Download or read book Rational and Social Agency written by Manuel Vargas and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Bratman's work has been unusually influential, with significance in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, computer science, law, and primatology.The essays in this volume engage with ideas and themes prominent in Bratman's work. The volume also includes a lengthy reply by Bratman that breaks new ground and deepens our understanding of the nature of action, rationality, and social agency.
Download or read book Rational Choice and Moral Agency written by David Schmidtz and published by . This book was released on 1995-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it rational to be moral? How do rationality and morality fit together with being human? These questions are at the heart of David Schmidtz's exploration of the connections between rationality and morality. This inquiry leads into both metaethics and rational choice theory, as Schmidtz develops conceptions of what it is to be moral and what it is to be rational. He defends a fairly expansive conception of rational choice, considering how ends as well as means can be rationally chosen and explaining the role of self-imposed constraints in a rational life plan. His moral theory is dualistic, ranging over social structure as well as personal conduct and building both individual and collective rationality into its rules of recognition for morals. To the "why be moral" question, Schmidtz responds that being moral is rational, but he does not assume we have reasons to be rational. Instead, Schmidtz argues that being moral is rational in a particular way and that beings like us in situations like ours have reasons to be rational in just that way. This approach allows him to identify decisive reasons to be moral; at the same time, it explains why immorality is as prevalent as it is. This book thus offers a set of interesting and realistic conclusions about how morality fits into the lives of humanly rational agents operating in an institutional context like our own.
Download or read book The Handbook of Rational and Social Choice written by Paul Anand and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare, but also to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.
Download or read book Group Agency written by Christian List and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? How do we explain their behaviour? Can we treat them as accountable for their actions? List and Pettit offer original arguments, grounded in cutting-edge work on social choice, economics, and philosophy, to show there really are group agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them.
Download or read book Tradition Rationality and Virtue written by Thomas D. D'Andrea and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue provides the first comprehensive and detailed treatment of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. In this book Thomas D'Andrea presents an accessible critical study of the full range of MacIntyre's thought across ethical theory, psychoanalytic theory, social and political philosophy, Marxist theory, and the philosophy of religion. Moving from the roots of MacIntyre's thought in ethical inquiry, this book examines MacIntyre's treatment of Marx, Christianity, and the nature of human action and discusses in depth the development and applications of MacIntyre's After Virtue project. The book culminates in an examination of major internal and external criticisms of MacIntyre's work and a consideration of its future directions.
Download or read book Social Agency written by Wojciech W. Gasparski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praxiology deals with doing and working from the point of view of effectiveness. It has three components: analysis of concepts involving purposive actions; critique of models of action from the viewpoint of efficiency; and normative advisory aspects in recommendations for increasing human efficiency. This fourth volume of the Praxiology series is devoted to the very special topic of social agency. It focuses on two important praxiological concepts: rationality and preparation as preconditions for human action to be effective and efficient. The question of efficiency was raised by Anatol Rapoport over three decades ago in his lecture to the audience at the Praxiological Seminar in Warsaw in 1961. Social Agency begins with an article written by this same famous scholar on the topic of decision theory, "Social Dilemmas: A Historical Overview." Social dilemmas is the subject of the first part of this volume, a question related to studies on human action guided by two types of rationality: individual and collective rationality. The intersection of the two, in which individuals meet collectives, creates the situation in which social agency emerges, generating dilemmatic circumstances for the actors involved. The articles collected in the second part explore praxiological dimensions of education aimed toward the knowledge society, because of knowledge possessed and produced by educated persons. Chapters and contributors to volume 4 include: "Five Questions on the Research on Social Dilemmas" by Marek K. Mlicki; "Psychological Processes Underlying Cooperation in Social Dilemmas" by Paul A. M. Van Lange and David M. Messick; "Designing a System for Design Learning: Designers and/or Learners?" by Arne Collen; "Creating an Evolutionary Image of New Systems of Learning and Human Development" by Janet A. Khan; and "A Study Program Design in Retrospect" by Stig C. Holmberg. Social Agency continues the trend of original research done in a little-known, but important area. Social scientists, policymakers, and educators will benefit from this work.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences written by Ian C Jarvie and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2011-03-14 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exciting Handbook, Ian Jarvie and Jesús Zamora-Bonilla have put together a wide-ranging and authoritative overview of the main philosophical currents and traditions at work in the social sciences today. Starting with the history of social scientific thought, this Handbook sets out to explore that core fundamentals of social science practice, from issues of ontology and epistemology to issues of practical method. Along the way it investigates such notions as paradigm, empiricism, postmodernism, naturalism, language, agency, power, culture, and causality.
