I study a market model in which profit-maximizing firms compete in multidimensional pricing strategies over a consumer, who is limited in his ability to grasp such complicated objects and therefore uses a sampling procedure to evaluate them. Firms respond to increased competition with an increased effort to obfuscate, rather than with more competitive pricing. As a result, consumer welfare is not enhanced and may even deteriorate. Specifically, when firms control both the price and the quality of each dimension, and (...) there are diminishing returns to quality, increased competition implies an efficiency loss which is entirely borne by consumers. KEYWORDS. Bounded rationality, industrial organization, multi-dimensional pricing, law of small numbers, market exploitation, obfuscation. (shrink)

How to understand the "entrepreneurial university"? Three hundred years of popularised economic/philosophical thought, in which conflict/competition has been presented as progressive; lacking a normative context, this becomes warlike. Society presented as a "macro-market", linking people with money and media and frowning on political justice, leads to economism (economic totalitarianism). This instrumentalises universities and motivates bookkeeping rationality and goal rationality; the maximisation thesis guides managerial aims. Scholarship becomes industrialised and leadership managerialised. Empty concepts of "quality" and "competitiveness" become audit measures (...) of "excellence"; this is standardised scholarship, serving hedonistic leisure class values and neglecting perspectivised creative, critical involvement with the suffering world. (shrink)

How to understand the "entrepreneurial university"? Three hundred years of popularised economic/philosophical thought, in which conflict/competition has been presented as progressive; lacking a normative context, this becomes warlike. Society presented as a "macro-market", linking people with money and media and frowning on political justice, leads to economism (economic totalitarianism). This instrumentalises universities and motivates bookkeeping rationality and goal rationality; the maximisation thesis guides managerial aims. Scholarship becomes industrialised and leadership managerialised. Empty concepts of "quality" and "competitiveness" become audit measures (...) of "excellence"; this is standardised scholarship, serving hedonistic leisure class values and neglecting perspectivised creative, critical involvement with the suffering world. (shrink)

Errol Lord explores the boundaries of epistemic normativity. He argues that we can understand these better by thinking about which mental states are competitors in rationality’s competition. He argues that belief, disbelief, and two kinds of suspension of judgment are competitors. Lord shows that there are non-evidential reasons for suspension of judgment. One upshot is an independent motivation for a certain sort of pragmatist view of epistemic rationality.

This paper studies the dynamic characteristics of triopoly models that are constructed based on a 3-dimensional Cobb–Douglas utility function. The paper presents two parts. The first part introduces a competition among three rational firms on which their prices are isoelastic functions. The competition is described by a 3-dimensional discrete dynamical system. We examine the impact of rationality on the system’s steady state point. Studying the stability/instability of this point, which is Nash equilibrium and is unique in those (...) models, is illustrated. Numerically, we give some global analysis of Nash point and its stability. The second part deals with heterogeneous scenarios. It consists of two different models. In the first model, we assume that one competitor adopts the local monopolistic approximation mechanism while the other opponents are rational. The second model assumes two heterogeneous players with LMA mechanism against one rational firm. Studies show that the stability of NE point of those models is not guaranteed. Furthermore, simulation shows that when firms behave rational with symmetric costs, the stability of NE point is achievable. (shrink)

Despite the reality of intersex individuals whose biological markers do not necessarily all point towards a traditional binary understanding of either male or female, the vast majority of sports divide competition into categories based on a binary notion of biological sex and develop policies and regulations to police the divide. In so doing, sports governing bodies (SGBs) adopt an imperfect model of biological sex in order to serve their particular purposes, which, typically, will include protecting the fundamental sporting value (...) of fair competition. Yet, one potential consequence of enforcing such an approach would seem to be the exclusion or marginalization of individuals whose biological development does not fit within the binary model, whether due to genetics or through a choice to undergo medical intervention to better represent a chosen gender identity. Any such exclusion or marginalization will inevitably tend to undermine another fundamental value of sport, that of inclusivity. In the context of those with differences of sex development, SGBs appear to be faced with a difficult problem: dealing with a conflict between two fundamental values of sport. Different approaches to this problem have been suggested, with some academics proposing that sports organisations, in general, ought to prioritise fairness above, while others suggest the need to ‘balance’ competing values or even to prioritise inclusion over fairness. However, it is argued that any of these approaches are, in principle, justifiable as any sport should be free to prioritise or balance its own values. What seems more important for any SGB is the need for a rational and transparent justification of regulations that pursue fair competition at the expense of inclusivity. Furthermore, where fair competition and inclusivity are fundamental values, any such justification would seem to demand adherence to some basic norms. First, the regulations should be built on (and articulate) a consistent and principled basis of what ‘fair competition’ means in a particular sport. Second, any regulations should only exclude or restrict participation to the minimum degree necessary to achieve the sense of fair competition so articulated. Third, SGBs should be transparent about what their values are and where their priorities lie so that participants and other stakeholders are able to make an informed choice as to whether they wish to participate in, support, or be associated with a particular sport. With reference to the adoption of the Eligibility Regulations for Athletes with Differences of Sex Development (the ‘DSD Regulations’) by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF), this article seeks to evaluate whether the approach of the IAAF satisfied these basic requirements. (shrink)

