Agency (philosophy)

About: Agency (philosophy) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10461 publications have been published within this topic receiving 350831 citations. The topic is also known as: Thought & Human agency.

Simple Mindedness: In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind

Abstract: Book synopsis: How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience—as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer a distinctive view of questions about “the mind’s place in nature,” and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism. This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years’ philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of “materialism,” “physicalism,” or “naturalism” as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation.

Persons in Structures of Social Practice

Abstract: In this article I argue for grounding psychological theories of persons in relation to structures of social practice. I introduce crucial features of such a theory of persons which is based on critical psychology and invite contributions to its further development. The theory emphasizes that persons are participants involved in personal trajectories in relation to structural arrangements of social practice. It is intended to lead to a richer and worldlier psychology. It also leads to a different understanding of professional psychological practices and of their users. To illuminate this, I present key insights from a study of clients attending therapy. Client changes do not occur only in therapeutic sessions but also in and across the contexts in which these clients live their lives in structures of social practice. In this respect, though, the structural arrangement of secluded sessions with intimate expert strangers significantly affects the mode of working of therapy in the social practice of its clients.

Can Institutions Have Responsibilities?: Collective Moral Agency and International Relations

Abstract: Introduction: Making Sense of 'Responsibility' in International Relations: Key Questions and Concepts T.Erskine PART I: IDENTIFYING MORAL AGENTS: STATES, GOVERNMENTS AND 'INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY' Assigning Responsibilities to Institutional Moral Agents: The Case of States and Quasi-states T. Erskine Moral Responsibility and the Problem of Representing the State D.Runciman Moral Agency and International Society: Reflections on Norms, the UN, the Gulf War, and the Kosovo Campaign C.Brown PART II: OBSTACLES AND ALTERNATIVE QUESTIONS Collective Moral Agency and the Political Process F.V.Harbour Constitutive Theory and Moral Accountability: Individuals, Institutions, and Dispersed Practices M.Frost When Agents Cannot Act: International Institutions as 'Moral Patients' C.Navari PART III: HARD CASES: ASSIGNING DUTIES NATO and the Individual Soldier as Moral Agents with Reciprocal Duties: Imbalance in the Kosovo Campaign P.Cornish & F.V.Harbour The Anti-Sweatshop Movement: Constructing Corporate Moral Agency in the Global Apparel Industry R.DeWinter PART IV: HARD CASES: APPORTIONING BLAME The Responsibility of Collective External Bystanders in Cases of Genocide: The French in Rwanda D.Kroslak The United Nations and the Fall of Srebrenica: Meaningful Responsibility and International Society A.F.Lang, Jr. PART V: CONCLUSIONS On 'Good Global Governance', Institutional Design and the Practices of Moral Agency N.Rengger Global Justice: Aims, Arrangements and Responsibilities C.Barry Selected Bibliography Index

Come to Africa: A Hermeneutics of Race in International Theory:

Abstract: Siba N. Grovogui (*) [The Republican congressional class of 1994 should] come to Africa. . . . In Rwanda and Burundi, no one is asked to pay for Head Start, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, national service or student loan programs. Instead, they just have a brutal competition for scarce land, energy and water, in which Tutsi and Hutu take turns downsizing the other tribe in order to grab more resources for their own. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, January 28, 1996 The end of the Cold War and the advent of the information age have upset the old adages that guided the study of international relations for the past fifty years. To many, these events have all but given an aura of inevitability to US (and Western) hegemony and vindicated liberal democracy and late-modern capitalism. (1) As a result, vast numbers of comparative analysts have rid themselves of the theories of imperialism, dependency, uneven development, and others that once sought to explore the political and institutional context of late-modern inequities between states, nations, classes, and genders. Under the guise of restoring agency and cultural perspectives to past and present historical processes, these theorists have rediscovered comparative analyses of cultures and civilizations as means to explaining the unevenness of modernity. But their speculations on the origins and trajectories of the different regional entities of the international order remain grounded in subtle notions of "race" and their rel ations to progress and modernization. (2) Thus, where once analysts sought to advance social justice by examining social relations, power, and the nature of material transactions among entities, the new theories now assume the inevitability of the present order on the basis of the supposed civilizational attainments, cultural dispositions, and work ethics of the inhabitants of the different regions of the globe. Typically, these explanations depend upon a reverse orientalism that extols the economic achievements of the "Asian Tigers"; a cultural determinism that faults African cultural practices alone for the underdevelopment of that region; (3) and a refashioned Weberian notion of work ethics to explain away class and regional differentiations within the international system. Such approaches frequently oppose culture and agency to structures and institutions in order to favor the former. Moreover, they place "culture" and "agency" outside of their structural and institutional contexts and, as a result, substitute the presumed "habits" and "dispositions" of "regional" groupings for the culture and agency of their constituent members; hence, the habits and supposed cultural dispositions of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans, especially as these are expressed through institutions, which are said to spur or hinder their sociopolitical advancement and economic modernization. Despite numerous disclaimers by its adepts, the new scholarship shows a near disinterest in the historical role of the various agents of the moral order for the purpose of elucidating their performance and the ethical bases of their actions. Nor have they shown any sustained interest in the historicity of modernity, the function of the language of progress, and structuring effects of different civilizational (or modernizing) agencies. The result, intended or not, is the racialization of history and historical processes such as international relations. By the racialization of international knowledge, I do not mean to impute racist motives to international theorists: I simply mean to stress the use of analytical methods that uphold ethnographic allusions associated with a hermeneutics of race and culture. Often, such hermeneutics depend upon incomplete historiographic data that serve as central axes for understanding power (sovereignty) and subjectivity (self-determination) within the moral order. To date, no i nternational-relations theorists have based their distinctions between civilized and uncivilized upon a comprehensive comparative investigation of Europe and other regions in regard to "historical traditions," "political morality," and "cultural dispositions. …

