Rational Person Research Articles

Christine M. Korsgaard'da Hayvanlar ve Hayvanlara Yönelik Kimi Pratik Yükümlülüklerimiz

C. M. Korsgaard is a Kantian philosopher, she proceeds in her works with the guidance of Kant, and by this guidance, she argues important subjects as “agent and identity”, “self”, “normativity”, “practical reason”, and “animals”. In her works she especially argues that normativity has a necessary relationship with human nature, it has a psychological power in human nature as a form of necessity, it functions as the creator of the human soul. Korsgaard believes that: Only the rational person reaches to “the normative principles, laws which will govern the things she/he does and believes”, he/she has the skill “to normatively manage himself/herself”. This skill is not available in other non-human animals; they all do not have a capacity of reason, rationality rather they only act with their evolutionary instincts, their natural structures. Korsgaard, however, says that we must not exaggerate this difference and that this difference does not make us morally superior to them. For animals, like us, value their lives, pursuit certain goods and ends, live with certain functions (ergon). In this paper, we will see the Kantian theory which Korsgaard argues about animals.

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations on the Reasonable Soul

The aim of this paper is to examine the views of Mark Aurelius, one of the representatives of ancient Roman stoicism, who emphasized the place and role of the human soul in the life of a person, the ratio of reason and feeling as its main components and considered the rational soul as the basis of universal human ethics. Research methodology . In this study the author uses the following methodological approaches: historical, sociocultural, and comprehensive ones. Marcus Aurelius’s views on the place and role of the soul in human life, his attitude to nature and society as well as the development and realization of ethical relations in society are identified drawing on these approaches. The author also uses analytical, comparative and terminological methods of research. A descriptive method for presentation of the content of some conceptual ideas of the philosopher is also used as an additional one. Results . In the context of the philosophical and ethical ideas of Stoicism, Marcus Aurelius substantiates the idea of the rational soul, examines the relationship of its components, like mind and feelings, and identifies the role of the rational soul in the life of a person, his attitude to nature and society. Peace of mind, peace in the soul, according to the Stoic philosophy, is the goal of a rational person. To characterize this psychological state, the ancient Greeks used the concept of “ataraxia”, which means tranquility, fearlessness, peace of mind. A person in the state of ataraxia achieves inner freedom, because his mind controls sensual passions, regardless of external influences. According to Marcus Aurelius, people are created for each other and cannot exist outside of society, therefore they must sincerely and heartily love their neighbors, and their activities should be directed towards the creation of good. The philosopher draws love for neighbors, as a sensual manifestation of the soul, from intellect and logic of the mind. Novelty . The author concludes that according to Marcus Aurelius only a person with a rational soul, whose intellect and sensual intentions are in harmony, can be the carrier of the basic principles and norms of universal ethics. The practical significance . The material of the paper is of theoretical importance for further research of the philosophical heritage of the ancient Roman Stoics. It can also be used in the process of studying humanities in higher education and preparing textbooks for students. Keywords: human being, nature, society, soul, mind, feelings, ethics, stoicism, saintly life.

Rational choice theory and demand for petty corruption

This article studies corruption as a rational choice phenomenon. Unlike the widespread game-theory approach to explaining corrupt behaviour, this article attempts to describe corruption as continuous utility-maximizing problem. It comes up with a demand for corruption function, which shows how the readiness of a rational person to accept corrupt income depends on several factors such as official wage rate, severity of punishment, awareness of those penalties, probability of being detected and probability of being prosecuted.

Teaching ‘small and helpless’ women how to live: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy in Sweden, ca 1995–2005

In 1995, a Swedish pilot study of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) was launched to investigate its therapeutic efficacy and cost-effectiveness as treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in suicidal women. In the same year, a sweeping reform of psychiatric care commenced, dramatically reducing the number of beds by the end of the decade. The psychiatry reform was presented as an important factor prompting the need for a community-based treatment for Borderline patients. This article suggests that the introduction of DBT in Sweden, and its relationship to the reform, can only be adequately explained with reference to the wider political shift occurring at the time, whereby the Swedish welfare state and its guiding ethos of egalitarianism were abandoned in favour of a neoliberal ‘choice revolution’. With the new liberalism, hard work and individual responsibility replaced the idea of a Swedish ‘people’s home’, a nationwide community and social support network. This language was reflected in DBT, which sought to teach patients the ‘skills’ necessary ‘to create a life worth living’. In this context, therapy was constituted as a form of ‘work’ that the patient had to undertake to improve. Moreover, DBT rejected the prevailing view of Borderline patients as ‘manipulative’ and ‘aggressive’, suggesting instead that they were ‘helpless’, ‘weak’ and unable to regulate their emotions. This new Borderline persona fit neatly into the new liberal discourse: she could be taught to become a rational and independent person able to cope in a society that valued individual responsibility over social support.

SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE

AbstractThis paper looks at three ways of addressing probabilism's implausible requirement of logical omniscience. The first and most common strategy says it's okay to require an ideally rational person to be logically omniscient. I argue that this view is indefensible on any interpretation of ‘ideally rational’. The second strategy says probabilism should be formulated not in terms of logically possible worlds but in terms of doxastically possible worlds, ways you think the world might be. I argue that, on the interpretation of this approach that lifts the requirement of certainty in all logical truths, the view becomes vacuous, issuing no requirements on rational believers at all. Finally, I develop and endorse a new solution to the problem. This view proposes dynamic norms for reasoning with credences. The solution is based on an old proposal of Ian Hacking's that says you're required to be sensitive to logical facts only when you know they are logical facts.

Spinoza’s Critique of Humility in theEthics

AbstractIn theEthicsSpinoza denies that humility is a virtue on the grounds that it arises from a reflection on our lack of power, rather than a rational understanding of our power (Part IV, Proposition 53, Demonstration). He suggests that humility, to the extent that it involves a consideration of our weakness, indicates a lack of self‐understanding. However, in a brief remark in the same demonstration he also allows that conceiving our lack of power can be conducive to self‐understanding and an increase in power, on the condition that we “conceive [it] because [we] understand [intelligit] something more powerful than [ourselves].” Unfortunately, Spinoza does not flesh out this remark, nor does he specify the name of the affect that arises from thus conceiving our weakness. Commentators have not been much help in this regard either. What does it mean, in the Spinozistic framework, to conceive our weakness because we understand something more powerful than ourselves? And what exactly is the difference between this instance of conceiving our lack of power and the one that is involved in humility? This paper will examine the nature of this difference by analyzing its metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings, as well as its ethical implications within Spinoza’sEthics. In doing so, it will highlight the ethical importance and epistemological conditions of recognizing our weakness in the Spinozistic universe. Abraham Wolf takes Spinoza’s denial of humility’s virtue in theEthicsto imply that “the rational man should think of what hecando, not of what hecannotdo.” While I agree with Wolf’s remark, my reading in this paper will show that as the rational person thinks of her power and what she can do, she never loses sight of her ineliminable weakness as a finite mode.

Theology after Enlightenment: Between Moral and Religion (from Daniel Defoe to Martin Buber)

The article considers the questions of relations between religion and morality, how it appeared in the culture of European Enlightenment, and its further theological resonance. Already in the beginning of the 18th century the problem of relations between religion and morality was eloquently considered in Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”. The main character of this novel, who happened to be alone at a desert island, first becomes a true Christian, and then tests his moral, and only later on also religious attitudes in communication with the local cannibal, meaningfully called “Friday”. Voltaire in his L’Ingénu develops this problem further: his character, an Indian converted into Christianity, spontaneously arrives to all-rounded moral criticism of Christianity. Marquis de Sade in his La Philosophie dans le boudoir takes up this motive of all-rounded moral criticism of Christianity, but comes to much more radical conclusions: if a truly rational person necessarily will reach atheism, common people need religion in order to feel certain moral limits; however, this religion cannot be Christianity. Finally, Martin Buber’s works show how topical this problem, discovered by the Enlightenment, remains also in our contemporary culture – and, also, which peculiar difficulties and perspectives appear here in the theological dimension. To solve the problem, posed by the Enlightenment, Buber has to draw a distinction between religion and religiosity, and also postulate continuity of God’s revelation and dialogue between human being and God.

