Download or read book Reviving Rationality written by Michael A. Livermore and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics and regulation -- A threatening synthesis -- Staying in bounds -- A retreat from reason -- The illusion of costs without benefits -- Erasing public health science -- Resurrecting discredited models -- Ignoring indirect benefits -- Trivializing climate change -- Manipulating transfers -- Future directions -- Improving the guardrails.
Download or read book Rationality written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 'Punchy, funny and invigorating ... Pinker is the high priest of rationalism' Sunday Times 'If you've ever considered taking drugs to make yourself smarter, read Rationality instead. It's cheaper, more entertaining, and more effective' Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorizing? In Rationality, Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, causal inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now. Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower. 'A terrific book, much-needed for our time' Peter Singer
Download or read book Reviving Liberty written by Joan S. Bennett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milton's Great Poems--Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes--are here examined in the light of his lifelong commitment to the English revolutionary cause. The poems, Joan Bennett shows, reflect the issues Milton had dealt with in theological and public policy debate, foreign diplomacy, and propaganda; moreover, they work innovatively with these issues, reaching in epic and tragedy answers that his pamphlets and tracts of the past twenty years had only partially achieved. The central issue is the nature and possibility of human freedom, or "Christian liberty." Related questions are the nature of human rationality, the meaning of law, of history, of individuality, of society, and--everywhere--the problem of evil. The book offers a revisionist position in the history of ideas, arguing that Renaissance Christian humanism in England descended not from Tudor to Stuart Anglicanism but from Tudor Anglicanism to revolutionary Puritanism. Close readings are offered of texts by Richard Hooker, Milton, and a range of writers before and during the revolutionary period. Not only theological and political positions but also political actions taken by the authors are compared. Milton's poems are studied in the light of these analyses. The concept of "radical Christian humanism" moves current Milton criticism beyond the competing conceptions of Milton as the poet of democratic liberalism and the prophet of revolutionary absolutism. Milton's radical Christian humanism was built upon pre-modern conceptions and experiences of reason that are not alien to our time. It stemmed from, and resulted in, a religious commitment to political process which his poems embody and illuminate.
Download or read book Back to the Rough Ground written by Joseph Dunne and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Back to the Rough Ground is a philosophical investigation of practical knowledge, with major import for professional practice and the ethical life in modern society. Its purpose is to clarify the kind of knowledge that informs good practice in a range of disciplines such as education, psychotherapy, medicine, management, and law. Through reflection on key modern thinkers who have revived cardinal insights of Aristotle, and a sustained engagement with the Philosopher himself, it presents a radical challenge to the scientistic assumptions that have dominated how these professional domains have been conceived, practiced, and institutionalized.
Download or read book The Globalization of Cost Benefit Analysis in Environmental Policy written by Michael A. Livermore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues in favor of using cost-benefit analysis globally and examines the positive impact it can have in developing countries using relevant case studies. The book discusses the potential for cost-benefit analysis to provoke a global shift toward stronger and more effective economic policies.
Download or read book Hidden Games written by Erez Yoeli and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two MIT economists show how game theory—the ultimate theory of rationality—explains irrational behavior We like to think of ourselves as rational. This idea is the foundation for classical economic analysis of human behavior, including the awesome achievements of game theory. But as behavioral economics shows, most behavior doesn’t seem rational at all—which, unfortunately, to cast doubt on game theory’s real-world credibility. In Hidden Games, Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli find a surprising middle ground between the hyperrationality of classical economics and the hyper-irrationality of behavioral economics. They call it hidden games. Reviving game theory, Hoffman and Yoeli use it to explain our most puzzling behavior, from the mechanics of Stockholm syndrome and internalized misogyny to why we help strangers and have a sense of fairness. Fun and powerfully insightful, Hidden Games is an eye-opening argument for using game theory to explain all the irrational things we think, feel, and do.
Download or read book The Cost Benefit Revolution written by Cass R. Sunstein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why policies should be based on careful consideration of their costs and benefits rather than on intuition, popular opinion, interest groups, and anecdotes. Opinions on government policies vary widely. Some people feel passionately about the child obesity epidemic and support government regulation of sugary drinks. Others argue that people should be able to eat and drink whatever they like. Some people are alarmed about climate change and favor aggressive government intervention. Others don't feel the need for any sort of climate regulation. In The Cost-Benefit Revolution, Cass Sunstein argues our major disagreements really involve facts, not values. It follows that government policy should not be based on public opinion, intuitions, or pressure from interest groups, but on numbers—meaning careful consideration of costs and benefits. Will a policy save one life, or one thousand lives? Will it impose costs on consumers, and if so, will the costs be high or negligible? Will it hurt workers and small businesses, and, if so, precisely how much? As the Obama administration's “regulatory czar,” Sunstein knows his subject in both theory and practice. Drawing on behavioral economics and his well-known emphasis on “nudging,” he celebrates the cost-benefit revolution in policy making, tracing its defining moments in the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama administrations (and pondering its uncertain future in the Trump administration). He acknowledges that public officials often lack information about costs and benefits, and outlines state-of-the-art techniques for acquiring that information. Policies should make people's lives better. Quantitative cost-benefit analysis, Sunstein argues, is the best available method for making this happen—even if, in the future, new measures of human well-being, also explored in this book, may be better still.
