This paper examines the dynamics between scientific reason and cultural diversity by: a) analyzing the epistemic structure of 'universalism' as conceived by science, both theoretically and through its historical determination; and b) focusing on the situation of science in Africa, presenting its limits and challenges. It calls for a coconstruction of science at an international scale, which represents a key factor of development and cultural transmission, in particular, transmission of scientific scholarship.

Cosmopolitan critics attack the scope-limitation of justice of egalitarian liberal theorists to states. They treat justice as the production of a given set of outcomes for people regardless of location or relationship. However, in doing so they either ignore the relevant agent towards whom principles of justice are addressed or see the question of agency as a practical, derivative question, of a secondary character. This paper argues that a principle of justice without a clearly justified agent is not a genuine (...) principle at all. This is what writers like Rawls mean by the "subject" of justice (analogous to the grammatical subject of a sentence, i.e.,the agent). We should reflect on agents and why they would or would not justifiably carry certain burdens for others and what kind of benefits or goods they are able to secure. The answers to those questions explain why the idea of cosmopolitan global justice is incomplete, either requiring a global basic structural agency or not applying because no relevant agent is present that can create cooperative arrangements between individual persons across the globe. Other moral principles will still apply globally, but they will be distinct from those that apply to basic-structural agencies. This account is not a practice dependence account, as it bases the distinctness of moral and political principles on purely moral and value-based considerations. (shrink)

The central problem of social theory is 'structure and agency'. How do the objective features of society influence human agents? Determinism is not the answer, nor is conditioning as currently conceptualised. It accentuates the way structure and culture shape the social context in which individuals operate, but it neglects our personal capacity to define what we care about most and to establish a modus vivendi expressive of our concerns. Through inner dialogue, 'the internal conversation', individuals reflect upon their social situation (...) in the light of current concerns and projects. On the basis of a series of unique, in-depth interviews, Archer identifies three distinctive forms of internal conversation. These govern agents' responses to social conditioning, their individual patterns of social mobility and whether or not they contribute to social stability or change. Thus the internal conversation is seen as being the missing link between society and the individual, structure and agency. (shrink)

This chapter will address the axiological objection to cognitive enhancement, which is that the use of cognitive enhancers reduces the value of cognitive achievement. In a recent defense of cognitive enhancement, Carter and Pritchard (2019) utilize the extended mind hypothesis to argue that cognitive enhancers do not compromise knowledge acquisition. In this chapter, it will be demonstrated that the reliance on the extended mind hypothesis leaves some cognitive enhancers vulnerable to the axiological objection. To expand the scope of the argument, (...) it will be shown that criteria for cognitive integration are applicable even to enhancers that cause changes to cognition internal to the human organism. This chapter will begin with a description of several cognitive enhancers and with the identification of the type of cognitive process they purportedly improve. It will then be demonstrated that even when those improvements are internal, they need not affect cognitive character and do not compromise cognitive agency. (shrink)

The dominant view in the philosophical literature contends that internalized oppression, especially that experienced in virtue of one's womanhood, reduces one's sense of agency. Here, I extend these arguments and suggest a more nuanced account. In particular, I argue that internalized oppression can cause a person to conceive of herself as a deviant agent as well as a reduced one. This self-conception is also damaging to one's moral identity and creates challenges that are not captured by merely analyzing a reduced (...) sense of agency. To help illustrate this claim, I consider experiences of people of color who internalize stereotypes regarding criminality and moral deviance. With these examples in mind, I show that internalized prejudices regarding criminality can cause people of color to view themselves as outlaws in the moral community, that is, as wrongdoers. This conclusion helps give voice to some of the challenges that women of color who experience multiple sorts of internalized prejudices often face. To conclude, I discuss one strategy for empowerment that women of color have used when confronted with multiple forms of internalized oppression. (shrink)

This book is the first in-depth study of the concepts of agency and structure in the context of international relations and politics. It is an important contribution, examing the ways in which explanations of social phenomenon integrate and account for the interrelationship between agency and structure.

