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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.

How do technologies shape participation? The rise of digital technologies has facilitated novel modes of engagement, such as political campaigns, protest movements, or civic education initiatives. However, changing economies of attention and politics of affect have allowed right-wing populist and far-right actors and movements to also reap benefits. This volume brings together new perspectives from general education and media education on digital democratic publics., Wie verändern Technologien Partizipation? Das Aufkommen digitaler Technologien hat neue Formen des Engagements ermöglicht, die Protestbewegungen, politische Kampagnen oder auch Initiativen der politischen Bildung prägen. Veränderte Aufmerksamkeitsökonomien und Affektpolitiken, von denen rechtspopulistische Akteur*innen profitieren, fordern die demokratische Selbstverständigung ebenso heraus wie die Macht der Daten. Der Band versammelt Perspektiven aus der Allgemeinen Erziehungswissenschaft und Medienpädagogik auf (post-)digitale demokratische Öffentlichkeiten.

Wie entstehen Musikdokumentationen? Und woran orientieren sich die Produzierenden - an der außerfilmischen Wirklichkeit oder an institutionellen Vorgaben, Quoten und Absatzmärkten? Christian Bettges beantwortet diese Fragen in Auseinandersetzung mit Jürgen Habermas' »Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns« und arbeitet so multidimensionale Begründungsprozesse heraus. Er begreift Musikdokumentationen als Teil gesamtgesellschaftlicher Realitäten und formuliert eine radikale Absage an »Abbild-Theorien«. Im Rahmen künstlerischer Forschung rücken rationale Praxen des Kompilierens und Arrangierens von Materialien in den Timelines digitaler Schnittsysteme ins Zentrum der Analyse.

This open access book will examine the implications of digitalization for the understanding of humanity, conceived as a community of intelligent agency. It addresses important topics across a range of social and behavioral theories and identifies a range of novel mechanisms and their social behavioral effects. Across the book, the author highlights the expansion of intelligent processing capability brought about by digitalization and the challenges this exposes for integrating artificial and human capabilities. It includes the altered effects of bounded rationality in problem solving and decision making; related changes in the perception of rationality, plus novel myopias and biases. It also seeks to address cognitive intersubjectivity, learning from performance and agentic self-generation; and the novel methods and patterns of reasoned thought which emerge in a digitalized world; and how these mechanisms will combine in making and remaking the world of human experience and understanding. This book examines the problematics and prospects for digitally augmented humanity. In doing so, it maps the terrain for a future science of augmented agency. It will have cross-disciplinary appeal to students and scholars of applied psychology, cognitive and behavioral science, organizational psychology and management, business, finance, and digital cultures and humanities.

Nie war das Politische frei von Emotionen, jedoch scheint ihre Quantität und Geltung in der politischen Sphäre der Gegenwart stetig zuzunehmen. Hinweise darauf sind die zunehmende Präsenz emotionaler Debatten im medialen Bereich wie auch im alltäglichen Umgang miteinander. Ein Blick in die Zeitung oder in soziale Netzwerke scheint zu genügen, um zu erfahren, welchen Stellenwert Emotionen und Affekte in Diskussionen über politische Entscheidungen oder Problemstellungen einnehmen. Ob und inwiefern es eine signifikante Zunahme der Rolle der Emotionen im Bereich des Politischen gibt, erörtern die Beitragenden des Bandes mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven.

Healing the Reason-Emotion Split draws on research from experimental psychology and neuroscience to dispel the myth that reason should be heralded above emotion. Arguing that reason and emotion mutually benefit our decision-making abilities, the book explores the idea that understanding this relationship could have long-term advantages for our management of society’s biggest problems. Levine reviews how reason and emotion operated in historical movements such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism and 1960s' counterculture, to conclude that a successful society would restore human connection and foster compassion in economics and politics by equally utilizing reason and emotion. Integrating discussion on classic and contemporary neurological studies and using allegory, the book lays out the potential for societal change through compassion, and would be of interest to psychologists concerned with social implications of their fields, philosophy students, social activists, and religious leaders.

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.

Whatever societies accept as ‘knowledge’ is embedded in epistemological, institutional, political, and economic power relations. How is knowledge produced under such circumstances? What is the difference between general knowledge and the sciences? Can there be science without universal truth claims? Questions like these are discussed in eleven essays from the perspective of Sociology, Law, Cultural Studies, and the Humanities.

Survey based valuation techniques like the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) rely particularly on the premise of respondents’ rationality when answering willingness to pay (WTP) questions. Results of CVM surveys have repeatedly put this fundamental assumption into question. This study adopts a more realistic view of rationality accounting for respondents’ limited capacities to process information. Based on cognitive psychology a technique to detect and analyze the bounds of rationality inherent in WTP statements is developed. Using an empirical example, the influence of bounded rationality on the validity of CVM results is analyzed. It is shown that individual differences in information processing play a major role. From these results recommendations for future survey design are developed.