Theory of Rational Action
Gregory Gleason
University of New Mexico
Imagine that a group of space travelers crash landed on an uninhabited planet
that was in all other respects just like the earth. The entire crew was
slightly injured in the crash. Everyone had amnesia. All of them retained all
their intellectual capacities but none of their memories about how society was
organized on earth. When they realized where they were, they understood
that they had to establish a new society. They all agreed that they had to
devise rules of operation for the new society. No one had any particular
interests other than the other people, except those interests that were
conditioned by the fact that some were smart, some less so, some were brave, so
less so, some were articulate, some less so, some diligent, some less so, and
so on. What kind of rules would they come up with for distributive justice? How
would they decide who gets what when, where and how?
How would they decide on the principles of distributive justice?
The first question in such a contemplation is obviously "What is available for distribution"?
Goods and services have a number of properties that influence how human beings decide what is available. These properties are inherent in the goods and services. Consequently, they are objective properties.
Some things everybody shares and they don't cost anything
Air, sunlight, the space you stand in-these things belong to a special class of objects and qualities. These things every one shares even without any sacrifice. They are things that can be enjoyed without subtracting from anyone's else's enjoyment of them. They are things that can be enjoyed even if you do not sacrifice or in some way "pay" for them. These are "common goods" or "public goods".
But just because you cannot be deprived of such goods and services and your use of them does not diminish the benefit available to someone else, that does not mean that these goods and services are "free". Consider the case of national security. If a citizen in a country refuses to pay taxes to pay for the country's security from being attacked, that citizen does not contribute to the nation's burden of protecting itself. Yet as long as the citizen remains in the country, the citizen cannot be excluded from the protection afforded by the country's defenses. The citizen enjoys the benefits of national security just as surely as those who do sacrifice to protect the country.
The core function of government is to provide and allocate public goods. The ways in which these goods are produced and distributed define the way that government functions in a society. Government functions to produce and distribute public goods and services. To do this, government must create the basis for cooperation of the citizens of the society.
BUILDING COOPERATION
We may distinguish between ends and means. An end is something that someone wants to achieve, it is a goal. The things that people use or do in order to achieve that goal is referred to as the means. Means allow us to pursue the goals we set. Of course, our means may not be sufficient to achieve our ends. Or our ends may be beyond the capacity of our means. It is possible that humans act sometimes without any clear goal in mind. But when they do act in pursuit of a goal by applying those means at their disposal, their action may be regarded as rational. Rational action attempts to bring means and ends into line. Rational action is based on the idea of establishing a ratio-a correlation-between ends and means.
People often agree on ends. For instance, many people would like to live in a secure, prosperous, comfortable society. But even when people agree fully upon the ends they would like to achieve, they may find that the means to achieve these ends are simply not available. They may find that differences about how the means should be used to achieve their common goals divide them and obstruct them from pursuing cooperative, mutually beneficial action. Indeed, many politicians will testify that political cooperation fails less often on disagreement concerning ends than concerning means. People may agree upon what they want, but they may fail to achieve their ends because of disagreement over the definition of boundaries of competing institutions, or upon competition created by overlapping jurisdictions, or because of conflicting prerogatives and authorities of individuals or agencies that are supposed to be working together. The politician, concerned about the definition of authority, the economist, concerned about material exchange and the role of government in markets, and the jurist, concerned about who has the right to act, find themselves pondering the question the question of how to best organize the means of society to achieve the stated goals. They find themselves contemplating the best way to achieve cooperation in society.
There are two widely held propositions about how to bring about cooperation. View number one is that parallel interests imply cooperation. If individual actors have a common goal or would benefit from working together, we can expect them to do so. According to this view, cooperation naturally arises out of mutual interest. View number two is that individual actors can be forced to work together. According to this view, if individuals have difficulty cooperating or if cooperation does not appear to be taking place, the solution is to make the disincentives to failing to cooperate so great that actors will turn to cooperation out of despair over the alternatives.
Unfortunately, both of these widely held views on cooperation are wrong. Sustained cooperation is based on neither of these. In the real world of complex interactions, parallel interests often dissolve in petty disputes on the road to cooperation. Para llel interests may mean that both sides benefit from cooperation, but it does not mean that both sides benefit equally. Thus cooperation often seems unfair. Coercion often seems to the subjects like extortion. It frequently results in avoidance behaviors such as dissimulation, prevarication, retaliation, foot-dragging, misrepresentation, and so on.
How then is cooperation encouraged? How are institutions designed, managed, and changed in order to facilitate cooperation and reduce duplication, invidious competition, and outright conflict? Modern political theorists acknowledge that the road to coop eration is much more nuanced that either of these two traditional approaches suggests. Cooperation is influenced by leadership, management, organizational style, cooperation, monitoring and evaluation, and a proportionality between action and effect. But above all, successful formulas for cooperation are ones that recognize the importance of overcoming dilemmas of collective action.
INDIVIDUAL RATIONAL ACTION
The model of individual action we will use involves a number of assumptions. The first assumption we make is that the actions that we analyze are produced by decision making units we will call rational actors. A rational actor is a value-maximizing unit in the sense that, with respect to the actor's own values and preferences, the actor makes choices in such a way as to maximize outcomes. Second, we assume that the actors which we analyze may be individuals or they may be individuals united and choosing or acting as a group. These groups may take the form of families, firms, corporations, agencies, tribes, clans, collectives, unions, nations, states, nation-states, or international organizations. A unit, analyzed for our purposes as a rational actor, therefore, may consist of anywhere between one and many millions of separate individuals. They are united in the sense that they united by the fact that they pursue some common purpose. Third, we postulate that rational actors pursue strategies. Strategies are the ways in which ends are brought into line with means. That is, strategies are plans for action which seek to direct capabilities toward the achievement of objectives.
It is useful to note a few observations about the assumptions of rational action. Rational action theory does not assume that actors always choose "rationally" if that is understood to mean choosing in a dispassionate, cool, calm manner and correct manner. Individuals or groups of individuals may choose emotionally or from inadequate information. They may mistakenly calculate the outcome of a situation. And the actor may be internally divided. If the actor is a group, particularly if it is a large group, it may encounter internal problems which make it difficult for the group to even identify its common values and preferences. Sometimes individuals choose "irrationally" if only to demonstrate that their choices are not predetermined. Suicidal people sometime choose self-destruction, an outcome that a third party would not view as "value-maximizing." Rational actor theory does not assume that choices are "right", only that relative to a specific set of values and preferences the actor chooses among the available alternatives.
We need not assume that people always act rationally. For the purposes of the theory presented here, all we assume is that if people did act rationally, the following conclusions would hold true. In other words, we are making the "best case" assumptions. If people do not act rationally, the following collective action theory would still hold, and be even more important.
The assumptions of rational actor theory are widespread in social science methodology. Most modern theories of psychology, economics and government make assumptions of rational action. For instance, in modern economics, the value of goods and services is determined by the interaction of supply and demand, demand being explained in terms of the aggregate effect of the consumer behavior as rational, value-maximizing decision makers and supply being explained in terms of the aggregate effect of rational calculations on the part of producers. Economists argue that supply adjusts to demand because the rational producer will see that if there is excess demand, there is an opportunity to satisfy that demand by selling more. The producer will change his action seeking to improve his position, or "maximize utility."
