Jimmy? Or Warren? 
Upside the head.
This. Rationality is effective for figuring out how to implement your principles & goals, but you have to have at least some of those principles & goals first or it has nothing to work with. Our built in instincts and needs & the rest of the external universe normally provide those basic axioms that rationality can build on.
For example; there’s no objective principle that says survival is desirable; but we have a survival instinct and can therefore build on that. We can make rules forbidding murder, we can decide it’s desirable to prevent others from being killed and so on, all based on that initial non-rational, instinctive axiom.
Tell it to the Libertarians and the Marxists, they both think their ideologies are purely rational.
We obviously need a Spock emoticon, although that does sort of sound like an oxymoron.
Pizza, but the presence of delegates who salt it might lead to irrational assault-and-batteries.
Hmmm… I may have to take back my comment about how we can mostly agree on basic values and outcomes but not on many facts. Apparently we can’t agree on basic values, either. IIRC, some of the libertarians here have informed us that they don’t care about outcomes, only about principles. Marxists pretty much care only about outcomes, or at least that’s the main thrust of their ideology.
Salting pizza is exceedingly irrational and probably violates international culinary law!
Differences in beliefs are often deep and intractable.
Try getting pro-life and pro-abortion folks to agree on “a logical and rational solution.” Ten years later you still won’t have agreement. They’re polar opposite views.
I suspect that, long term, vegetarianism is going to be a near-universal feature of human civilization. I say that as a guy who isn’t a vegetarian, and never will be, and will spend the rest of my life cheerfully eating prime rib, roasted chicken, and the like. However, I still firmly believe in the future - and we’re probably talking centuries - meat won’t be a thing anymore. because
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Economics dictates that it just makes sense to do this. Meat is extremely expensive as opposed to vegetation, and that expense is only going to increase as the demand on resources increases.
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It’s inescapably true that eating meat requires killing sentient creatures. I personally am okay with this in part because I’m simply used to it, but it’s still something more and more people are having trouble with, and making the process more humane adds expense, leading us back to #1.
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As we learn more about food and its effects on our body, we’ll learn more about how to make delicious and nutritious food without using meat, this reducing the demand that drives its use.
Not a vegetarian, either, but red meat in particular is getting more and more infrequent in my diet, partly for health and partly as a sort of gesture to vaguely vegan principles, though I’ll still toss a nice steak on the barbie occasionally.
Agreed on all three points. Some of this was discussed in a CBC News article recently, which incidentally mentioned this interesting place (Disclaimer: have never been there nor had anything from them, but their existence seems to be part of a trend. We’ll see if they survive.)
Pro life here, from a rational standpoint we don’t have much of an arguement, unless we get deep into a study of human emotions and long term effects of guilt or lack of empathy.
I have a long list of things I am moraly opposed to that from a rational standpoint just don’t hold water.
In that case, the only logical and rational solution is Thunderdome.
Are you saying this is a good thing? There’s an entire field of philosophy that tries to derive a code of morality and ethics entirely out of pure logic (that I linked somewhere upthread). I maintain that this isn’t possible without first having a framework of values, but then you can apply rationalism to derive policy consistent with those values.
If you simply have “beliefs” that you freely acknowledge aren’t rationally supportable, how do you justify them, how can you hope to convince your opponents of their correctness, and how can you hope to reconcile your views with those who may hold the diametric opposite views and perhaps DO have a rational justification for them?
A good example might be how to win a war when there is no apparent points of agreement. The only rational solution I see is to annihilate the other country and the people in it. Morally I could never do this even if I might really want to.
Eugenics seems like a logical, rational but morally repugnant course of action.
This is what Ayn Rand attempted to do, and thought she had succeeded in doing. With the help of Leonard Peikoff, Rand nailed down metaphysics and epistemology, but made a fatal mistake at the root of her ethics and politics that collapsed the entire house of cards. What we’re left with is the likes of Paul Ryan. I think that someday someone will fix that mistake, but the results will be unrecognizable to today’s Objectivists.
It seems to me that both those comments are confusing a rational grounding of morality with calculated self-serving malice. It’s like if you’re going to be guided by science and rationality, you must lose all humanity and empathy. It’s actually the exact opposite. Have a look at Kant’s categorical imperative, and especially this part.
Ayn Rand was a libertarian lunatic who personified the concept of what’s come to be called rational irrationality. She was about as much a “philosopher” as Paul Ryan. Or Rand Paul.
Or the nightmare Frankensteinian hybrid Rand Paul Ryan! 
I wasn’t aware that Ryan and Paul wrote extensively about metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and esthetics. I guess they really are “philosophers.” Thanks for clearing that up for me.
This might already be taking place given realpolitik.