Chinese international students constitute the largest proportion of overseas students in several English-speaking countries such as the UK and New Zealand. Little research has been done concerning those undertaking doctoral study. This qualitative study explores how Chinese overseas doctoral students become involved in church communities and how some of them convert to Christianity in New Zealand. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine Chinese doctoral students from different social backgrounds. Five of these reported varying degrees of interest in and commitment (...) to Christianity. Their narratives revealed that their conversion was a gradual and complex process as a result of the interplay between habitus, agency and contextual factors. These findings from a New Zealand context provide insights into non-academic experience of Chinese international students, particularly their religious experience. (shrink)

Constructive engagement in international business practice is defined as purpose-driven behavior in which economic contributions by the foreign investor also advance social progress in the host country. This paper distinguishes between amoral and moral social agency, and proposes a model of principled constructive engagement that describes a principled constructive engagement regime enacted in a disciplined, morally-directed manner.

Some have argued that the UN or the Security Council can exercise agency on behalf of IS, but in view of the "underinstitutionalization" of IS in the UN, groups of states may authorize themselves to act on the behalf of IS as "coalitions of the willing.".

The objective of the paper is to examine the role of the two donor agencies, the IMF and the World Bank in the formulation of social welfare policies in the post-independence Sri Lanka. The ideologies of the two major parties in Sri Lanka, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), became the determining factor in the formulation of social welfare policies before 1977. In this context, the IMF and the World Bank played two different (...) roles before 1977. Meanwhile, the ideological gap existed between the two major parties began to disappear after 1977 with the introduction of liberalized economic policies. The IMF and the World Bank played an important role during the post-1977 period. There was evidence that these funding bodies influenced in the formulation of social welfare programmes under the two major parties. The guideline recommended by these two organizations adversely affected the subsidized rice ration, one of the major welfare programmes, in the country. (shrink)

The way many human rights advocates frame the international norm against child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM) has shifted in the past decade. While CEFM has historically been framed as driven by poverty and underdevelopment, advocates have more recently discussed the problem with a feminist sexuality frame. What leads advocates to change their framing about an international norm? We build an argument that stresses how (a) the nature of the frame, (b) the characteristics of the advocates, and (c) (...) the characteristics of the discursive environment interact to determine whether and to what extent advocates will adopt an alternative frame. We use a multi-methods approach (machine-learning text analysis, process tracing, and interviews) to examine the process of frame adoption around an international norm. Our theoretical understanding of international norms requires a better grasp on the role of framing, especially framing among the very norm entrepreneurs that are critical to international norm diffusion. (shrink)

Agency without Actors? New Approaches to collective Action is rethinking a key issue in social theory and research: the question of agency. The history of sociological thought is deeply intertwined with the discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations. In most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact. Consequently the book asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in what different ways? The volume offers a critical state-of-the-art debate (...) of internationally and nationally leading scholars within Sociology, Social Anthropology and STS on agency (Latour, Law, Michael, Rammert etc.). It fosters the productive exchange of empirical settings and theoretical views by outlining a wide range of novel accounts that link human and non-human agency. It tries to understand social-technical, political and environmental networks as different forms of agency that produce discrete and identifiable entities like humans, animals, technical artifacts. It also asks how different types of (often conflicting) agency and agents actors are distinguished in practice, how they are maintained and how they interfere with each other. (shrink)

International Journal of Machine Consciousness, Volume 06, Issue 02, Page 141-161, December 2014. This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As before, we take moral agency to be that condition in which an agent can appropriately be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. We set a number of stringent conditions on moral agency. (...) A moral agent must be embedded in a cultural and specifically moral context and embodied in a suitable physical form. It must be, in some substantive sense, alive. It must exhibit self-conscious awareness. It must exhibit sophisticated conceptual abilities, going well beyond what the likely majority of conceptual agents possess: not least that it must possess a well-developed moral space of reasons. Finally, it must be able to communicate its moral agency through some system of signs: A "private" moral world is not enough. After reviewing these conditions and pouring cold water on recent claims for having achieved "minimal" machine consciousness, we turn our attention to a number of existing and, in some cases, commonplace artifacts that lack moral agency yet nevertheless require one to take a moral stance toward them, as if they were moral agents. Finally, we address another class of agents raising a related set of issues: autonomous military robots. (shrink)

