Rationality and Social Responsibility

Rationality and Social Responsibility
Author: Joachim I. Krueger
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2008-04-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135703876

The breadth of topics reflects Dawes's wide-ranging impact on psychological theory and empirical practice. The two themes of rationality and social responsibility feature heavily. The book serves as an overview of psychological science development in its struggle to reconcile what is true with what is good.

The Conceptual Foundation of Morality

The Conceptual Foundation of Morality
Author: Gal Yehezkel
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2021-11-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030805832

This book offers a solution to the ancient philosophical problem regarding the nature and the justification of morality. The importance of this subject matter is obvious, not merely as an abstract philosophical problem, but perhaps even more as a practical challenge, regarding the way we ought to live our lives: the values that ought to direct us, and the ends that we ought to pursue. In the course of this inquiry, a wide array of philosophical topics is explored: the nature of intentional action, and the role played by reason and desires in agency; the question of the final end of agency – better known in ancient terminology as the question of the purpose of life, and in modern terms as the question of the meaning of life; the nature of moral obligations and their rational justification; the challenge posed by determinism for the freedom of the will, with its implications on fatalism and moral responsibility; and normative questions regarding the value of life. This book is of interest not only to professional philosophers, but also to any intellectual who is concerned with questions about morality, our nature as agents, and the end that we ought to pursue.

Responsibility for Rationality

Responsibility for Rationality
Author: Sebastian Schmidt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2024-11-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1040260896

This book develops the foundations of an ethics of mind by investigating the responsibility that is presupposed by the requirements of rationality that govern our attitudes. It thereby connects the most recent research on responsibility and rationality in a unifying dialectic. How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and ethics. Yet, its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. The book has five main goals. First, it reinterprets the problem of responsibility for attitudes as a problem about the normativity of rationality. Second, it connects substantive and structural rationality by drawing on debates about responsibility. Third, it supports recent accounts of the normativity of rationality by explicitly defending the view that epistemic reasons and other ‘right‐kind’ reasons are genuine normative reasons, and it does so by drawing on recent discussions about epistemic blame. Fourth, it breaks the stalemate between rationalist and voluntarist accounts of mental responsibility by proposing a hybrid view. Finally, it argues that being irrational can warrant moral blame, thus revealing an unnoticed normative force of rational requirements. Responsibility for Rationality is an original and essential resource for scholars and advanced students interested in connecting strands of normative theory within epistemology, metaethics, and moral psychology.

Hegel's Theory of Responsibility

Hegel's Theory of Responsibility
Author: Mark Alznauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2015-02-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107078121

The first book-length treatment of a central concept in Hegel's practical philosophy - the theory of responsibility. This theory is both original and radical in its emphasis on the role and importance of social and historical conditions as a context for our actions.

Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments

Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments
Author: R. Jay Wallace
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1998-01-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674268210

R. Jay Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility.

Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will

Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will
Author: David Hodgson
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012-01-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199845301

The author examines the idea of free will, arguing that consideration of human rationality and consciousness together gives us free will.

Responsible Belief

Responsible Belief
Author: Rik Peels
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190608110

This book develops and defends a theory of responsible belief. The author argues that we lack control over our beliefs, but that we can nonetheless influence them. It is because we have intellectual obligations to influence our beliefs that we are responsible for them.

The Importance of Being Rational

The Importance of Being Rational
Author: Errol Lord
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018-05-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192546759

The Importance of Being Rational systematically defends a novel reasons-based account of rationality. The book's central thesis is that what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. Errol Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons. He shows that these views not only help to support the book's main thesis, they also help to resolve several important problems that are independent of rationality. The account of possession provides novel contributions to debates about what determines what we ought to do, and the account of correctly responding to reasons provides novel contributions to debates about causal theories of reacting for reasons. After defending views about possession and correctly responding, Lord shows that the account of rationality can solve two difficult problems about rationality. The first is the New Evil Demon problem. The book argues that the account has the resources to show that internal duplicates necessarily have the same rational status. The second problem concerns the deontic significance of rationality. Recently it has been doubted whether we ought to be rational. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that the requirements of rationality are the requirements that we ultimately ought to comply with. If this is right, then rationality is of fundamental importance to our deliberative lives.

The Normativity of Rationality

The Normativity of Rationality
Author: Benjamin Kiesewetter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198754280

Benjamin Kiesewetter defends the normativity of rationality by presenting a new solution to the problems that arise from the common assumption that we ought to be rational. Drawing on an extensive and careful assessment of the problems discussed in the literature, Kiesewetter provides a detailed defence of a reason-response conception of rationality, a novel, evidence-relative account of reasons, and an explanation of structural irrationality in terms of theseaccounts.

Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics

Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics
Author: Jonathan Pugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2020
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0198858582

Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary Western bioethics, and the claim that there is an important relationship between autonomy and rationality is often treated as an uncontroversial claim in this sphere. Yet, there is also considerable disagreement about how we should cash out the relationship between rationality and autonomy. In particular, it is unclear whether a rationalist view of autonomy can be compatible with legal judgments that enshrine a patient's right to refuse medical treatment, regardless of whether ". . . the reasons for making the choice are rational, irrational, unknown or even non-existent". In this book, I bring recent philosophical work on the nature of rationality to bear on the question of how we should understand autonomy in contemporary bioethics. In doing so, I develop a new framework for thinking about the concept, one that is grounded in an understanding of the different roles that rational beliefs and rational desires have to play in personal autonomy. Furthermore, the account outlined here allows for a deeper understanding of different form of controlling influence, and the relationship between our freedom to act, and our capacity to decide autonomously. I contrast my rationalist with other prominent accounts of autonomy in bioethics, and outline the revisionary implications it has for various practical questions in bioethics in which autonomy is a salient concern, including questions about the nature of informed consent and decision-making capacity.