Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 1991"

Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism

Abstract: PART 1: ETHICS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM Prologue: Saints 1. Ethics and Psychology The Topic Ethics, Psychology, and the Human Sciences The Autonomy Thesis 2. The Principle of Minimal Psychological Realism Minimal Psychological Realism Psychological Distance Natural and Social Psychological Traits Environmental Sensitivity Natural Teleology and the Naturalistic Fallacy 3. Psychological Realism and the Personal Point of View The Argument from the Personal Point of View Minimal Persons Persons and Plans Characters, Commitments, and Projects Separateness and Impersonality 4. Abstraction, Alienation, and Integrity Strong Realism and Socially Fortified Persons Abstraction and Kinds of Impartiality Integrity, Alienation, and Virtues of Form PART 2: LIBERAL AND COMMUNITARIAN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 5. Community and the Liberal Self The Social Construction of Persons The Classical Picture and the Primacy of Justice Community, Friendship, and Flourishing Appreciation, Emulation, and Self-Respect Social Union 6. Identity and Community Actual and Self-Represented Identity Identity, Self-Esteem, and Effective Agency Self-Understanding, Encumbered Identity, and Psychological Realism, Self-Understanding and Like-Mindedness Narrativity and Homogeneity PART 3: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY 7. Moral Cognition: Development and Deep Structure Psychological Realism and Deep Structure The Moral Judgment of the Child Moral Consciousness, Speech Acting, and Opacity Rules and Autonomy: The Marble Study Games and Gender Consequences and Intentions The "Consciousness of Something Attractive" 8. Modern Moral Philosophy and Moral Stages Stage Theory Stage Holism and Globality Moral Stage, Character Assessment, and Unified Justification Development and Improvement The Adequacy of the Highest Stage 9. Virtue, Gender, and Identity Identity and Morality Psychological Realism and Gender Two Different Global Voices? Gestalt Shifts 10. Gender Differences: The Current Status of the Debate The No-Difference Claim The Relation of Justice and Care Further Empirical Questions 11. Gender, Normative Adequacy, Content, and Cognitivis Six Theses The Separate-but-Equal Doctrine The Integration Doctrine The Hammer-Wrench Doctrine Impartialism Noncognitivist Care Context-Sensitive Care PART 4: SITUATION, DISPOSITIONS, AND WELL-BEING 12. Invisible Shepherds, Sensible Knaves, and the Modularity of the Moral Two Thought Experiments about Character Persons in Situations Moral Gaps and the Unity of Character Moral Modularity 13. Characters and Their Traits Traits and Traitology Individual Trait Globality and Situation Sensitivity The Trait-Inference Network and Evaluative Consistency Evaluative Consistency, the Authoritarian Personality, and Authoritarian Behavior Moral Traits 14. Situations, Sympathy, and Attribution Theory Character and Coercion Milgram's "One Great Unchanging Result" Coercion and Rebellion in Groups Situations and Samaritans Attribution Theory and Moral Personality 15. Virtue, Mental Health, and Happiness Illusion and Well-Being The Traditional View Meets the Facts The Traditional View versus the Classical View Virtue, Again Epilogue Notes References Index

Ethics with Aristotle

Abstract: In this book, Sarah Broadie gives a close and comprehensive analysis of the main themes of Aristotle's ethics. She concentrates on his discussions of happiness, virtue, voluntary agency, practical reason, incontinence, pleasure, and the place of theoria in the best life. The book makes a major contribution towards the understanding of Aristotle's ethics.

Society in Action: The Theory of Social Becoming

Abstract: Preface. Part I: The Background: 1. Toward a Theoretical Reorientation. 2. Evolving Focus on the Agency. 3. On the Shoulders of Marx. Part II: The Theory: 4. Ontology of the Constructed World. 5. The Model of Social Becoming. 6. Active and Passive Society. Part III: The Follow-up: 7. Social Movements: Double Morphogenesis. 8. Revolutions: The Peak of Social Becoming. Name Index. Subject Index. Bibliography.