This book represents a unique endeavor to elucidate the story of Kosovo's unilateral quest for statehood. It is an inquiry into the international legal aspects and processes that shaped and surrounded the creation of the state of Kosovo. Being created outside the post-colonial context, Kosovo offers a unique yet controversial example of state emergence both in the theory and practice of creation of states. Accordingly, the book investigates the legal pathways, strategies, developments and policy positions of international (...) class='Hi'>agencies/actors and regional players (in particular the EU) that helped Kosovo to establish its independence and gradually acquire statehood. Although contested, Kosovo, and its quest for statehood, represents a unique example of successful unilateral secession. The book therefore explores and analyses patterns of state formation and nation-building in Kosovo, and its transition to democracy. It presents a three-level assessment. First, seen from a historical perspective, the book examines the validity of the right of Kosovar-Albanians to self-determination and remedial secession. Second, from a legal positivist perspective, it scrutinizes all of the legalist arguments that support Kosovo's right to statehood, and claims that both traditional and legality-based criteria for statehood remain insufficient to determine whether Kosovo has achieved statehood. Third, from a post-factum perspective, the book analyzes the scope and extent to which the internationally blended element was decisive in Kosovo's state-formation and state-building processes. It explains how the EU's involvement as an 'internationally blended element' in Kosovo's efforts to achieve statehood was instrumental and played a crucial role in shaping the emerging state. In particular, the book elaborates on how the EU was able to streamline its mode of intervention in the context of state-building and reform. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic, mind-independent grounding of proper function and natural norms. The attribution of perspectives to biological systems is intended to be neither metaphorical (...) nor anthropomorphic: I do not mean to imply that such systems thereby must possess agency, cognition, intentions, concepts, or mental or psychological states. Instead, such systems provide the grounding for norms of performance when they internally enforce their own standard of (i.e., their own perspective on) what constitutes proper functioning or malfunctioning. By operating with a fixed, determinate level of generality, such systems provide the basis for an account of proper function that is immune to generality problems. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the structure of our temporally extended agency. We do not have the power to act directly at a distance, so any of our temporally extended projects must be sustained over its temporal unfolding by momentary actions. We need both the capacity to organize these momentary steps in light of a synoptic overview of the extended activity as a whole and to sustain our motivation to continue to pursue the extended activity. Hence, the distinctive mode in which we (...) act over time is that of ’planning agency,’ which requires a form of temporal identification that goes beyond mere psychological continuity. I then discuss the differences in internal structure between merely continuous and integrated activities, and between telic and atelic ones. I provide a taxonomy of the different kinds of temporal goods and values and how these structures might bear on the risk of crisis of meaning in our temporal existence. I then touch briefly on the issue of how our mortality might make a difference to the structure of what we find valuable and how it relates to the temporal features of our agency. In the closing section, I discuss the effects of the moving temporal location of the agent (with her local executive powers) relative to her extended pursuits, including the asymmetries generated by the distinction between past and future stages of the activity and the moving horizon of what the agent can anticipate and (indirectly) control. (shrink)

Any foreign manufacturer desiring to market its products in Jordan has several courses open to it. The foreign manufacturer could establish a branch or wholly-owned subsidiary in Jordan or enter into a licensing or joint venture agreement with a company doing business in Jordan. If it wants a less significant presence, however, it is left with the alternative of having a local commercial agent market and sells its products. -/- The purpose of this article is to study certain aspects-exclusivity and (...) termination- of commercial agency according to the Jordanian law. The article is divided into four sections. Section two explains the general rules governing commercial agency in Jordan. Section three analyzes exclusivity of commercial agents. This section introduces the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the basic instrument covering trade in services, and analyses the current commercial agencies regulation in Jordan and its relation to articles VIII and IX of GATS. Also, section two explores Jordan schedule of specific commitments under the GATS in order to shed light on the extent and limit of its obligations with regard to commercial agents. Section four discusses agency termination. Finally, the article concludes by summarizing the main. (shrink)