Fat, fashion and public shaming in the British long eighteenth century

Abstract Dieting as a fashionable undertaking in the public sphere appears throughout the course of the long eighteenth century. It was part of a shift in awareness to the public stigma of obesity, and marks the rise of a dieting culture focused on psychological effects rather than purely somatic phenomena. It is coterminous with the redefinition of the ‘reasonable’ (rational) person both in law as well as in the public sphere: ‘reasonableness’ comes to define the normal within the cult of the rational; obesity comes to mark that state beyond reasonableness. Such views led and continue to lead to a potential for psychological difficulties, which have come to be the hallmark of modern dieting practice.

Hilarious lessons: The construction of a nonconformist individual through humor in China

This paper discusses how individuals can use humor, sarcasm and mockery to question the governmental policies in China regarding issues such as tradition, democracy, values of education in general and of critical thinking specifically. Drawing on research on individualization of the Chinese society (discussed later), the paper interprets the use of humor by an individual Chinese while teaching English in a test-preparation school in China to illustrate how the authorities and their policies in diverse areas of Chinese life can be challenged. Focusing on the images that the teacher constructed in his jokes on the basis of personal experience, the analysis identified how he projected an attitude of a critical, rational, reflexive and self-reliant nonconformist person towards the political establishment by mocking it for its promotion of traditional and nationalistic discourses, as well as its problematic practices. Since such individuals arguably constitute the backbone of the civil society for a better China, there is a need to acknowledge in research their efforts to contest the discursive and ideological constraints when pursuing the path to remain “individuals” in a post-totalitarian society.

Addressing Ethical Matters in Ukrainian Accounting Practice

IntroductionNowadays professional ethics is rapidly gaining its importance all over the world in general and accounting ethics in particular. Financial scandals have shifted the focus from the technical competence of accounting professionals to their norms and perceptions and caused an increase in the public interest towards ethics in accounting over the last decades (Mele, 2005). According to the findings of Baldvinsdottir et al. (2009) the image of accountant as seen in accounting software adverts has changed from responsible and rational person in the 1970-s and 1980s to a well instructed action man in the 1990s and then to a more hedonistic person in the 2000s. With years the image of accountants has undergone serious transformations, from the ordinary book-keeper to a highly qualified specialist in financial area. In their everyday work accountants face dilemmas and find solutions to various complex situations, which are not always straightforward (Peursem and Julian, 2006), however, various factors including combined influence of commercialism and regulatory response have led to a systemic decline in accounting's professional ideals and, as a result, an erosion of public trust (Lail et al., 2017). The governing idea of making money has influenced the developments of accounting profession and harmed the overall image of accountants, who seem not having realized the aspect of their work (Flanagan and Clarke, 2007) and its crucial influence on external users. Therefore, it is extremely important that accounting should no more be regarded as a technical tool only, with no connection to ethics (Mele et al., 2017) because nowadays, the reliability of accountants' work often depends on their ability to comply with professional and behavioural norms which first of all should be treated as a moral obligation and maintaining high standards (Caglio & Cameran, 2017).All these developments and changes in rapidly expanding business world have made the code of ethics a vital tool to maintain the reputation of the accounting profession and achieve the true and fair view of their tasks and responsibilities and according to Claypool et al. (1990), good knowledge of such code may help accountants identify more clearly the dominant code provision in each dilemma making it vital for professional accountants involved in international business to have a good and proper understanding of all the differences (Jakubowski et al., 2002). However, it should be noted that Velayutham (2003) revealed that in some cases the code may focus more on technical competences and compliance with accounting standards than on the moral responsibility for external users. While findings of Pflugrath et al. (2007) indicate that the existence of code of ethics had a positive impact of the judgments of professional accountants, the studies of Baker (2014) revealed that ethical discourse of the profession can be found more in the self-forming practices of the profession rather than its code of ethics. In general, it can be stated that code of ethics serves as the framework for making decisions, containing common rules varying across countries.While the importance of the code of ethics for professional accounting is growing and gaining popularity, little is known about the recent developments in this regard in Ukraine, whose business environment is still considered as to be in transition. The country regained independence in 1991, since then it strives to establish a strong market economy, however, with little success so far. A significant constraint for the economy is the unstable political shifts, therefore, under such uncertainty the businesses are mainly struggling to survive concentrating on profit and not on the moral values or social responsibility. Ukraine has fully recognized The Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants and adopted it in 2004. It was translated and localized by the Audit Chamber of Ukraine in collaboration with the Federation of Professional Accountants and Auditors of Ukraine. …