Download or read book Relating Humanities and Social Thought written by Abraham Edel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the current atmosphere of controversy about modes of interpreting literature, historical influences in science, and subtle ideologies in social theory, Abraham Edel confronts the institutionalized separation of the humanities and the sciences, the segregation of disciplines through structures that rest on entrenched dualisms, and the isolations reenforced by habits of the academy and its struggles over turf. Edel's "search for connections" - carried out not only theoretically but through a series of particular studies spanning major disciplines from philosophy and social theory to jurisprudence, biography, and cultural anthropology - leads into uncharted waters. He faces the startling conclusion that the clue to answering internal questions characteristically turns out to come from trans-discipline relations. This fourth volume of Edel's Science, Ideology and Value focuses in a Deweyan vein on the functional requirements at the base of the social sciences and humanities alike: discipline structures are subject to change, development, and decay, and even to categorial shifts as well as to readjustments. At the same time, Edel's philosophical nauralism helps diagnose the obstacles to research that stem from imposed dualisms such as theory and practice, subjectivity and objectivity, fact and value, individual and society, as well as social contrasts of elite and mass. Normative structures are to be held responsible to inquiry, and a self-conscious exploratory practice is needed to minimize the risks of arbitrary closures. For those who wish to get beyond sloganeering in the world of education, humane learning, and the social and historical sciences, this book is a must.
Download or read book Alternative Social Agencies written by Felice D Perlmutter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a diverse set of successful alternative programs as case examples, professionals who have been involved directly in the organization and development of alternative social programs explain the complicated process of planning and implementing new agencies. Alternative social agencies have emerged over the past two decades in response to a variety of needs not being met by older established agencies, but their survival is often limited. This comprehensive volume will help all of those involved in social administration to question their own administrative practices and struggle with new approaches that can best meet the needs of their present and/or potential constituencies. Existing social agencies will find these innovative ideas to be adaptable in meeting changing social conditions, service needs, and target populations. Topics include various direct services in voluntary health-related organizations and agencies; public sector agencies that are not usually associated with alternative programs; and descriptions of effective indirect service.
Download or read book Freedom Recognition and Non Domination written by Fabian Schuppert and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original account of a distinctly republican theory of social and global justice. The book starts by exploring the nature and value of Hegelian recognition theory. It shows the importance of that theory for grounding a normative account of free and autonomous agency. It is this normative account of free agency which provides the groundwork for a republican conception of social and global justice, based on the core-ideas of freedom as non-domination and autonomy as non-alienation. As the author argues, republicans should endorse a sufficientarian account of social justice, which focuses on the nature of social relationships and their effects on people's ability to act freely and realize their fundamental interests. On the global level, the book argues for the cosmopolitan extension of the republican principles of non-domination and non-alienation within a multi-level democratic system. In so doing, the book addresses a major gap in the existing literature, presenting an original theory of justice, which combines Hegelian recognition theory and republican ideas of freedom, and applying this hybrid theory to the global domain.
Download or read book Reasoning about Rational Agents written by Michael Wooldridge and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of rational agents, which recognizes the primacy of beliefs, desires, and intentions in rational action. One goal of modern computer science is to engineer computer programs that can act as autonomous, rational agents; software that can independently make good decisions about what actions to perform on our behalf and execute those actions. Applications range from small programs that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commerce, to autonomous space probes. This book focuses on the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of rational agents, which recognizes the primacy of beliefs, desires, and intentions in rational action. The BDI model has three distinct strengths: an underlying philosophy based on practical reasoning in humans, a software architecture that is implementable in real systems, and a family of logics that support a formal theory of rational agency.The book introduces a BDI logic called LORA (Logic of Rational Agents). In addition to the BDI component, LORA contains a temporal component, which allows one to represent the dynamics of how agents and their environments change over time, and an action component, which allows one to represent the actions that agents perform and the effects of the actions. The book shows how LORA can be used to capture many components of a theory of rational agency, including such notions as communication and cooperation.