Orthodox economics operates within a hypothesized world of perfect competition in which perfect consumers and firms act to bring about supposedly optimal outcomes. The discrepancies between this model and the reality it claims to address are then attributed to particular imperfections in reality itself. Most heterodox economists seize on this fact and insist that the world is characterized by imperfect competition. But this only ties them to the notion of perfect competition, which remains as their point of (...) departure and base of comparison. There is no imperfection without perfection. In Capitalism, Anwar Shaikh takes a different approach. He demonstrates that most of the central propositions of economic analysis can be derived without any reference to standard devices such as hyperrationality, optimization, perfect competition, perfect information, representative agents, or so-called rational expectations. This perspective allows him to look afresh at virtually all the elements of economic analysis: the laws of demand and supply, the determination of wage and profit rates, technological change, relative prices, interest rates, bond and equity prices, exchange rates, terms and balance of trade, growth, unemployment, inflation, and long booms culminating in recurrent general crises. In every case, Shaikh's innovative theory is applied to modern empirical patterns and contrasted with neoclassical, Keynesian, and Post-Keynesian approaches to the same issues. Shaikh's object of analysis is the economics of capitalism, and he explores the subject in this expansive light. This is how the classical economists, as well as Keynes and Kalecki, approached the issue. Anyone interested in capitalism and economics in general can gain a wealth of knowledge from this ground-breaking text. (shrink)

Economic competition threatens equity in the delivery of health care. This essay examines four of the various ways in which it does that: the reduction of charity care, increased patient cost-sharing, "cream-skimming" of healthy subscribers, and lack of information to patients about rationed care that is not prescribed. In all four cases, society must guard against distinct inequities and injustices, but also in all four, either the particular problem is not inherent in competition or, though inherent, it is (...) not irremediable. Competition therefore cannot be finally morally accepted or rejected as an economic structure for delivering health care without knowing what among a wide range of supplementary things our society is actually going to do with it. Keywords: for-profit medicine, competition, patient-physician relationship, informed consent CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Ultimate is a competitive team sport that is played, even at the highest level of competition, without external referees. The key to Ultimate as a self-refereed sport is the so-called ‘Spirit of the Game’. As this paper aims to show, the Spirit of the Game closely resembles Habermas’s theory of communicative action. This suggests that Habermas’s theory might be used to spell out the philosophical presuppositions of the Spirit of the Game. Most importantly, the requirements for players to serve (...) as referees of their own game specified in the ‘Rules of Ultimate’ turn out to be reformulation of the four validity claims of communicative action. Moreover, the Spirit of the Game can be interpreted as aiming towards facilitating real-life decision-making procedures that resemble as much as possible Habermas’s concept of an ideal speech situation. On the other hand, Ultimate might serve as a case study for exploring how Habermas’s idea of rational deliberation works in the practice of a competitive sporting environment. Most importantly, it makes manifest that self-refereeing is a trust-based system. This suggests that communicative rationality can only unfold its power—the unforced force of the better argument—within a context in which participants trust that everyone participates in good faith towards the common goal of finding the best decision. Hence, investigating the case of Ultimate allows us to draw broader conclusions about the requirements for rational deliberation to work in practice. (shrink)