Self-interest and the modernity of homo economicus

PurposeCriticism directed at neoclassical economics has failed to replace it with a similar grand theory. The authors argue that one possible explanation may lie in the failure of economists to formulate an opinion as to the philosophical foundations of the author’s object of study. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe argument proceeds in two steps. First, the authors review the prevailing philosophical view of “the self-interest theory (S)”, which is one of the most powerful constituents of today’s economics, and social theorizing in general. Second, the authors present a reasoning framework in which rationality becomes intelligible within a schema of integrating the self’s external and internal conditionalities into a unified view of human reasoning.FindingsSelf-interest has been supposed to give the authors direction about what, concretely, to do, but, on the way, the authors have learned that defining rationality is necessarily a life-dependent process. The conflicts of reasons call for a revised S according to which rationality implies consistency among a person’s competing behavioural drivers rooted in three ontological realms, natural, social, and cultural.Originality/valueFirst, understanding the purpose of one’s actions in rational terms demands redirecting attention from outcomes in terms of utility, profits, or welfare to a social profile of a rational person, with real life coordinates in space and time, as well as the personal histories of that individual. A change in explaining aspirations leads, and this is the second implication, to change in defining the meaning of economic (or social) behaviour. Decision making is not necessarily a process of virtuously selecting the best available options, but assessing and acting according to the opportunity of choice; it is not about freedom of choice, but about the degree of freedom a person is willing and is able to take advantage of.

The Fat Person on the Edgware Road Omnibus: Fat, Fashion, and Public Shaming in the British Long Eighteenth Century.

Dieting as a fashionable undertaking in the public sphere appears in the course of the long eighteenth century. It is part of a shift to an awareness of the public stigma of obesity and marks the rise of a dieting culture focused on psychological rather than a purely somatic phenomenon. It is coterminous with the redefinition of the "reasonable" (rational) person both in law as well as in the public sphere.Reasonableness comes to define the normal within a cult of the rational; obesity comes to mark that state beyond reasonableness. Such views led and lead to the potential for psychological difficulties that come to be the hallmark of modern dieting practice.

Desire, Expectation, and Invariance

The Desire-as-Belief thesis (DAB) states that any rational person desires a proposition exactly to the degree that she believes or expects the proposition to be good. Many people take David Lewis to have shown the thesis to be inconsistent with Bayesian decision theory. However, as we show, Lewis’s argument was based on an Invariance condition that itself is inconsistent with the (standard formulation of the) version of Bayesian decision theory that he assumed in his arguments against DAB. The aim of this paper is to explore what impact the rejection of Invariance has on the DAB thesis. Without assuming Invariance, we first refute all versions of DAB that entail that there are only two levels of goodness. We next consider two theses according to which rational desires are intimately connected to expectations of (multi-levelled) goodness, and show that these are consistent with Bayesian decision theory as long as we assume that the contents of ‘value propositions’ are not fixed. We explain why this conclusion is independently plausible, and show how to construct such propositions.

Spinoza on Lying and Suicide

Spinoza is often taken to claim that suicide is never a rational act, that a ‘free’ person acting by the guidance of reason will never terminate his/her own existence. Spinoza also defends the prima facie counterintuitive claim that the rational person will never act dishonestly. This second claim can, in fact, be justified when Spinoza's moral psychology and account of motivation are properly understood. Moreover, making sense of the free man's exception-less honesty in this way also helps to clarify how Spinoza should, and indeed does, recognize the possibility of rational suicide.

Incentive Mechanisms of Altruistic Behavior With Social Preference Introduced and the Effects Comparison

Under the assumption of rational person, the provision of altruistic behavior will eventually be exhausted. However, in reality, some people still would rather sacrifice their own interests to help others. This paper introduces altruistic social preference into utility function, researches on how to push the upgrade of altruistic behavior in the society through designing the incentive mechanism while realizing the maximum of individual interest and social welfare. This paper divides the individuals into individuals with high, middle and low altruistic levels and analyzes the effects of different incentive mechanisms on these three kinds of individuals. Finally, this paper comes to the comparative analysis on the policy effects by combining the effects of the proportion of the individuals with different altruistic levels in the group on the aggregate provision of altruistic behavior.

