“Instrumental and value-rational action”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Instrumental and value-rational action are modern labels for an ancient belief that humans can act rationally in two separate ways. They can act in ways they think will "work" as means or tools to achieve their ends, and in ways they think are "right" as legitimate ends or rules. Acting in ways thought to work is called instrumental action. Acting in ways thought to be right is called value-rational action.

In practice, instrumental action cannot be separated from value-rational action, because every rational act identifies specific means relevant to achieving a specific end. But the two can be separated in thought, sometimes with harmful consequences. People may think an instrumental means is good if it "works" efficiently to achieve an immediate end, but they ignore side-effects. They may think a valued end is legitimate if it seems "right" in itself, but they ignore predictable consequences of pursuing it. Such actions are not rational.

Sociologist Max Weber coined the labels "instrumental" and "value-rational" action after observing widespread separation of means from ends. But he warned of irrational consequences. Here are his original definitions and his warning. An action may be:

value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success;

To explain some consequences of separating instrumental from value-rational action, this article reports how four scholars--Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dewey--employed the separation to explain social patterns of behavior.

Max Weber

Max Weber spent years studying reasons people give for their actions, and came to believe that unobservable reasons or motives can explain observable actions. He focused on two ways people rationally correlate group behavior he labeled "social action".

Weber found people attaching two subjective meanings to their actions. They acted as they did because they thought it would work as means, or was right as an end. Acts people treated as means he labeled "instrumentally rational." Acts people treated as ends he labeled "value-rational." He found everyone acting for both kinds of reasons, but justifying individual acts by one reason or the other.

He did not consistently use these labels, sometimes calling instrumental actions "calculation of material interests" and "everyday purposive conduct," and calling value-rational actions "ideal motives enjoined by religion or magic.^[1]{{rp|212,13, 400, 242–44}} His failure to use his labels consistently obscured--and continues to obscure--the widespread separation of instrumental means from value-rational ends. But his original distinction survives as the core of modern explanations of rational social action: instrumental means, thought to be efficient tools, and value-rational ends, thought to be intrinsically legitimate rules.^[2]{{rp|II:301}}

As Weber studied human action in religious, governmental, and economic settings, he found peoples' reasoning evolving and often contaminating itself by converting conditionally efficient means into unconditionally legitimate ends. Pre-modern peoples impute to animate and inanimate objects alike the free-will and purpose they find in human action—a belief called animism. They seek instrumentally efficient means to control non-human wills. But applying means-end reasoning to control spirits and inanimate objects contaminates instrumental reasoning. A rain-dance mistakenly thought to work instrumentally becomes a prescribed ritual action proclaimed to be permanently legitimate regardless of consequences. Instrumentally-ineffective means often became prescribed value-rational ends-in-themselves.^[1]{{rp|25, 33, 401–2, 422–4, 576–7}}^[2]{{rp|48}} Similar contamination occurs in modern societies when instrumental actions that actually "work" temporarily become accepted as intrinsically efficient, converting context-dependent action-as-means into permanently legitimate action-as-end.

Weber knew (and personally regretted) that European societies had been rejecting supernatural rules of behavior since the Age of Enlightenment. He called this discrediting of value-rational ends "disenchantment",^[3] and feared that placing faith in practical ends destroys human freedom to believe in ultimate moral values.^[1]{{rp|65}}^[2]{{rp|I:159, 195,244}}^[4]{{rp|11–17}} Jürgen Habermas quoted his dismay at this destruction of an intrinsic moral compass for human societies:

As a scientist, Weber did not judge disenchantment. But he continued to believe that instrumental means are neither legitimate nor workable without value-rational ends. Even apparently impersonal scientific inquiry, he argued, depends on intrinsic value-rational beliefs as much as does religion.^[4]{{rp|43–6}} A recent study argues that his analysis provides legitimate means for restoring value-rational action as a permanent constraint on instrumental action.

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons used Weber's instrumental and value-rational action in his theory explaining society-wide patterns of behavior. In his 1938 work, The Structure of Social Action, he quoted Weber's definitions.^[6]{{rp|II:642–3}} He integrated Weber's two kinds of action into the theory he called "social harmonized action systems," turning individual actions into prescribed patterns of correlated behavior.

