Democracy Versus the Domination of Instrumental Rationality: Defending Dewey’S Argument for Democracy As an Ethical Way of Life
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Rationality As Reasons-Responsiveness Benjamin Kiesewetter, Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin
Rationality as reasons-responsiveness Benjamin Kiesewetter, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Forthcoming in: Australasian Philosophical Review Abstract: John Broome argues that rationality cannot consist in reasons-responsiveness since rationality supervenes on the mind, while reasons-responsiveness does not supervene on the mind. I here defend this conception of rationality by way of defending the assumption that reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind. Given the many advantages of an analysis of rationality in terms of reasons-responsiveness, and in light of independent considerations in favour of the view that reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind, we should take seriously the backup view, a hypothesis that explains why reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind even though paradigmatic reasons are external facts. I argue that Broome’s objections to the backup view, as well as his more general objection to the thesis that reasons- responsiveness supervenes on the mind, do not succeed. I The idea that rationality and normativity are essentially related to each other has a long tradition in the history of philosophy. It is present in Plato’s conception of the rational part of the soul as directing us towards the good, in Aristotle’s view that being virtuous involves following prescriptions of rationality, as well as in Kant’s conviction that we gain insight into the moral law and can be motivated to act accordingly by way of exercising our capacity of practical reason. In the 20th and 21st century, when the notion of a reason became increasingly important for the conception of normativity, the idea is present in the common assumption that rationality is a matter of responding to reasons, or put the other way around, that reasons are the kind of things that can make responses rational – an assumption that can be found in the influential works of Donald Davidson, Philippa Foot, Christine Korsgaard, Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, and Bernard Williams, among others. -
La Guerra Por La Mente Pública Moldeando La Mente Pública
La guerra por la mente pública Moldeando la mente pública NUÑO RODRÍGUEZ, POLITÓLOGO Y AnaLISTA l surgimiento de la sociedad de masas supuso un punto de giro en la narra- tiva de la historia. La necesidad de reconducir a la población por los nuevos parámetros fijados por las elites, supuso un punto de inflexión en la manera Ede gobernar. En el mundo moderno fue Napoleón el primero en usar abiertamente la propaganda para sus fines políticos, para ello creó la oficina de la opinión -pú blica. Napoleón veía la opinión pública como algo mecánico y manipulable a tra- vés de la psicología.1 De hecho, Napoleón pensaba que solo habían dos fuerzas en el mundo: la espada y el espíritu. Veía que a lo largo de la historia la espada siempre ha sido derrotada por el espíritu,2 y por ello pensaba que la fuerza de un estado residía en la opinión pública que la población tenía del propio estado. Na- poleón resumió su creencia en el poder de la opinión pública cuando dijo “tres periódicos hostiles son más temibles que mil bayonetas”.3 El beneplácito de la población era indispensable para la práctica de gobierno. Por este motivo el surgi- miento de las masas y su irrupción en los asuntos políticos es una de las razones 4 REVISTA FUERZA AÉREA-EUA TERCERA EDICIÓN La guerra por la mente pública principales por las que el estado moderno necesita de la propaganda.4 En la sociedad de masas la población conoce a sus líderes a través del sistema mediático y en el sistema mediático es más complejo ejercer una recia censura, como se podía ejercer en tiempos anteriores. -
What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R
HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Vol. IV - What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R. J. Gómez WHAT IS THAT THING CALLED PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY? R. J. Gómez Department of Philosophy. California State University (LA). USA Keywords: Adorno, Aristotle, Bunge, Ellul, Feenberg, Habermas, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Jonas, Latour, Marcuse, Mumford, Naess, Shrader-Frechette, artifact, assessment, determinism, ecosophy, ends, enlightenment, efficiency, epistemology, enframing, ideology, life-form, megamachine, metaphysics, method, naturalistic, fallacy, new, ethics, progress, rationality, rule, science, techno-philosophy Contents 1. Introduction 2. Locating technology with respect to science 2.1. Structure and Content 2.2. Method 2.3. Aim 2.4. Pattern of Change 3. Locating philosophy of technology 4. Early philosophies of technology 4.1. Aristotelianism 4.2. Technological Pessimism 4.3. Technological Optimism 4.4. Heidegger’s Existentialism and the Essence of Technology 4.5. Mumford’s Megamachinism 4.6. Neomarxism 4.6.1. Adorno-Horkheimer 4.6.2. Marcuse 4.6.3. Habermas 5. Recent philosophies of technology 5.1. L. Winner 5.2. A. Feenberg 5.3. EcosophyUNESCO – EOLSS 6. Technology and values 6.1. Shrader-Frechette Claims 6.2. H Jonas 7. Conclusions SAMPLE CHAPTERS Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketch Summary A philosophy of technology is mainly a critical reflection on technology from the point of view of the main chapters of philosophy, e.g., metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Technology has had a fast development since the middle of the 20th century , especially ©Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Vol. IV - What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R. -