This paper argues that the question of the compatibility between competition and solidarity needs to be clarified by distinguishing a variety of possible normative frameworks. Using a core metaphor of a race between runners hired by stadiums, I develop and discuss three ethical frameworks: the emergentist perspective, which considers that competition is in itself the locus of solidarity; the social-democratic perspective, which views solidarity as the main counterweight to the abrasive effects of competition – without, however, calling (...) into question the system that generates this competition; and the oppositional perspective, which considers solidarity as an implication of the desire to assist the victims of asymmetrical social power, unfairly distributed through competition, and therefore sees ‘genuine’ solidarity as a means to subvert competitive logic itself. In each case, I deconstruct the fundamental ‘axioms’ that underlie the approach, and I gradually demonstrate why there are compelling ethical arguments for a radical subversion of the logic of competition within a framework of ‘genuine’ solidarity. Thus, while the social-democratic perspective trumps the emergentist perspective, it is in turn trumped by the oppositional perspective. The basic idea is that competition which is statically fair, tends to become dynamically unfair, revealing a deep-lying source of structural alienation. This requires a renewed view of the nature of agents’ rationality, however, and an abandonment of some cherished beliefs and prejudices concerning the alleged fairness of competition in market economies. (shrink)

The project of understanding rationality in non-human animals faces a number of conceptual and methodological difficulties. The present chapter defends the view that it is counterproductive to rely on the human folk psychological idiom in animal cognition studies. Instead, it approaches the subject on the basis of dynamic- evolutionary considerations. Concepts from control theory can be used to frame the problem in the most general terms. The specific selective pressures exerted on agents endowed with information-processing capacities are analysed. It is (...) hypothesized that metacognition offers an evolutionary stable response to the various demands of the internal and external flows of information in a competitive environment. Metacognition provides a form of process-reflexivity that can, but does not have to be redeployed through metarepresentations. Finally the claim that rationality so conceived involves normativity is discussed. (shrink)

Behaviorism is consistent with the assumptions of perfect competition, with the homo economicus model, and with a form of ethics that enshrines market-based notions of utility, justice, and rights and encourages rational maximizing. Economics and business courses foster this deficient form of ethics, assuming an overriding desire for money, which, according to MacIntyre and Aristotle, crowds out the associative virtues. These beliefs, often associated with Taylor and Friedman, lead to such practices as incentive compensation, which would be effective (...) only if employees were homines economici and thus rational in the sense of knowing how to satisfy whatever desires they have. Against Davidson’s view that psychology cannot be a natural science, Aristotle believes that there can be a teleological, if not exact, science of behavior. Aristotle believes that emotions and objectives may be rational or irrational. But rationality—phronesis, practical wisdom—is not a matter of applying algorithms. Doris questions whether character generates the first premises of an agent’s practical syllogisms, while Haidt has argued that we often act on emotions rather than on the basis of the reasons that we claim motivate us. Aristotle agrees that many people are not virtuous and that weakness of the will is a common occurrence, and he agrees that emotion drives actions. But if you are virtuous, your emotions and desires support your rationality. Aristotle gives us reason to reject the notion that people are homines economici and to treat them as rational deliberators, in part by creating an appropriate culture. The claim that it is in the nature of human beings to deliberate rationally is in part aspirational, but also in part scientific—in Aristotle’s modest sense. (shrink)

Philosophical tradition demands rational reflection as a condition for genuine moral acts. But the grounds for that requirement are untenable, and when the requirement is dropped morality comes into clearer view as a naturally developing phenomenon that is not confined to human beings and does not require higher-level rational reflective processes. Rational consideration of rules and duties can enhance and extend moral behavior, but rationality is not necessary for morality and (contrary to the Kantian tradition represented by (...) Thomas Nagel) morality cannot transcend its biological roots. Recognizing this helps forge a complementary rather than competitive relation between feminist care-based ethics and rationalistic duty-based ethics. (shrink)

The thesis of the present volume is critical and dual. (1) Present day philosophy of man and sciences of man suffer from the Greek mis taken polarization of everything human into nature and convention which is (allegedly) good and evil, which is (allegedly) truth and fal sity, which is (allegedly) rationality and irrationality, to wit, the polar ization of all fields of inquiry, the natural and social sciences, as well as ethics and all technology, whether natural or social, into the (...) totally positive and the totally negative. (2) Almost all philosophy and sci ences of man share the erroneous work ethic which is the myth of man's evil nature - the myth of the beast in man, the doctrine of original sin. To mediate or to compromise between the first view of human nature as good with the second view of it as evil, sociologists have devised a modified utilitarianism with deferred gratification so called, and the theory of the evil of artificial competition (capitalist and socialist alike) and of keeping up with the Joneses. Now, the mediation is not necessary. For, the polarization makes for abstract errors which are simplistic views of rationality, such as reductionism and positivism of all sorts, as well as for concrete errors, such as the disposition to condemn repeatedly those human weaknesses which are inevitable, namely man's inability to be perfectly rational, avoid all error, etc. , thus setting man against himself as all too wicked. (shrink)