Agency is the human capacity to freely choose one’s thoughts, motivations and actions without undue internal or external influences; it is distinguished from decisional capacity. Four well-known conditions that can deeply affect agency are depression, demoralization, existential distress, and family dysfunction. The study reviews how they may diminish agency in persons whose circumstances may lead them to consider or request euthanasia or assisted suicide. Since agency has been a relatively neglected dimension of autonomous choice at the end of life, it (...) is argued that to respect the autonomy of individuals, it is essential to establish their agency. (shrink)

This is the latest volume in the Workshops in Computing series and contains papers to be presented at the Third International Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science (DEON '96) to be held in Sesimbra, Portugal 11 - 13 January 1996. It contains a variety of contributions covering the relationship between deontic logics, logics of action and normative systems (i.e. systems of or about interacting agents whose behaviour is subject to ideal constraints that may not always be fulfilled in (...) practice). The papers range from the theoretical studies of the logical and conceptual tools needed, to studies of various applications. The resulting volume will be of interest to researchers working in a variety of fields from philosophy, logic and legal theory, through to artificial intelligence and computer/management sciences. (shrink)

For several decades, there has been a debate in the philosophical literature concerning whether those of us who live in developed countries are morally required to give some of our money to aid agencies. Many contributors to this debate have apparently taken it that one may simply assume that the effects of the work such agencies do are overwhelmingly positive. If one turns to the literature on such agencies that has emerged in recent decades, however, one finds (...) a number of concerns about such agencies and the work they do that put that assumption in serious doubt. This situation raises a number of pressing questions, many of which have received little or no attention from philosophers. After articulating a number of those questions, I focus mainly on what I call the ‘Epistemic Question (for potential contributors to aid agencies)’: How can those of us who are not experts in international aid arrive at an estimate concerning the effects of the work aid agencies do that we have at least some good reason to believe accurate? (shrink)

On the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), internal proper parts of an agent such as desires and intentions are causally responsible for actions. CTA has increasingly come under attack for its alleged failure to account for agency. A recent version of this criticism due to François Schroeter proposes that CTA cannot provide an adequate account of either the executive control or the autonomous control involved in full-fledged agency. Schroeter offers as an alternative a revised understanding of the proper role of (...) consciousness in agency. In this paper we criticize Schroeter’s analysis of the type of consciousness involved in executive control and examine the way in which the conscious self allegedly intervenes in action. We argue that Schroeter’s proposal should not be preferred over recent versions of CTA. (shrink)

Theories of collective intentionality and theories of relational autonomy share a common interest in analyzing the social dynamics of agency. However, whereas theories of collective intentionality conceive of social groups primarily as intentional and voluntarily willed, theories of relational autonomy claim that autonomous agency is both scaffolded and constrained by social forces and structures, including the constraints imposed by nonvoluntary group membership. The question raised by this difference in view is whether social theorizing that overlooks the effects of nonvoluntary social (...) group membership on individual and joint agency overlooks crucial aspects of the social dynamics of agency. To explore this question, this article first evaluates Michael Bratman's planning analysis of individual agency from the perspective of relational autonomy theory and compares it with a narrative self‐constitution account of temporally extended agency. It then evaluates Bratman's analysis of shared agency and discusses Shaun Gallagher and Deborah Tollefsen's concept of we‐narratives, which extends the notion of narrative construction to shared agency. Overall, the argument aims to show that if we are interested in understanding the social dynamics of agency, it is critical to attend to the way that agents exercise their intentional agency in relation to internalized and external social constraints. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to the role of the IAEA in shaping radiation dosimetry practices, instrumentation, and standards in the late 1950s and 1960s. It traces the beginnings of the IAEA’s radiation dose intercomparison program which targeted all member states and involved the WHO so as to standardize dosimetry on a global level. To standardize dosimetric measurement methods, techniques, and instruments, however, one had to devise a method of comparing absorbed dose measurements in one laboratory with those performed in others (...) with a high degree of accuracy. In 1964 the IAEA thus started to build up what I call the “global experiment,” an intercomparison of radiation doses with participating laboratories from many of its member states. To carry out the process of worldwide standardization in radiation dosimetry, I argue, an organization with the diplomatic power and global reach of the IAEA was absolutely necessary. Thus, “global experiment” indicates a novel understanding of the experimental process. What counts as an experiment became governed by a process that was designed and strictly regulated by an international organization; it took place simultaneously in several laboratories across the globe, while experimental data became centrally owned and alienated from those that produced it. (shrink)