Moral Hazard and Verifiability: The Effects of Renegotiation in Agency

Abstract: We examine the effects of renegotiation in an agency relationship. We show how renegotiation affects: (i) the set of actions the principal can induce the agent to take; and (ii) the cost of implementing a given action. We show that, when the principal receives an unverifiable signal of the agent's action, renegotiation can improve welfare. This result stands in contrast to Fudenberg and Tirole's (1990) finding that renegotiation lowers welfare when the principal receives no signal about the agent's action prior to renegotiation.

The cultural contexts of ethnic differences

Abstract: Discarding simplistic conceptions of 'cultures' as bounded entities for research, recent social anthropological studies have descnbed ethnicity as those aspects of social relationships and processes in which cultural difference is communicated. This approach is endorsed here, but it is argued that it is also necessary to understand vanrations in the forms of cultural difference communicated through ethnicity. Thus, variations in the significance of cultural differences in otherwise comparable inter-ethnic situations must be understood comparatively. Drawing on the Wittgensteinian concept of language-games, the article demonstrates and discusses such vanations as they are expressed in different inter-ethnic contexts in Trinidad and Mauritius. It is argued that a concept of culture which fully acknowledges the contextual character of shared meaning in any society must be dual: culture is continuously created and re-created through intentional agency, but it is simultaneously a necessary condition for all agency to be meaningful. The objective of this article is to contribute to the development of analytical devices for dealing comparatively with cultural differences made relevant in systems of interaction. First, the strengths and limitations of a leading social anthropological perspective on ethnicity are considered. Thereafter, certain aspects of ethnicity in

Beyond "State vs. Society": Theories of the State and New Deal Agricultural Policies

Abstract: Political sociologists studying social classes, state structures, and public policies are engaged in a debate between "society-centered" and "state-centered" theories. We challenge the state-centered approach by analyzing the interrelationship of state and society, focusing on the convergence of state institutional capacity and class capacity. We explore the social origins of state-building in U.S. agriculture and show the historical class biases of state agricultural institutions. Through an examination of the majorNewDealfarm policy themes, particularly the rise andfall of reform in the AgriculturalAdjustmentAdministration and the Resettlement/Farm Security Administration, we demonstrate the interdependence of state and society. We analyze statelsociety relations as they affected each agency and examine class conflict both within and beyond the state. Instead of assuming the separation of the state and social forces, we investigate how they interact to shape policy.

The State of Research on Performance in Africa

Abstract: Performance raises fundamental issues about bodily praxis, human agency, temporality, and discursive knowledge and calls into question conventional understandings of tradition, repetition, mechanical reproduction, and ontological definitions of social order and reality. Across academic disciplines and across modes of production, however, performance is a contested concept, “meaning that its very existence is bound up in disagreement about what it is, and that disagreement over its essence is itself part of that essence” (Strine, Long, and HopKins, 1989: 183). In other words, performance has no precisely agreed upon definition. Rather it varies in scope and import from one academic discipline to another and from one practitioner, or human agent, to another. In the emerging field of performance studies, performance is open-ended, but it privileges process, the temporally or processually constructed nature of human realities, and the agency of knowledgeable performers who have embodied particular techniques and styles to accomplish it (M. Drewal, 1989b; Conquergood, 1989). In the broadest sense, performance is the praxis of everyday social life; indeed, it is the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of taking action. Performance is thus a fundamental dimension of culture as well as the production of knowledge about culture. It might include anything from individual agents' negotiations of everyday life, to the stories people tell each other, popular entertainments, political oratory, guerrilla warfare, to bounded events such as theater, ritual, festivals, parades, and more.

Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: Human Ecology and Icelandic Discourse

Abstract: Social theory and human ecology - the speaker and the producer - the "household" and the individual, structure, agency, and history anthropological discussions of fishing economies - hunters and gatherers of aquatic resources, the definition and the category of fishing, restrictions of access to resources - closure and tenure systems of production and social discourse - the relationship between representations and reality, cultural constructs - on fish, production, and gender, concepts and social context - an hypothesis the domestication of nature - household production - the production system of medieval Iceland, a "blind date" with the sea, myth and metaphor from nature to society - the market economy - the social relations and techniques of expansive fishing, hierarchical models of success, information, competition and social honour the domination of nature - the modern state - consolidated capitalism changing notices of fishing - the authenticity of the "skipper effect" - competing rationalities - science, equity and power beyond the language of nature.

Morality, identity, and historical explanation: Charles Taylor on the sources of the self

Abstract: argued, not on individuals' variant faculties, nor on moral choice as an exercise of free will, but on social processes more basic than individuals. The effect of a moral order was produced directly by social causes. For the most part, sociologists have not carried forward Durkheim's task of creating a sociology of morality. We have tried to sever normative from empirical discourse even more sharply than he did. We have lost sight of the philosophical problems Durkheim thought sociology could solve. And as a discipline we have become "unmusical" in matters of moral discourse. Yet we remain true to the Durkheimian heritage in our avoidance of strong accounts of human subjects.1 Even symbolic interactionists have largely abandoned Mead's focus on the self, and those sociologists who have turned recently to address (or rehabilitate) the role of "agency" in human affairs have largely tried to do so withcat focusing on individual subjects, either stressing instead the more anonymous workings of a decentered collective agency, or sticking to general statements about the importance of agency rather than specific analyses of its historical forms and variations. Conversely, explicitly individualistic sociologies (like the rational choice theory of Coleman 1990) take the individual largely for granted, treating the person as a naturally given entity rather than as a problematic or historically constructed category. In this context, Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989a; hereinafter cited without date) ought to have a major and very salutary impact. It is a book of enormous wisdom, deceptively clear and straightforward in its writing style (if rather casual and meandering), but subtle and profound in its argument. Sources of the Self continues a line

Reconstituting the Subject: Feminism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Abstract: Political agency is vital to the formulation of a feminist politics so feminists have attempted to create a subject that eschews the sexism of the Cartesian subject while at the same time retaining agency. This paper examines some of the principal feminist attempts to reconstitute the subject along these lines. It assesses the success of these attempts in light of the question of whether the subject is a necessary component of feminist theory and practice.

Beyond the Structure/Agency Dualism: An Evaluation of Giddens’Theory of Structuration*

Abstract: In this paper an evaluation of Giddens’theory of structuration is focused on two related issues: first, the degree to which Giddens provides a theory of action which transcends the structure/agency dualism and, second, whether such a transcendence is possible. In the first instance, it is demonstrated that Giddens exaggerates the powers of agents at the expense of structural constraints. Second, it is argued that transcendence of structure/agency dualism and the specification of a definitive ontology of action is not possible and that the merit of structuration theory lies in its use as a sensitizing device for empirical research.

Agency, Attachment, and Difference

Abstract: It is for no trivial reason that Kant's ethics is the standard model of an impartial ethical system. Persons have moral standing in virtue of their rationality, and the morally dictated regard we are to have for one another reflects this deep sameness: we are never to fail to treat one another as agents with autonomous rational wills. This yields impartial treatment of persons and impartial judgment across cases. Although these features of Kant's ethics have traditionally been a source of its appeal, in many recent discussions just this sort of impartiality has come to stand for a kind of vice-mostly a vice of theory.' To the extent, however, that persons embody the values of impartiality, it is sometimes thought to be in them, if not quite a vice, then a lack or limit or defect of moral sensibility.2 In this article I want to examine a cluster of criticisms of Kantian ethics associated with its impartiality. They arise from concern for the moral standing of relationships of attachment between persons and extend to claims for the nonrational nature of the moral agent and the moral relevance of difference. Each strand of criticism has the form: because of its commitment to impartiality (or one of the grounds of impartiality-e.g., rationality), Kantian ethics fails to make room for X, where X is something no acceptable moral theory can ignore. Without making a general argument in praise of impartiality, I want to look to see whether its Kantian instantiation really fails to accommodate things no moral theory can afford to omit.