This paper presents the 'rationality-of-ends/market-structure grid'. With this grid, the article contrasts, in economic terms, different approaches to business ethics and addresses the question how far and what type of business ethics is feasible. Four basic scenarios for business ethics are outlined that imply different conceptualizations of business ethics. The grid interrelates a rationality-of-ends dimension with a market-structure dimension. The rationality-of-ends dimension ranges from opportunism and self-interested egoism to self-interested altruism and ultimately to authentic altruism. The market-structure dimension ranges from (...) perfect competition/no information problems/perfectly dispersed market power to imperfect competition/high information problems/concentrated power. Rather than presenting economic, legal, ethical and discretionary issues in a hierarchical fashion, the grid interrelates these issues. Conclusions are spelled out regarding the empirical observance of business ethics and the programmatic, 'theoretical' positions that are behind empirical observations. Practical implications for managers and public policy makers are outlined. (shrink)

This paper presents the ‘rationality‐of‐ends/market‐structure grid’. With this grid, the article contrasts, in economic terms, different approaches to business ethics and addresses the question how far and what type of business ethics is feasible. Four basic scenarios for business ethics are outlined that imply different conceptualizations of business ethics. The grid interrelates a rationality‐of‐ends dimension with a market‐structure dimension. The rationality‐of‐ends dimension ranges from opportunism and self‐interested egoism to self‐interested altruism and ultimately to authentic altruism. The market‐structure dimension ranges from (...) perfect competition/no information problems/perfectly dispersed market power to imperfect competition/high information problems/concentrated power. Rather than presenting economic, legal, ethical and discretionary issues in a hierarchical fashion, the grid interrelates these issues. Conclusions are spelled out regarding the empirical observance of business ethics and the programmatic, ‘theoretical’ positions that are behind empirical observations. Practical implications for managers and public policy makers are outlined. (shrink)

This paper presents the ‘rationality‐of‐ends/market‐structure grid’. With this grid, the article contrasts, in economic terms, different approaches to business ethics and addresses the question how far and what type of business ethics is feasible. Four basic scenarios for business ethics are outlined that imply different conceptualizations of business ethics. The grid interrelates a rationality‐of‐ends dimension with a market‐structure dimension. The rationality‐of‐ends dimension ranges from opportunism and self‐interested egoism to self‐interested altruism and ultimately to authentic altruism. The market‐structure dimension ranges from (...) perfect competition/no information problems/perfectly dispersed market power to imperfect competition/high information problems/concentrated power. Rather than presenting economic, legal, ethical and discretionary issues in a hierarchical fashion, the grid interrelates these issues. Conclusions are spelled out regarding the empirical observance of business ethics and the programmatic, ‘theoretical’ positions that are behind empirical observations. Practical implications for managers and public policy makers are outlined. (shrink)

According to the paradigm of adaptive rationality, successful inference and prediction methods tend to be local and frugal. As a complement to work within this paradigm, we investigate the problem of selecting an optimal combination of prediction methods from a given toolbox of such local methods, in the context of changing environments. These selection methods are called meta-inductive strategies, if they are based on the success-records of the toolbox-methods. No absolutely optimal MI strategy exists—a fact that we call the “revenge (...) of ecological rationality”. Nevertheless one can show that a certain MI strategy exists, called “AW”, which is universally long-run optimal, with provably small short-run losses, in comparison to any set of prediction methods that it can use as input. We call this property universal access-optimality. Local and short-run improvements over AW are possible, but only at the cost of forfeiting universal access-optimality. The last part of the paper includes an empirical study of MI strategies in application to an 8-year-long data set from the Monash University Footy Tipping Competition. (shrink)