Narrative views of agency and identity arise in opposition to reductionism in both domains. While reductionists understand both identity and agency in terms of their components, narrativists respond that life and action are both constituted by narratives, and since the components of a narrative gain their meaning from the whole, life and action not only incorporate their constituent parts but also shape them. I first lay out the difficulties with treating narrative as constitutive of metaphysical identity and turn to its (...) function in practical identity. I then explore the ways narrative shapes our agency—by tapping into our motivational structures, providing an understanding of the social background within which our agency operates, guiding our agency through an understanding of our histories and aspirations, providing the links that structure actions internally, and allowing us to change the meaning of our pasts. I suggest that putting these functions of narrative together may allow us to genuinely shape our past motivational structures through our actions. Finally, if life has the form of a narrative, it may seem as if mortality is necessary for our lives and their contents to be meaningful: a narrative, it might seem, relies on the ending for its meaning. If so, an immortal life would be meaningless. I examine the possibility that even an immortal life may draw meaning from local narratives that constitute projects within such a life, while arguing that, to the contrary, narrative may be a tool exclusively adapted to mortal lives. (shrink)

Enhancing agency—or in a more colloquial term, promoting empowerment—is typically viewed as an unquestioned good. International organisations promote the empowerment of girls and other vulnerable groups around the world. Domestically, democracies rely for their legitimacy on the idea that citizens have agency; hence, civic educators aim to strengthen student ‘voice’ and their inclination to participate. This is all for good reason, as justice does depend in part on the agency of individuals and oppressed groups. But a focus on individual (...) or even collective agency has a dark side. For if people feel that they can change the world, then they also often feel that they should. This sense of responsibility to use one's agency at all times can encourage an instrumental relationship to others and make it difficult to learn receptively, particularly from people with whom we disagree, and especially in moments of crisis. (shrink)

I defend two main theses. First, I argue that Aristotle’s account of voluntary action focuses on the conditions under which one is the cause of one’s actions in virtue of being (qua) the individual one is. Aristotle contrasts voluntary action not only with involuntary action but also with cases in which one acts (or does something) due to one’s nature (for example, in virtue of being a member of a certain species) rather than due to one’s own desires (i.e. qua (...) individual). An action can be attributed to one qua individual in two distinct ways depending on whether one is a rational or a non-rational animal. One is responsible for one’s action in both cases, but only in the former case is one also responsible for being the sort of individual that performs it. Aristotle also distinguishes two ways in which an action can be compelled while still being an action of the agent. In the first case, one is compelled by (physically) external forces or circumstances to act against one’s internal impulse. In the second case, one is compelled to act on (internal) impulses that are fixed by one’s nature against one’s own individual impulse. This latter kind of compelled action is only possible in the case of rational agents. Secondly, I argue that Aristotle’s conception of what it is to be a cause of an action inevitably brings in certain normative features which support evaluative judgments and the practice of praise and blame. On Aristotle’s view, any goal-directed behavior that is properly attributable to an individual is (normally) subject to standards that pertain to behavior of that sort. At the most basic level, these standards establish what counts as a successful realization of the goal that one aims at. Thus even in the case of non-rational animals (or children), one can judge the success of what they are doing and encourage (or discourage) similar behavior by praise or blame. These standards are applicable to one’s conduct simply insofar as one is the controlling origin (or efficient cause) of one’s action qua individual. In the case of rational agents the practice of praise and blame can involve a further normative layer since they can be praised or blamed not only for acting in a certain way so as to encourage or discourage them with a view to the future, but also for being – and having become – individuals of a certain sort. Nevertheless, the applicability of such evaluative judgments and of praise and blame is still warranted by one’s being the controlling origin of one’s actions qua the individual one is (in this case, qua rational individual). (shrink)