Agency and Omniscience

Abstract: It is said that faith in a divine agent is partly an attitude of trust; believers typically find assurance in the conception of a divine being's will, and cherish confidence in its capacity to implement its intentions and plans. Yet, there would be little point in trusting in the will of any being without assuming its ability to both act and know, and perhaps it is only by assuming divine omniscience that one can retain the confidence in the efficacy and direction of divine agency that has long been the lure of certain religious traditions.

Leisure and Women's Identity: Conformity or Individuality?

Abstract: Critical theorists such as Rojek suggest that leisure in capitalist society masks individual oppression rather than contributing to individual identity. This paper argues, however, that such a view incorporates a limited view of identity and ignores aspects of agency such as Mead's “I”. Drawing on Mead's concepts of “I” and “me” and poststructural ideas of subjectivity and discourse, the paper examines the relationship between leisure experiences of women and the construction of gender identity in different stages of the life-cycle. It concludes that leisure experiences of women both reinforce traditional oppressive gender identities and also provide a space for challenging them and creating liberating individual identities.

Democracy and modern political community: limits and possibilities

Abstract: There are various limits to what is politically possible. The exigencies of economic production and exchange represent one crucial limit to possible political structures. Inherited Marxist and liberal conceptions of the relation between economic systems and political structures are incoherent; these relations need to be reconceived, yet recent socialist political thinking has preferred to focus mainly on the political domain, pursuing a theory of self-governing community. Can there today be a coherent account of such a theory? One way of showing there cannot is by pressing the question of the contours an dsubstance of modern political community. Optimistic theorists of self-governing community rely on a self-enclosed, determinate conception of community that has its imaginative roots in a vision of ancient liberty: the demos exercising legitimate and effective agency over a particular territory. But modern political community cannot be conceived of in this way: because of the presence of global processes ...

Delegated voice: ritual speech, risk, and the making of marriage alliances in Anakalang

Abstract: Many societies stress communicative practice in their models of the social world. In Anakalang, Sumba, the process of marriage negotiation helps constitute and display the value of social identities and relations. In this “scene of negotiation,” ritual speech performance formalizes discrete speech participant roles and separates voice from agency. The scene implicitly portrays interaction as risky, with a potential for failure to which the very forms of interaction may themselves contribute.

Social learning theories of moral agency

Abstract: An important question for a naturalized philosophical psychology is what constitutes moral agency (MA). The two prominent scientific theories to which such a philosophical approach might appeal, those of cognitive developmental theory (CDT) and social learning theory (SLT), currently face an investigative dilemma: The better theories of the acquisition of beliefs and the performance of action based on them, the SLTs, seem to be irrelevant to the phenomenon of MA and the theories that seem to be relevant, the CDTs, are unsatisfactory in their accounts of acquisition and action. In this paper I take up the cause of SLT accounts of MA. Critics of SLT accounts of MA can be interpreted as arguing that they are irrelevant to MA because they lack one or more of five functional criteria that require MA to be integral morally motivated cognitive agency. I argue that SLT accounts of MA, and specifically Bandura's social cognitive theory, (SCT), when applied to issues of MA, meet these criteria. Assuming the merits of SLT explanations of both the acquisition of beliefs and the performance of actions based on them, I conclude that SLTs generally, and specifically Bandura's SCT, are promising candidates for explaining MA. If so, they merit the attention of naturalistic philosophical psychologists.

The Trouble with Subjects: Feminism, Marxism and the Questions of Poststructuralism

Abstract: A prominent theme of poststructuralist theory is that the "subject" is a problematic concept. In taking this position, poststructuralism is not alone. The status of the subject has long been at issue in Marxist debates about ideology, agency, structure, interests, and representation, to name only a few. Feminist theory, too, has challenged the notion of the subject in its attention to questions of identity, gender, rationality, and individuality. In the shared questioning of the subject, poststructuralist theorists, Marxists, and feminists have occasionally discovered affinity in their intellectual projects.

