Chapter 5: Commonsense Biases

Individual Bias

An animal following its instincts spontaneously are not necessarily egotistical. Following their instincts is to achieve biological results. Natural human response to eat, learn, pursue friendship, and exercise self-love. Friendship requires self-love. Friendship requires self-live in the sense "man loves himself if he wants for himself the finest things in the world, namely, virtue and wisdom; and without virtue and wisdom a man can be a true friend neither to himself nor to anyone else" (129). Lonergan believes there is a "sense in which egoism is always wrong and altruism its proper corrective" (129). Lonergan thinks that egoism is neither spontaneous or pure intelligence, "but an interference of spontaneity with he development of pure intelligence" (129). egoism is an individual bias when the egoist "refuses to put the further questions that would lead to a profound modification to his solution" of the problem (130).

Lonergan states that egoism "is an incomplete development of intelligence" (130). "Just as in the sciences intelligence begins from hypothesis that prove insufficient and advances to further hypothesis that successively prove more and more satisfactory, so too in practical living it is through the cumulative process of further questions and further insights that an adequate understanding is reached" (130). Individual bias seeks to cut this process short. The egoist might be self-deceived, but he is not "totally unaware of his self-deception" (131). The egoist has to fight against the natural drive to raise further questions, and against the natural drive to intersubjectivity which can help with their lack of development in intelligence. Lonergan thinks of it as a "sin against the light" (131). The egoist conscience is away of the fault because "operative within him there is the eros of the mind, the desire and drive to understand; he knows its value, for he gives free rein where his own interests are concerned; yet he also repudiates its mastery, for he will not grant serious considerations to further relevant questions" (131).

Group Bias

Like individual bias, group bias is an "interference with the development of practical common sense. But while individual bias has to overcome normal intersubjective feeling, group bias finds itself supported by such feeling" (132).

Group expectations are not necessarily bad. They are normal ways different types of groups and institutions function. Lonergan writes, "In a school, a regiment, a factory, a trade, a profession, a prison, there develops an ethos that at once subtly and flexibly provides concrete premises and norms for practical human decisions" (132). Groups depend on one another to act in a certain manner. "Such expectations rest on recognized codes of behavior; they appeal to past performance; acquired habit, reputation; they attain a maximum of precision and reliability among those frequently brought together, engaged in similar work, guided by similar motives, sharing the same prosperity or adversity" (132). There exists the bias against other groups.