David Hume and the Origin of Modern Rationalism Donald Livingston Emory University
A Symposium: Morality Reconsidered David Hume and the Origin of Modern Rationalism Donald Livingston Emory University In “How Desperate Should We Be?” Claes Ryn argues that “morality” in modern societies is generally understood to be a form of moral rationalism, a matter of applying preconceived moral principles to particular situations in much the same way one talks of “pure” and “applied” geometry. Ryn finds a num- ber of pernicious consequences to follow from this rationalist model of morals. First, the purity of the principles, untainted by the particularities of tradition, creates a great distance between what the principles demand and what is possible in actual experience. The iridescent beauty and demands of the moral ideal distract the mind from what is before experience.1 The practical barriers to idealistically demanded change are oc- cluded from perception, and what realistically can and ought to be done is dismissed as insufficient. And “moral indignation is deemed sufficient”2 to carry the day in disputes over policy. Further, the destruction wrought by misplaced idealistic change is not acknowledged to be the result of bad policy but is ascribed to insufficient effort or to wicked persons or groups who have derailed it. A special point Ryn wants to make is that, “One of the dangers of moral rationalism and idealism is DONAL D LIVINGSTON is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Emory Univer- sity. 1 Claes Ryn, “How Desperate Should We Be?” Humanitas, Vol. XXVIII, Nos. 1 & 2 (2015), 9. 2 Ibid., 18. 44 • Volume XXVIII, Nos. 1 and 2, 2015 Donald Livingston that they set human beings up for desperation. -
Walter Lippmann and the Fallacy of Data Privacy Self-Management
Original Research Article Big Data & Society July–December 2015: 1–15 ! The Author(s) 2015 Big Data and The Phantom Public: Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Walter Lippmann and the fallacy DOI: 10.1177/2053951715608876 of data privacy self-management bds.sagepub.com Jonathan Obar Abstract In 1927, Walter Lippmann published The Phantom Public, denouncing what he refers to as the ‘mystical fallacy of dem ocracy.’ Decrying romantic democratic models that privilege self-governance, he writes: ‘‘I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embody 2 ing the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen’’. Almost 90-years later, Lippmann’s pragmatism is as relevant as ever, and should be applied in new contexts where similar self-governance concerns persist. This paper does just that, repurposing Lippmann’s argument in the context of the ongoing debate over the role of the digital citizen in Big Data management. It is argued that recent proposals by the Federal Trade Commission, the White House and the US Congress, championing notice and choice privacy policy, perpetuate a self-governance fallacy comparable to Lippmann’s, referred to here as the fallacy of data privacy self-management. Even if the digital citizen had the faculties and the system for data privacy self-management, the digital citizen has little time for data governance. What we desire is the freedom to pursue the ends of digital production, without being inhibited by the means. The average digital citizen wants privacy, and safety, but cannot complete all that is required for its protection. -
Let Us Infotain You: Politics in the New Media Age
University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Departmental Papers (ASC) Annenberg School for Communication 1-1-2001 Let Us Infotain You: Politics in the New Media Age Michael X. Delli Carpini University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Bruce A. Williams Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers Part of the Social Influence and oliticalP Communication Commons Recommended Citation (OVERRIDE) Delli Carpini, M. X., & Williams, B. A. (2001). Let us infotain you: Politics in the new media age. In W. L. Bennett & R. M. Entman (Eds.), Mediated politics: Communication in the future of democracy (pp.160-181). Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/14 NOTE: At the time of publication, the author Michael X. Delli Carpini was affiliated with Columbia University. Currently January 2008, he is a faculty member of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/14 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Let Us Infotain You: Politics in the New Media Age Abstract Political communications scholars, members of the press, and political elites have traditionally distinguished between entertainment and non-entertainment media. It is in public affairs media in general and news media in particular that politics is assumed to reside, and it is to this part of the media that the public is assumed to turn when engaging the political world. Politics, in this view, is a distinct and self- contained part of public life, and citizen is one role among many played by individuals. -
