Existentialism and lack of choice.
The courses I'm taking and the books that I'm reading are gelling in weird ways. One of my roommates spends a lot of time reading philosophy too, so our conversations tend to spiral around certain themes.
Existentialism is, essentially, the exultation of people as free beings, making free choices. Under strong existentialism, everything after your birth is a choice. Being in an abusive relationship is a choice, being dependent on drugs is a choice, becoming the leader of a country is a choice. A close friend is in several abusive relationships (both parents and bf). The abuse is entirely emotional and mental, and it's my measured opinion (I've known the girl for about a year now, and we've had long conversations about her life) that she does not have the choice to leave the situation. My thinking about her situation is causing me to examine Existentialism in a manner that my roommate doesn't. Existentialism confirms his life choices and affirms that he is the architect of his own life. In her case, it (essentially and indirectly) lays the blame for abuse at the feet of the victim (ie if you do not walk away (because this *is* an available choice), you are choosing to remain in the role of the victim). I cannot conscience this. [Edit: that's not to say that my roommate 'doesn't think'. We were discussing this whole situation last night, which is wot prompted the blog. He hasn't studied either epistemology or decision theory, so it's not that he simply ignored this implication, it was more a matter of not awarding that line of thinking the same weight that I was giving it]
Another course I am taking is Decision Theory (aka Game Theory). The focus on this course is about how to make rational decisions, different systems and tools, weighting options depending on what the choices are, and so on. It's ridiculously interesting.
A major component of this course, that is emphasised by the prof a *lot* is 'epistemic probability': what you *believe* the probability of something to be. This can be (and frequently is) radically different from the objective physical chance of something. To illustrate: if you are involved in a dice game, how you place your bet will be determined by whether you believe that the die is loaded or not. The true state of the world may influence your belief, but we make inaccuracte inferences all the time.
Going from there, given a certain epistemic state (knowledge about the world), we can then lay out all possible choices for a given situation (we can include the 'obviously' useless choices like 'kill oneself' if we wish to be complete, but we usually just try to stick with pertinent choices), and weight them according to how likely they are to obtain given certain states of the world and how we value the outcome (so the actual numbers are rather arbitrary, but they are accurate in a relative sense).
On this line of thinking, a decision is 'rational' if it tends to have the best outcome (according to a *complete* set of preferences), and 'irrational' if it's not the best. (you can, of course, choose the 2nd best simply 'because you can', but you have to realise that this is (by definition) irrational. But 'irrational' doesn't mean 'not allowed').
Thus... One can really only say that a decision is 'rational' or 'irrational' from a certain knowledge base, not objectively.
More explicitly: it's possible that under a certain state of knowledge that *all* choices lead to *worse* results than the 'do nothing and maintain the current situation' choice. To make the claim that "the person chooses to maintain the abusive relationship" is to ignore the fact that under their state of knowledge, it's the *best* choice that they can make. To do what the Existentialist demands ("just leave!!!!") is to make an *irrational* decision.
Sure, we can argue that the results that the abused person lists are 'unrealistic' or 'unlikely' all we like, but we're operating from a different epistemic perspective. And that's not something the strong existentialist wants to argue: they want to argue that all choices are available at all times, that knowing that one is in a 'learned helplessness' state is now information that one can plug into our epistemic state to review and re-evaluate our decisions.
But that's hardly reasonable: if you know that you are biased towards weighting the negative of change 'too much', how do you judge correctly? If you know your weights are faulty, but not the degree to which they are faulty, and they are the only weights that you have, then how do you weigh things more accurately?
To me, this is an insurmountable problem for strong existentialism, which must be abandoned.
[NB: this does not bring us anywhere even remotely *near* relativism. At no point am I claiming that their beliefs are 'true' (or even 'true for them'), I am simply saying that the decisions that they make are entirely rational given the other beliefs that they hold, even if I would claim that those other beliefs are *not* rational]