The behavior of people in the presence of scarce resources has long been a source of ethical concern and debate. Many of the responses, ranging from outright brutality and cheating on the one hand to altruism, nobility, and sacrifice on the other, were most recently demonstrated in the movie Titanic. It should come as no surprise, then, that rational efforts to allocate the very scarce life-saving resource of organs are sometimes circumvented by these natural human impulses and sheer human (...) creativity. This is especially true when the organs in question are required for continued life and cannot be temporarily or permanently replaced by technology. Thus the focus of this paper will be on the competition for livers. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 190-227, May 2022. There is a sense of fairness that is distinctive of markets. This is fairness among economic competitors, competitive fairness. We regularly make judgments of competitive fairness about market participants, public policies and institutions. However, it is not clear to what these judgments refer, or what moral significance they have. This paper offers a rational reconstruction of competitive fairness in terms of non-domination. It first identifies competitive fairness as (...) a distinctive claim, advanced within markets in turn characterized as antagonistic, instrumental and procedural. It distinguishes competitive fairness from a number of familiar ideals with which it might be confused: legitimate expectation, equality of opportunity, sporting fairness and economic efficiency. While many exponents likely assume competitive fairness can be explained in terms of one of these ideals, in each case there are significant objections to doing so. Instead, the paper argues that the most promising justification of competitive fairness is under the republican ideal of non-domination, which can reconstruct many of the intuitive judgments of competitive fairness that we make in particular cases. However, it concludes, this explanation makes it difficult for exponents to continue to emphasize competitive fairness, given diverse other risks of domination, and to other values, in markets. (shrink)

The anti-commodification and social responsibility traditions of media criticism emphasize journalism's function as a public good. This commentary supplements that perspective by calling attention to the status of journalistic authority as a “positional” good. Such goods can be possessed only by a limited number of people in relation to others. For news producers, the reputation of journalistic authority cannot itself be a public good. When news is conveyed to mass audiences, some voices will be perceived to have that authority while (...) most will not. To illustrate the social laws of competition for journalistic authority, a theme in media criticism from the liberal blogosphere is discussed. The point of this discussion is to highlight the social dynamic that informs perceptions of journalistic authority when that authority cannot always be inspected through rational-critical analysis. (shrink)

Textual exegesis is used to show that Marx's concept of social labor is transhistorical, referring to a collective activity of humans as a species. The collective nature of labor is suspended in capitalist production because of the anarchic character of market relations. But the suspension is skin deep: The sociality of labor asserts itself in a mediated manner through the alienated empowerment of goods with value. This is commodity fetishism, which vanishes when relations of production become actually collective?matching the transhistorical (...) essence of labor. Marx's concept of social labor is adjudged inadequate. It amounts to asserting that the actions of agents could be ex ante calculated according to a global rationality. In this respect, Marx's concept of social labor is reminiscent of the equally deficient notion of perfect competition in mainstream neoclassical economics. (shrink)

In this study I discuss G. W. Leibniz's (1646-1716) views on rational decision-making from the standpoint of both God and man. The Divine decision takes place within creation, as God freely chooses the best from an infinite number of possible worlds. While God's choice is based on absolutely certain knowledge, human decisions on practical matters are mostly based on uncertain knowledge. However, in many respects they could be regarded as analogous in more complicated situations. In addition to giving an (...) overview of the divine decision-making and discussing critically the criteria God favours in his choice, I provide an account of Leibniz's views on human deliberation, which includes some new ideas. One of these concerns is the importance of estimating probabilities – in making decisions one estimates both the goodness of the act itself and its consequences as far as the desired good is concerned. Another idea is related to the plurality of goods in complicated decisions and the competition this may provoke. Thirdly, heuristic models are used to sketch situations under deliberation in order to help in making the decision. Combining the views of Marcelo Dascal, Jaakko Hintikka and Simo Knuuttila, I argue that Leibniz applied two kinds of models of rational decision-making to practical controversies, often without explicating the details. The more simple, traditional pair of scales model is best suited to cases in which one has to decide for or against some option, or to distribute goods among parties and strive for a compromise. What may be of more help in more complicated deliberations is the novel vectorial model, which is an instance of the general mathematical doctrine of the calculus of variations. To illustrate this distinction, I discuss some cases in which he apparently applied these models in different kinds of situation. These examples support the view that the models had a systematic value in his theory of practical rationality. (shrink)

