justification. I sometimes even have to check myself on that. As I said, we all rationalize because none of us are perfect, and we all have a conscience. Most of us don't like to own our bad behavior. We want to find some kind of justification for it that lets us off the hook. But how do we know if we're being honest with ourselves about it? I guess that's just a matter doing some soul-searching and reflection. I think it is possible to fool yourself--to be persuaded of the legitimacy of your own rationalization as if it really justified your behavior.

I have more to say about that, but I think I'll save it for another post another time.