Download or read book Law and Leviathan written by Cass R. Sunstein and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Scribes Book Award “As brilliantly imaginative as it is urgently timely.” —Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Harvard Law School “At no time more than the present, a defense of expertise-based governance and administration is sorely needed, and this book provides it with gusto.” —Frederick Schauer, author of The Proof A highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? America has long been divided over these questions, but the debate has recently taken on more urgency and spilled into the streets. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed so long as public officials are constrained by morality and guided by stable rules. Officials should make clear rules, ensure transparency, and never abuse retroactivity, so that current guidelines are not under constant threat of change. They should make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing contradictory ones. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. In more robust form, they could address some of the concerns of critics who decry the “deep state” and yearn for its downfall. “Has something to offer both critics and supporters...a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over the constitutionality of the modern state.” —Review of Politics “The authors freely admit that the administrative state is not perfect. But, they contend, it is far better than its critics allow.” —Wall Street Journal
Download or read book Invasive Technification written by Gernot Böhme and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-08-23 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology has extended its reach to the human body, not just in a literal sense, through implants, transplants and technological substitutes for biological organs, but in a more figurative sense too. Technological infrastructure and the institutions of a technified society today determine what perception is, how we communicate and what forms of human relationship with the natural world are possible. A fundamental new conception of technology is urgently needed. Technology can no longer be seen as a means for efficiently attaining pre-established ends. Rather, it must be seen as a total structure which makes new forms of human action and human relationship possible, while limiting the possibilities of others. In Invasive Technification, acclaimed German philosopher Gernot Böhme offers a reading of technology that explores the many dimensions in which technology presents challenges for modern human beings. It is a book about the preservation of humanity and humane values under the demanding conditions of a technically advanced civilisation and makes a major contribution to the contemporary philosophy of technology.
Download or read book Bending the Rules written by Rachel Augustine Potter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.
Download or read book Saving the Freedom of Information Act written by Margaret B. Kwoka and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Freedom of Information Act is vital for democratic accountability. Understanding who uses it is key to re-centering its oversight purposes.
Download or read book The Unrepentant Renaissance written by Richard Strier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the revival of Stoicism and Platonism. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them. Richard Strier reveals that many long-recognized major texts did question the most traditional values and uncovers a Renaissance far more bumptious and affirmative than much recent scholarship has allowed.The Unrepentant Renaissance counters the prevalent view of the period as dominated by the regulation of bodies and passions, aiming to reclaim the Renaissance as an era happily churning with surprising, worldly, and self-assertive energies. Reviving the perspective of Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Strier provides fresh and uninhibited readings of texts by Petrarch, More, Shakespeare, Ignatius Loyola, Montaigne, Descartes, and Milton. Strier’s lively argument will stir debate throughout the field of Renaissance studies.
Download or read book By Executive Order written by Andrew Rudalevige and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the executive branch—not the president alone—formulates executive orders, and how this process constrains the chief executive's ability to act unilaterally The president of the United States is commonly thought to wield extraordinary personal power through the issuance of executive orders. In fact, the vast majority of such orders are proposed by federal agencies and shaped by negotiations that span the executive branch. By Executive Order provides the first comprehensive look at how presidential directives are written—and by whom. In this eye-opening book, Andrew Rudalevige examines more than five hundred executive orders from the 1930s to today—as well as more than two hundred others negotiated but never issued—shedding vital new light on the multilateral process of drafting supposedly unilateral directives. He draws on a wealth of archival evidence from the Office of Management and Budget and presidential libraries as well as original interviews to show how the crafting of orders requires widespread consultation and compromise with a formidable bureaucracy. Rudalevige explains the key role of management in the presidential skill set, detailing how bureaucratic resistance can stall and even prevent actions the chief executive desires, and how presidents must bargain with the bureaucracy even when they seek to act unilaterally. Challenging popular conceptions about the scope of presidential power, By Executive Order reveals how the executive branch holds the power to both enact and constrain the president’s will.
Download or read book History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe written by William Edward Hartpole Lecky and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Retrieval of Ethics written by Talbot Brewer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talbot Brewer presents an invigorating new approach to ethical theory, in the context of human selfhood and agency. The first main theme of the book is that contemporary ethical theorists have focused too narrowly on actions and the discrete episodes of deliberation through which we choose them, and that the subject matter of the field looks quite different if one looks instead at unfolding activities and the continuous forms of evaluative awareness that carry them forward and that constitute an essential element of those activities. The second is that ethical reflection is itself a centrally important life activity, and that philosophical ethics is an extension of this practical activity rather than a merely theoretical reflection upon it. Brewer's approach is founded on a far-reaching reconsideration of the notions of the nature and sources of human agency, and particularly of the way in which practical thinking gives shape to activities, relationships and lives. He contests the usual understanding of the relationship between philosophical psychology and ethics. The Retrieval of Ethics shows the need for a new contemplative vision of the point or value of human action — without which we will remain unable to make optimal sense of our efforts to unify our lives around a tenable conception of how best to live them, or of the yearnings that draw us to our ideals and to each other.
Download or read book How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind written by Paul Erickson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
Download or read book Breaking the Vicious Circle written by Stephen Breyer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking the Vicious Circle is a tour de force that should be read by everyone who is interested in improving our regulatory processes. Written by a highly respected federal judge, who obviously recognizes the necessity of regulation but perceives its failures and weaknesses as well, it pinpoints the most serious problems and offers a creative solution that would for the first time bring rationality to bear on the vital issue of priorities in our era of limited resources.
