In earlier plays he has conveyed this theme through characters for whom speaking rationally came hard: the Peter Pan stoners in his breakout work, "This Is Our Youth" (1996), and the art gallery owner with Alzheimer's disease in "The Waverly Gallery" (2001).
"Standard economics says that everyone behaves rationally," says Oxford physicist Neil Johnson, "but in the minority game, even people who are trying to be rational come up with completely different predictions".
Arguments as to acceptability of suicide in moral or social terms range from the position that the act is inherently immoral and unacceptable under any circumstances to a regard for suicide as a sacrosanct right of anyone who believes they have rationally and conscientiously come to the decision to end their own lives, even if they are young and healthy.
Hence, although I can conceive of a talentless world, I cannot rationally will that it come about, given I already will, insofar as I am rational, that I develop all of my own.
Solutions to immigration problems need to come from rationally thought-out and compassionate government policies, not a witch hunt by all and sundry.
On the other hand religious belief that ignores the role of reason in religion is mere superstition and will result in bigotry and atheism, for "an Irrational Religion can never Rationally be conceived to come from God" (Occasional Thoughts, p. 36).
To attract enough older people -- who do not always act rationally when it comes to insurance -- and thereby skirt the problem of adverse selection.
Since voters actively demand these policies, a paradox in this explanation is that individuals act rationally when it comes to goods markets, but irrationally when it comes to voting.
Then taking any interest in these facts may come to look rationally optional, contingent on being creatures with the right kind of other-regarding desires.
And once we add this to the assumptions that we must will our own happiness as an end, and that developed talents are necessary means to achieving that end, it follows that we cannot rationally will that a world come about in which it is a law that no one ever develops any capacities.