Download or read book Frontiers in Social Dilemmas Research written by Wim B.G. Liebrand and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social dilemmas are situations in which individuals, groups or nations face a choice between their own short-term interests and the longer-term interests of all parties involved, including themselves. As a consequence, in the end they all regret the way they have acted. Examples of social dilemmas are easy to find: depletion of vital resources, arms races, over-production of hazardous substances and environmental pollutants, information hoarding, and the failure to provide and maintain public goods. Understanding the dynamics of social dilemmas constitutes a major challenge. One prominent feature that distinguishes this book is the focus on computer simulations as a methodology for the exploration of the dynamic interplay of individual level processes and aggregate outcomes.
Download or read book The Moral Responsibility of Firms written by Eric W. Orts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individuals are generally considered morally responsible for their actions. Who or what is responsible when those individuals become part of business organizations? Can we correctly ascribe moral responsibility to the organization itself? If so, what are the grounds for this claim and to what extent do the individuals also remain morally responsible? If not, does moral responsibility fall entirely to specific individuals within the organization and can they be readily identified? A perennial question in business ethics has concerned the extent to which business organizations can be correctly said to have moral responsibilities and obligations. In philosophical terms, this is a question of "corporate moral agency." Whether firms can be said to be moral agents and to have the capacity for moral responsibility has significant practical consequences. In most legal systems in the world, business firms are recognized as "persons" with the ability to own property, to maintain and defend lawsuits, and to self-organize governance structures. To recognize that these "business persons" can also act morally or immorally as organizations, however, would justify the imposition of other legal constraints and normative expectations on organizations. In the criminal law, for example, the idea that an organized firm may itself have criminal culpability is accepted in many countries (such as the United States) but rejected in others (such as Germany). This book collects new contributions by leading business scholars in business ethics, philosophy, and related disciplines to extend our understanding of the "moral responsibility of firms."
Download or read book Understanding Your Social Agency written by Armand Lauffer and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010-11-16 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides readers with an array of lenses for looking at a social agency from the outside in, and from the inside out This highly accessible text takes into account the organizational dynamics that readers are likely to have experienced and provides them with the conceptual tools for reassessing their understanding and considering how to act on their new insights. Renowned scholar Armand Lauffer shows readers how to apply organizational theories to challenges they confront at work, and to uncover other challenges they may not yet be aware of.
Download or read book The Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research written by Rafael Wittek and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research offers the first comprehensive overview of how the rational choice paradigm can inform empirical research within the social sciences. This landmark collection highlights successful empirical applications across a broad array of disciplines, including sociology, political science, economics, history, and psychology. Taking on issues ranging from financial markets and terrorism to immigration, race relations, and emotions, and a huge variety of other phenomena, rational choice proves a useful tool for theory- driven social research. Each chapter uses a rational choice framework to elaborate on testable hypotheses and then apply this to empirical research, including experimental research, survey studies, ethnographies, and historical investigations. Useful to students and scholars across the social sciences, this handbook will reinvigorate discussions about the utility and versatility of the rational choice approach, its key assumptions, and tools.
Download or read book In Defense of Liberal Pluralism written by Upendra Chidella and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a critical view of Kantian and Neo-Kantian moral philosophers’ preference of universalism, the unity of morality, moral impartiality, consensus, and common morality. The central claim of the book is if the human condition is treated as complex and infested with irreducible choices and alternatives, then moral rightness and wrongness ought to operate beyond these binaries; giving epistemic status to Pluralism’s multiple rationalities. Redefining liberal-pluralism, the book also argues that moral reasoning is necessarily bound by paradoxes and contradictions, seen in our choices of life-projects, in the conflict between individual morality and common morality, and in justifying what is morally reasonable in the interpersonal framework. Equivocation in moral argumentation cannot be valued without understanding the nature of the ‘interpersonal’ that ought to sufficiently argue for moral disagreement, irreducible pluralism and limits of morality. Liberal-pluralism, thus, signifies the quasi-relational (partially admitting Gilbert Harman) nature of moral reasoning in the multi-agent framework. It also takes account of reciprocity, fairness, reasonableness, tolerance, open-ended morality, and agreeing to disagree. However, this idea of liberal-pluralism no way undermines rationality and reason, nor turns to anti-theory; rather, it only treats morality as guided by ‘reason without unification’ and ‘pluralism without relativism’.
Download or read book Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility written by Katrina Hutchison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume open up reflection on the implications of social inequality for theorizing about moral responsibility. Collectively, they focus attention on the relevance of the social context, and of structural and epistemic injustice, stereotyping and implicit bias, for critically analyzing our moral responsibility practices.