Pragmatism and Rationality Jeremy Randel Koons in Chapter 2, I
Pragmatic Reasons —Chapter 3 Pragmatism and Rationality 1 Jeremy Randel Koons In chapter 2, I argued that since moral and epistemic facts do not figure in causal explanations, we must turn to pragmatic reasons to justify continued participation in these practices. What I hope to demonstrate in this chapter is that it is prudentially rational to submit to moral and epistemological constraints. Certainly, this has been argued before, at least with regard to moral constraints. However, previous attempts to prove that moral constraints are rational constraints have typically run into various difficulties. In this chapter, I will argue that these difficulties have arisen out of certain systematic misunderstandings regarding the nature of rationality. First, too many philosophers have thought that the individual action is the basic unit of rationality. That is, in questions of means-end rationality, it has too often been thought that we must examine and evaluate individual actions, and determine each isolated action’s rationality in terms of how well that individual action promotes the end in question. I will argue that this is a mistake, and that often strategies, not individual actions, are the basic units of rationality. That is, the rationality of individual actions often cannot be determined in abstraction from the strategy they constitute. Second, philosophers have too often thought of rationality as individualistic. That is, philosophers have thought that we can only evaluate the rationality of actions performed by individuals. I will argue that this, too, is a mistake, and that there is a viable (and indeed indispensable) notion of cooperative rationality. 1 This abridged version of Chapter 3 of Jeremy Randel Koons, Pragmatic Reasons: A Defense of Morality and Epistemology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) is reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. -
Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality
THE HUMEAN THEORY OF PRACTICAL IRRATIONALITY BY NEIL SINHABABU JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY VOL. 6, NO. 1 | NOVEMBER 2011 URL: WWW.JESP.ORG COPYRIGHT © NEIL SINHABABU 2011 JOURNAL OF ETHICS & SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY | VOL. 6, NO. 1 THE HUMEAN THEORY OF PRACTICAL IRRATIONALITY Neil Sinhababu The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality Neil Sinhababu N “THE NORMATIVITY OF INSTRUMENTAL REASON,” Christine Korsgaard presents a problem for those who accept similarly I structured Humean views of both action and rationality.1 (I will call the conjunction of views she criticizes the double-Humean view.) Korsgaard contends that the double-Humean view implies the impossibility of irrational action, as it claims that we can only perform the actions that it deems rational. First I will develop Humean views of rationality and action so as to display the force of Korsgaard’s objection. Then I will respond by showing how double-Humeans can develop their view to account for just as much practical irrationality as there is. Double-Humeans can answer Korsgaard’s objection if their views of action and rationality measure agents’ actual desires differently. What determines what the agent does should be the motivational forces that desires produce in the agent at the moment when she decides to act. That is when her desires play their causal role in determining action. What determines what it is rational to do should be the agent’s dispositional desire strengths. Our normative intuitions about rationality concern these states. Since the action that desire motivates us most strongly to do at the moment of action may not be the action that would best satisfy our dispositional desires, irrational action is possible. -
An Introduction to Philosophy
An Introduction to Philosophy W. Russ Payne Bellevue College Copyright (cc by nc 4.0) 2015 W. Russ Payne Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document with attribution under the terms of Creative Commons: Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International or any later version of this license. A copy of the license is found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1 Contents Introduction ………………………………………………. 3 Chapter 1: What Philosophy Is ………………………….. 5 Chapter 2: How to do Philosophy ………………….……. 11 Chapter 3: Ancient Philosophy ………………….………. 23 Chapter 4: Rationalism ………….………………….……. 38 Chapter 5: Empiricism …………………………………… 50 Chapter 6: Philosophy of Science ………………….…..… 58 Chapter 7: Philosophy of Mind …………………….……. 72 Chapter 8: Love and Happiness …………………….……. 79 Chapter 9: Meta Ethics …………………………………… 94 Chapter 10: Right Action ……………………...…………. 108 Chapter 11: Social Justice …………………………...…… 120 2 Introduction The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. -
Object Theory in Consumer Research Detlev Zwick York University, [email protected]