Winning and losing? Reflections on the war of 1878–79 in new caledoni

Abstract: equivalence and restraint; in colonial contexts, fighting included, Melanesians acted in creative and meaningful ways which often contradicted European as sumptions of external imposition and reflex reaction; and both contemporary texts and histories tend to anticipate the colonial 'conquest' of New Caledonia, overstate French military advantage, underestimate the significance of Melan esian agency and generally denigrate Melanesian performance.1 Doubt properly arises about the appropriateness of the categorical antitheses 'winning'/'losing', typical of outcome-oriented military histories: 'the "outcome" approach to mil itary history, like the time-honoured but outmoded "causes and results" approach to general history', commented John Keegan, 'pre-judges the terms in which the narrative can be cast'.2

Literature and Rationality: Ideas of Agency in Theory and Fiction

Abstract: Introduction: literature and rationality Part I. Theories and Questions: 1. Rationality: some basic issues 2. Agency, rationality, and literary knowledge Part II. Textual Models: 3. Naturalism and the question of agency 4. Agent's rationality 5. Plans and irrationality 6. Science, reason and society Coda: 'Der Bau' Notes Bibliography.

God's action in the real world1

Abstract: . The scientific and theological enterprises are regarded as interacting and mutually illuminating approaches to reality. The theological consequences of the transformation of the scientific worldview through twentieth-century physics and cosmology are considered with respect to notions of God's transcendence, time, continuous creation, determinism, and multiple universes. The theological implications of the worldview of biology are similarly assessed with respect to certain features of biological evolution: its continuity, its open-endedness, its mechanism, and the role of “chance” and law. The model of human agency for the agency of God in the hierarchy of natural systems is examined. The article concludes with some reflections on a science-informed understanding of God's relation to the world as transcendent, incarnate, and immanent.

Culture, biology, and human behavior

Abstract: Social scientists have not integrated relevant knowledge from the biological sciences into their explanations of human behavior. This failure is due to a longstanding antireductionistic bias against the natural sciences, which follows on a commitment to the view that social facts must be explained by social laws. This belief has led many social scientists into the error of reifying abstract analytical constructs into entities that possess powers of agency. It has also led to a false nature-culture dichotomy that effectively undermines the place of biology in social scientific explanation. Following the principles of methodological individualism, we show how behavioral explanations supported by data and theory from the neurosciences can be used to correct the errors of reificationist thinking in the social sciences. We outline a mechanistic approach to the explanation of human behavior with the hope that the biological sciences will begin to find greater acceptance among social scientists.

Getting Better: Television and Moral Progress

Abstract: Ever since the fifties, when television became ascendent in American popular culture, it has become commonplace to bemoan its "bad" effects. Little or nothing, however, has been said about its "good" effects. With this observation, Henry Perkinson introduces his provocative and original analysis of television and culture. Rejecting the determinism inherent in most studies of the effects of television ("We are what we watch"), he insists that it is people that actively change culture, media having no agency to do so. Nevertheless, he argues that television did facilitate the changes we have made in our culture over the past thirty years. Perkinson describes how television helped us become critical of our existing culture, especially of the relationships that were commonly accepted between men and women, blacks and whites, politicians and voters, employers and employees, and between people and the environment. These criticisms have brought about dramatic changes in our social, political, and economic arrangements, as well as changes in our intellectual outlook. Since these changes came about through our efforts to eliminate or reduce discrimination, suffering, and injustice, Perkinson argues that our culture has become more moral in the age of television. In what amounts to a history of recent social change in America, "Getting Better "examines the role television has played in the rise of feminism, the black protest movement, the presidential elections, the Vietnam War, Watergate, environmentalism, religious fundamentalism, and the New Age movement. This book will be essential reading for students of communications and American culture, and for anyone who wants to make sense of the transformations of American life from the 1950s to the present. Even those who do not agree that things are "getting better" will find that Perkinson's analysis helps to make things more coherent.