Rethinking religious social action: what is "rational" about rational-choice theory?

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 1998 by James V. Spickard

Any attempt to reformulate deontology as teleology must therefore combat both Kant's careful argument and Weber's typological distinction. Demerath (1995: 107) makes a similar point when he accuses rational-choice theory of ignoring normative inputs. Norms and goals are not the same thing: one follows the first but maximizes the second. Both involve rational action, but of different kinds.

I have called a third form of rational action "cathekontic." This form is based on the relational ethics pioneered by H. Richard Niebuhr (1963; see Hoedemaker 1970; Malloy 1977; Gardner 1979; Irish 1983) and by various feminist scholars (Gilligan 1979, 1982; Maguire 1982; Noddings 1984, 1988). Rooted in the metaphor of dialogue, this ethics emphasizes the social relations people have with one another and the rational consideration of the responsibilities that grow from these relationships. As Nell Noddings puts it:

Ethical agents adopting this perspective do not judge their own acts solely by their conformity to rule or principle, nor do they judge them only by the likely production of preassessed nonmoral goods such as happiness. While such agents may certainly consider both principles and utilities, their primary concern is the relation itself - not only what happens physically to others involved in the relation and in connected relations but what they may feel and how they may respond to the act under consideration (Noddings 1988: 219).

Like deontological action, cathekontic action is neither calculating nor "irrational." It asks neither "what can I gain?" nor "what is my duty?" but "what are my responsibilities?" A father might lose his life to save his child, not out of emotion but because he feels that it is his responsibility to do so - not just to the child but to the community of which he is a part. A deontologist might do the same, but would do it for duty to an ideal, not responsibility to others; a teleologist might do it to maximize the group's happiness. All three acts have the same outcome, but their inner logic - and thus their rationality - is different. Weber's classic insight that the same objective act can be reached by any one of several subjective motives underscores the falsity of Iannaccone's first assumption.(2)

Rational-choice theorists could respond that Iannaccone's first assumption refers not to people's subjective motives but to their objective ones. That is, it doesn't matter what people think they are doing, only what they are really doing. This is a reasonable answer, but it has consequences for the theory. Specifically it recasts Iannaccone's first assumption in the following form:

Individuals act as if they were rationally weighing the costs and benefits of potential actions, and as if they were choosing those actions that maximize their net benefits.

This is a very different statement than the one with which we began. Baring some epistemological heavy lifting, this is no longer a statement about empirical individuals but a statement about the constituent elements of a model of social life. Whether or not individuals use means-ends calculations subjectively, Iannaccone's model of religion is build on the assumption that they do. And it is the model that is important, not the elements out of which it is built. As I shall show below, this is fruitful, as long as one remembers not to argue from the success of the model to the reality of its constituent elements.(3)