University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI College of Business Administration Faculty College of Business Administration Publications 2006 The piE stemic Consumption Object and Postsocial Consumption: Expanding Consumer‐Object Theory in Consumer Research Detlev Zwick York University, [email protected] Nikhilesh Dholakia University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cba_facpubs Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, E-Commerce Commons, and the Marketing Commons Terms of Use All rights reserved under copyright. Citation/Publisher Attribution Zwick, Detlev, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. "The pE istemic Consumption Object and Postsocial Consumption: Expanding Consumer- Object Theory in Consumer Research." Consumption, Markets & Culture, Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 2006): 17-43. DOI: 10.1080/10253860500481452 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Business Administration at DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Business Administration Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 THE EPISTEMIC CONSUMPTION OBJECT AND POSTSOCIAL CONSUMPTION: EXPANDING CONSUMER-OBJECT THEORY IN CONSUMER RESEARCH Detlev Zwick, York University* Nikhilesh Dholakia, University of Rhode Island** *Detlev Zwick is Assistant Professor, Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Ontario. Phone: (1)416-736-2100 ext. 77199, Email: [email protected]. ** Nikhilesh Dholakia is Professor of Marketing, University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island, United States. Phone: (1) 401-874-4172. Email: [email protected] The authors thank the Marketing Science Institute and the Research Institute for Telecommunication and Information Marketing (RITIM) at the University of Rhode Island for funding for this research. -
Utilitarianism with a Human Face
1 Utilitarianism with a Human Face Bernward Gesang in: The Journal of Value Inquiry (2005) 39: 169–181 1. Utilitarianism: An Inhumane Calculus? Utilitarians are said to sacrifice the interests of individuals for a greater collective good, to threaten human rights and scorn justice. Utilitarianism is a monistic ethical theory with just one ultimate value, the maximization of happiness. Such monism is criticized for having absurd and inhumane moral consequences. Many people do not deny that happiness is important, but most people do not believe that happiness is the only thing that matters. This criticism is plausible. Utilitarianism starts with basic intuitions that are widely accepted, but it ends up absolutist, which leads to conflicts. In one respect, such conflicts are welcome to a utilitarian who seeks to oppose accepted conservative intuitions with the voice of reason. However, many utilitarians take confrontation too far. There are already resources available for a more humane utilitarianism that are worthy of development.1 They might help to temper the provocations of some utilitarians and to bring us closer to common sense. We need a greater correspondence between utilitarianism and common sense to gain a more humane utilitarianism. Ethics cannot be radically revolutionary.2 The so-called revolutionists emphasize that ethics is normative and that it cannot be its task to affirm the existing egoistic ethos. The so-called conservatives argue that revolutionary ethics will never be realized because only philosophers understand and believe in it. We seek to steer a middle course between pure conservatism and revisionism that is compatible with the fundamental concept of utilitarianism that means justified by a gain of utility. -
1 Protest Public As a Social Actor
Protest Public as a Social Actor: from mosaic of "issue-based groups" to the unity of "the other world possible" Abstract This paper is an attempt to address a methodological problem of defining the origin, the structure and social foundations of massive and lasting peaceful street protests, that had appeared spontaneously and almost simultaneously at the beginning of new millennia in the countries with very different level of public wealth and socio-political structure - from US and UK to Turkey, Brazil and Bulgaria, lately involving similar protest events in Russia and Ukraine. Been driven by different reasons, addressing different targets, those mass street actions have a lot of common features, that allow to consider them as one phenomena, which we define as a new type of social engagement, distinguished both from civil society organizations and social movements. This type of engagement is characterized by formation and activities of protesting publics, which can have deep and lasting impact on both society and policy process, including various fields of social policy, by transforming the public sphere through changing dominating public discourses. Such activities are largely based on common demand of ethical nature, that can bring together many diverse social groups and mini-publics, focused on issue-based protests. Paper is exploring theoretical foundations of perceiving self-organized publics as collective social actors with their unique features and capacities. It also seeks to develop a conceptual frame for protest events analysis as manifestations of protest publics, which allows to identify the type of specific public assembled for each event , its “qualities of actorness” and its transformative potential.