Ethics as design. Doing justice to moral problems.

Abstract: Suppose I face a moral problem, how ought I go about figuring out what to do? The question is not simply how I should evaluate proposed courses of action, but how I go about devising such courses of action, a subject on which, as Stuart Hampshire observed in 1949 and again in 1989, ethics has had little to say.[1] Ethical judgments are important in devising responses to moral problems, of course. These judgments come in many forms, from "What is being proposed is morally wrong" to "This safety factor (or margin) is sufficient for the circumstances in which this object or process will operate." Yet people confronted with ethical problems must do more than simply make judgments. They must figure out what to do. This is the reason for calling them "agents." Scholars and popular writers alike often confine themselves to the judge's perspective, for example, when philosophers working in professional ethics take the making of moral judgments or criteria for praising and blaming to be the whole of their subject matter, or when the press, reporting on some accident or miscarriage of science or engineering, takes the main question to be "Who is to blame?" In these cases the restriction of perspective is fairly explicit. However, as I have discussed elsewhere, it is also implicit in the representation of moral problems as dilemmas to which the only solutions are those given with the problem itself, so that the only task is to judge which of the proposed solutions is the best (or least bad).[2] It is not enough to be able to evaluate well-defined actions, motives, etc., because actual moral problems are not multiple-choice problems. One must devise possible courses of action as well as evaluate them. Suppose my supervisor tells me to dispose of some regulated toxic substance by dumping it down the drain. In this case part of my problem is that I have been ordered to do something that is potentially injurious to human health and, furthermore, illegal. Assuming that my supervisor knows, as I do, that the substance is a regulated toxic substance (an assumption that I should--verify), then my supervisor's order is unethical and illegal. This is an example of a moral judgment that I make in describing the situation. In the case I have just described the question is what can and should I do. It is not enough to say that I should not dump the waste down the drain. My problem is not the simple choice of answering yes or no to the question of whether I should follow the order. I need to figure out what to do about the supervisor's order. Shall I ignore it? Refuse it? Report it to someone? To someone else in the company? To the Environmental Protection Agency? Should I do something else altogether? Is there any place I can go for advice about my options in a situation like this? What are the likely consequences of using those channels (if they exist)? Where could I find out those consequences? Also, what do I do with that toxic waste, at least for the present? These are questions with important implications for fairness to others, including people in my organization, and for the health and safety of the public, as well as for my relationship with my supervisor and for my own position within the company. Answering the question of what to do will depend on a variety of factors. Learning what factors to consider and how to assess them are components of responsible professional behavior. The importance of finding good ways of acting (and not merely the ability to come up with the right answer to a "whether" question) may be brought home by reflecting on when you or I last poured paint solvents, petroleum wastes, acetone (nail polish remover), motor oil, garden pesticides, or other household hazardous waste down the drain (or put spent batteries in the trash). Was it only before we were in a position to know that these were environmental hazards? That is, was it only before we cotdd answer the "whether" question correctly? …