He called his theoretical framework a "means-end schema" in which individuals coordinate their instrumental actions by an "efficiency-norm and their value-rational actions by a "legitimacy-norm".^[6]{{rp|II:76, 652}} His prime example of instrumental action was the same as Weber's: using utilitarian means to satisfy individual ends.^[6]{{rp|51–5, 698}} His prime example of value-rational action was rituals: culturally prescribed but eternally legitimate ends.^[6]{{rp|467,675–9, 717}}^[7]

Rational humans pursue socially legitimate value-rational ends by using operationally efficient instrumental means.

Parsons thus placed Weber' rational actions in a "patterned normative order" of "cultural value patterns". Rational social action seeks to maintain a culture-bound value-rational order, legitimate in itself. The system maintains itself by means of four instrumental functions: pattern maintenance, goal attainment, adaptation, and integration.^[8] Weber's instrumental and value-rational action survives in a system of culturally correlated means and ends.

Jürgen Habermas

In addition, he proposed a new kind of social action—communicative—to explain how individual instrumental action becomes embedded in legitimate patterns of social interaction.^[12] James Gouinlock expressed Habermas's proposal as follows:

Habermas argued that language communities share a background of common symbols that constitutes "a normative context recognized as legitimate".^[2]{{rp|15}} It establishes an "intersubjectively shared lifeworld of knowledge that plays the role of correlating moral actions that Weber assigned to value rationality and Parsons assigned to institutions—a trans-empirical realm of shared beliefs.^[2]{{rp|11–13}} Shared understanding produced by direct communication creates a collective consciousness of instrumental knowledge—technological reality—and of moral rules—value reality—capable of generating prescribed patterns of correlated behavior.^[2]{{rp|II:313}}

Habermas reasoned that mutual understanding produced by communicative action provides socially legitimate value-rational norms. But power structures, such as Weber's religions, bureaucracies, and markets, prescribe contaminated patterns of behavior resulting in "cultural impoverishment" similar to Weber's disenchantment. He shared Weber's fear of the domination of instrumental action: "... instrumental rationality (as functionalist reason) has expanded from its appropriate realm of system organization into the lifeworld, and has thereby begun to erode the communicative competences of the members of that lifeworld". Instrumental motives for conformity to amoral institutional norms replace voluntarily shared norms of communicative action.^[2]{{rp|II:236, 310}}^[10]{{rp|235–8}}

Habermas replaced Weber's supernatural value-rational ends and Parsons' rational maintenance of patterned normative ends by communicative action to explain efficient instrumental action and legitimate value-rational action.

John Dewey

John Dewey could agree with Weber's observation that people act as if they can judge--and act separately on--instrumental means and value-rational end. But he denied that the practice created two separate kinds of behavior. It mixed competent and contaminated instrumental action. The flaw lay in separating means from ends.^[14]{{rp|12, 66}}

Dewey argued that singular human actions cannot be explained by isolated motives, as Weber sought to do. They are better thought of as revealing habitual "ways of acting" learned by actors. Every action is embedded in biological and cultural environments, which humans continuously shape instrumentally to promote developmental patterns of behavior.

Dewey had argued before Habermas that correlated action depends on communication. But communication is not a separate form of action preceding and enabling instrumental action. Rather, according to James Gouinlock, Dewey held that communication inheres in all correlated behavior.

Once correlated patterns of behavior become habitual, they require little thought, as Weber recognized. "... life is impossible without ways of action sufficiently general to be properly named habits".^[15]{{rp|12}} But habits arise only after instrumental actions successfully achieve each valued end. They are neither non-rational, as Weber classified them, nor immediately-known value-rational actions, as other philosophers classify them, undertaken without regard to existing means.

Where Parsons and Habermas concluded that culturally accredited institutions legitimize value-rational ends, Dewey concluded that they are often contaminated instrumental valuations—flawed generalizations—that should be reconstructed rather than treated as moral affirmations of rational behavior.

Dewey's challenge to Weber's separation between instrumental and value-rational action remains unanswered. The distinction persists in both common sense and scholarly explanations of human behavior.

Max Weber

Talcott Parsons

Jürgen Habermas

John Dewey

See also

References