In this essay, I describe and explain the standard accounts of agency, natural agency, artificial agency, and moral agency, as well as articulate what are widely taken to be the criteria for moral agency, supporting the contention that this is the standard account with citations from such widely used and respected professional resources as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I then flesh out the implications of some of these well-settled theories (...) with respect to the prerequisites that an ICT must satisfy in order to count as a moral agent accountable for its behavior. I argue that each of the various elements of the necessary conditions for moral agency presupposes consciousness, i.e., the capacity for inner subjective experience like that of pain or, as Nagel puts it, the possession of an internal something-of-which-it is-is-to-be-like. I ultimately conclude that the issue of whether artificial moral agency is possible depends on the issue of whether it is possible for ICTs to be conscious. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to explain a type of wrong that arises when agents obscure responsibility for their actions. Call it “agency laundering.” The second is to use the concept of agency laundering to understand the underlying moral issues in a number of recent cases involving algorithmic decision systems. From the Proceedings of the 14th International Conference, iConference 2019, Washington D.C., March 31-April 3, 2019.

The thought that children should be given greater opportunity to participate meaningfully in affairs which concern them and to show their capacity for reasonable measured thoughts and choices has been displayed by many others (COHEN, 1980; FARSON, 1974; KENNEDY, 1992). It has also been suggested than in order to ensure that we are fair to all individuals, regardless of their age, that our primary consideration should be the capacity for decision making and agency. However, whether or not children are indeed (...) capable of this kind of decision-making and developed agency is greatly contested (most notably perhaps by Plato and Aristotle), and so too are the reasons for this. In what follows then, I will examine the ways in which children may be encouraged to gain this kind of agency, and what our role in facilitating this may be. Moreover, I will show that while difficult, it is possible to approach ‘teaching’ young people to become autonomous agents in ways that do not interfere with their agency, either presently or in a future-oriented sense. Establishing this is essential as in order to make authentic choices, and allow for holding individuals responsible for their choices, they must be a result of the deliberation of their own choices, and not some other influence, be that external or internal. Finally, in relation to educative aims as a whole, I will follow Seneca’s statement above: that education should go beyond inculcating only learning and practises that are of immediate use to the institutions in which they are learned. (shrink)

There is agency in all we do: thinking, doing, or making. We invent a tune, play, or use it to celebrate an occasion. Or we make a conceptual leap and ask more abstract questions about the conditions for agency. They include autonomy and self-appraisal, each contested by arguments immersing us in circumstances we don’t control. But can it be true we that have no personal responsibility for all we think and do? Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will proposes that deliberation, (...) choice, and free will emerged within the evolutionary history of animals with a physical advantage: organisms having cell walls or exoskeletons had an internal space within which to protect themselves from external threats or encounters. This defense was both structural and active: such organisms could ignore intrusions or inhibit risky behavior. Their capacities evolved with time: inhibition became the power to deliberate and choose the manner of one’s responses. Hence the ability of humans and some other animals to determine their reactions to problematic situations or to information that alters values and choices. This is free will as a material power, not as the conclusion to a conceptual argument. Having it makes us morally responsible for much we do. It prefigures moral identity. Closely argued but plainly written, Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will speaks for autonomy and responsibility when both are eclipsed by ideas that embed us in history or tradition. Our sense of moral choice and freedom is accurate. We are not altogether the creatures of our circumstances. (shrink)

Proxy agency is the capacity of individuals and groups to act for other individuals or groups in specific social transactions. For example, a legal team acts as a proxy for a client in a courtroom, or the Prime Minister acts as a proxy for the UK Government when attending international meetings, etc. Although a very common social phenomenon, it has not yet received enough philosophical treatment. Currently, the most developed account of this capacity is Ludwig’s proxy agency in collective (...) action. Yet, his account relies on a deflationary, we-content approach to collective intentionality (á la Bratman). In this chapter, I argue that this approach is far too weak to explain proxy agency in institutional contexts—where the individuals and groups formally authorised to perform rule-guided group activities for the principal hold a strong, non-conditional we-commitment. In order to elucidate this feature, I provide an account of proxy agency based on a more robust, we-mode approach to collective intentionality (á la Tuomela). I suggest with this that, for institutional proxy agency to operate as expected, there must be appropriate conditions of sociality in place—which ultimately coheres with the larger project developed by Tuomela on social ontology. (shrink)