The argument from souls to God

AbstractHumans are pure mental substances, that is essentially souls, who have a rich mental life of sensations, thoughts, intentions, and other pure mental events, largely caused by and sometimes causing events in their brains and so in their bodies. God has reason to create humans because humans have a kind of goodness, the ability to choose between good and evil, which God himself does not have. The existence of these causal connections between mental events and brain events requires an enormous number of separate psychophysical laws. It is most improbable that there would be such laws if God had not made them. Each soul has a thisness; it is the particular soul it is quite independently of its mental properties and bodily connections. So no scientific law, concerned only with relations between substances in virtue of their universal properties, could explain why God created this soul rather than that possible soul, and connected it to this body. Yet a rational person often has to choose between equally good alternatives on non-rational grounds; and so there is nothing puzzling about God choosing to create this soul rather than that possible soul. Hence the existence of souls provides a good argument for the existence of God.

Metaphysics as fairness

What are the rules of the metaphysical game? And how are the rules, whatever they are, to be justified? Above all, the rules should be fair. They should be rules that we metaphysicians would all accept, and thus should be justifiable to all rational persons engaged in metaphysical inquiry. Borrowing from Rawls’s conception of justice as fairness, I develop a model for determining and justifying the rules of metaphysics as a going concern.

The Duty of Clarity

This article shows that the Constitution contemplates that judges are to exercise a duty of clarity before declining to follow legislation because it violates the Constitution. That is, they were to exercise the power of judicial review only if the legislation at issue proved to be in manifest contradiction of a constitutional provision. But judges were also expected to use the ample legal methods of clarification available to pin down the Constitution’s precise meaning.The best categorization of this duty of clarity and clarification is that it was an aspect of the judicial power granted under Article III of the Constitution. Thus, the article rejects James Bradley Thayer’s form of judicial deference - that legislation should be uphold on the basis of any interpretation that could be embraced by “a rational person” - as extreme and unwarranted. Thayer followed a jurisprudential tradition that developed subsequent to the Framing in which judicial review was fundamentally a political rather than a legal exercise and in which judges necessarily made law in the interstices of a written text’s unclear commands without any clear framework of discipline provided by legal rules. As a result, Thayer’s concept of constitutional deference has a larger scope and effect than it did at the jurisprudence of the Founding where judges were not seen as lawmakers in that sense and where the judicial duty of clarity has jurisprudential roots in natural law rather than positivism. But the article also rejects the notion that judicial review permits judges to overturn legislation based on their own view of the Constitution, even if their interpretation is not clearly the best one. The duty of clarity casts doubt on the legality of constitutional construction as opposed to constitutional interpretation in the course of judicial review, because constitutional construction can occur only when the meaning of the Constitution is unclear.

THEORETICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL SOURCES OF IBN SINA PHILOSOPHY ON THE ISSUE OF REASON AND FAITH

The article examines the theoretical and ideological sources of Ibn Sina philosophy on the issue of human. The author emphasizes that the studies of Ibn Sina were based on the philosophical tradition of antiquity, on their doctrine of man as a rational and social person. Due to the rational activity of man as his natural qualities, the philosopher based on the modern advanced science and social thought which has significantly expanded the frontiers of knowledge on the issues of human nature, the meaning of his life, his place in the Universe, and role in society.

Users’ Perception of Crisis Portrayals on Social Media: A Study of Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria

Social media are steadily becoming the dominant means of keeping in touch with one another and veritable channels of public communication of this epoch. Violent crisis like the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria is one of the global phenomena which elicit concern from every rational person. This paper examined the users’ perception of crisis portrayals on social media using the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria as an example. Survey research design was applied with 300 respondents as the sample; multi-stage sampling technique was used to select the samples and questionnaire was the instrument of data collection. The study found that users perceive the portrayals of the crisis on social media as excess and over-blown, especially on Facebook b y mostly users between 15 and 35 years old. Based on the findings, the paper mainly recommends more social media education and barring of youngsters of certain age from the use of Facebook in Nigeria. Keywords: Users, Perception, Crisis, Portrayal, Social Media, Book Haram,