I examine the role moral reasons play in the Mengzi and their relationship to Mengzi's conception of wisdom. Some commentators have argued that agency in early Chinese thought is best characterized as performance based rather than deliberation based. I propose that Mengzi's conception of agency is both performative and deliberative because he understands wisdom as a sort of expert decision making. Consequently, Mengzi relies on moral reasons of two sorts. First, duan-reasons are reasons to act so as to overcome internal (...) obstacles to action and, second, renyi-reasons are reasons to act so as to achieve a goal that constitutes moral success. (shrink)

Let us suppose that we accept that humans can be correctly characterized as agents. Let us further presume that this capacity contrasts with most non-human animals. Thus, since agency is what uniquely constitutes what it is to be human, it must be of supreme importance. If these claims have any merit, it would seem to follow that, if agency can be nurtured through education, then it is an overarching moral imperative that educational initiatives be undertaken to do that. In this (...) paper, it will be argued that agency can indeed be enhanced, and that the worldwide educational initiative called Philosophy for Children, and others like it, are in a unique position to do just that, and, therefore, that P4C deserves our praise and support; while denigrations of such efforts for not being “real philosophy” ought to be thoroughly renounced. (shrink)

Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinize the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognize that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at the broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group. The book brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances (...) on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. (shrink)

A measure of good and bad is internal to something falling under it when that thing falls under the measure in virtue of what it is. The concept of an internal standard has broad application. Compare the external breed standards arbitrarily imposed at a dog show with the internal standards of health at work in the veterinarian's office. This paper is about practical standards, measures of acting well and badly, and so measures deployed in deliberation and choice. More specifically, it (...) is about the attempt to explain the unconditional validity of certain norms (say, of justice and prudence) by showing them to be internal to our agency and the causality it involves. This is constitutivism. Its most prominent incarnations share a set of assumptions about the nature of agency and our knowledge of it: conceptualism, formalism and absolutism. This essay investigates the merits and viability of rejecting all of them while still seeking the ground of practical normativity in what we are, in our fundamental activity. (shrink)

In this article I argue that insanity defences such as M’Nagten should be abolished in favour of a defence of failed agency. It is not insanity per se, or any other empirical condition, which constitutes the moral reason for exculpation. Rather, we should first recognize the conditions for being a responsible moral agent. These include some capacity to direct and control one’s behavior, a non-delusional component, and the capacity to recognize that one’s behavior is expressive of what they have reason (...) to be doing. When either of these fail in a case involving alleged criminal behavior the defence of failed agency may be appealed to. There may be many causes, including and besides insanity, that give rise to use of the defence of failed agency. (shrink)

This book explores and critically reflects on the theory and practice of political agency in contemporary global politics. In light of the changing relationship between the state, the market and the society, it seeks to map both theoretically and empirically contemporary forms of global political agency. This book reflects on the theory and practice of political agency in contemporary global politics. More specifically, it empirically analyses a range of different forms of political agency and explores their significance for understanding and (...) enacting global politics. Reflecting the efforts of scholars from a variety of disciplines from political theory and Sociology to Geography and International Relations, it brings into conversation a wide spectrum of theoretical approaches including Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism and historical institutionalism. The contributors compare a range of forms of political agency; exploring their significance for the theory and practice of global politics; and reflect on the tensions and synergies generated by recent efforts to conceptualise them.Demonstrating an innovative and interdisciplinary approach Contemporary Political Agency will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, sociology, political economy and political theory. (shrink)

Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000) describes the striving mechanism as a mode of routine change driven by successful organizational routines. Striving describes a process by which organization members gain a better understanding of the ideals undergirding their actions. In turn, this insight drives changes within routines. In this paper, I argue that the rational actor model, especially as articulated in Donald Davidson’s (1963) theory of action, is unable to account for the striving mechanism of endogenous routine change identified by (...) Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000). Drawing upon Brewer’s (2011) criticisms of propositional theories of desire, the account of meta-language intentional attitudes developed by List and Pettit (2011), and MacIntyre’s (2007) theory of social practices, I introduce an expanded framework for conceptualizing agency at the individual level, and aggregation at the organization level, that better accounts for the striving mechanism as a process of endogenous routine change. (shrink)