With the use of Bruner’s concept of story, broad generalizations from the US, and political philosophy, this article suggests that comparisons between music programs throughout the world are meaningless unless we acknowledge how pervasive, insidious, and menacing is the rhetoric of the global market economy. Political philosophy is one process of inquiry that can provide a way of reflecting upon educative constructs that affect all educators. One way to begin thinking about the process of comparison is to examine educational statements (...) from government websites throughout the world. While in many cases these statements are not referred to as manifestos, the rhetoric in use on these government sanctioned websites not only boldly states the goal of education in terms of global markets and competition but also does so by co-opting discourse that was originally intended to speak for oppressed populations. (shrink)

The business corporation is at the centre of the modern global economy but does it act in the general interest? This paper explores Joel Bakan's film and book critique of the corporation which suggests that it is characterised by a 'pathological pursuit of power and profit'. It seeks to extend Bakan's argument by reconsidering the ethical position of those who run corporations; the question of how far competition constrains their actions; and the extent to which the modern state can (...) control corporations or is itself subject to similar pressures. (shrink)

Liberty: Individualism and state control in general. Competition. Contract. Comparative survey of theories.--Property: Introduction. Theories of private property. Collectivist and socialist theories. Functional and social trust theories. Review of modern trends.--Succession.--Family: Biological and social basis of the family. Modern problems.--Punishment.

There can be no doubt that Brian Barry has made an enormous contribution to the clarification of the ideas of justice current in contemporary political thought. In Barry’s Justice as Impartiality he explicitly distinguishes and sets in competition three models of justice: justice as mutual advantage; justice as reciprocity; and justice as impartiality, and he argues that we should prefer the last of these. What I want to do here is to consider four questions. First, what is this (...) class='Hi'>competition a competition about? Second, has Barry adequately characterised the contenders? Third, can the competition be won on the grounds Barry suggests? Fourth, is it a competition that we should want to be won by a single theory? By contrast I want to argue that there are advantages in retaining a pluralist perspective in which all three approaches remain in play. (shrink)

ABSTRACT“Post-truth” politics is often framed as a failure of the competition of idea­s. Yet there are different ways of thinking about the competition of ideas, with different implications for the way we understand its benefits and risks. The dominant way of framing the competition of ideas is in terms of a marketplace, which, however, obscures the different ways ideas can compete. Several theorists can help us think through the competition of ideas. J. S. Mill, for example, (...) avoided the metaphor of the market by focusing, instead, on competition as the testing of arguments in adversarial encounters before a critical audience. Georg Simmel, alternatively, conceived of competition as a form of indirect conflict, where two individuals strive in parallel to gain audience approval. This view emphasizes innovation and creativity in the competition of “all for all.” More recently, theorists have developed the market logic of competition by thinking of a marketplace not for ideas but for rationalizations. This articulates some of the features of Simmel’s view of competition, but underestimates the degrees of constraint required to secure the goods of competition. Ultimately, recognizing these different modes of competition in the public sphere can enrich our theories of deliberative democracy and sharpen our view of the problem of “post-truth” politics. (shrink)

Humans and animals make inferences about the world under limited time and knowledge. In contrast, many models of rational inference treat the mind as a Laplacean Demon, equipped with unlimited time, knowledge, and computational might. Following H. Simon's notion of satisficing, the authors have proposed a family of algorithms based on a simple psychological mechanism: one-reason decision making. These fast and frugal algorithms violate fundamental tenets of classical rationality: They neither look up nor integrate all information. By computer simulation, (...) the authors held a competition between the satisficing "Take The Best" algorithm and various "rational" inference procedures. The Take The Best algorithm matched or outperformed all competitors in inferential speed and accuracy. This result is an existence proof that cognitive mechanisms capable of successful performance in the real world do not need to satisfy the classical norms of rational inference. (shrink)

This book challenges the hegemonic view that economic calculation represents the ultimate rationality. The West legitimises its global dominance by the claim to be a rational, democratic, science-based and progressive civilisation. Yet, over the past decades, the dogma of economic rationality has become an ideological black hole whose gravitational pull allows no public debate or policy to escape. Political leaders of all creeds are held in its orbit and public language is saturated by it. This dogma has pervaded all (...) spheres of life, ushering the age of post-rationality, especially in English speaking countries. The authors discuss several aspects of post-rational global capitalism still dominated by the Anglosphere: hyper-competition, hyper-consumption, inequality, volatile global financial markets, environmental degradation and the unforeseen effects of the internet-mediated communication revolution. The book concludes by discussing some utopian and dystopian future scenarios and asking whether the West can transcend its crisis of rationality. (shrink)

This article takes it for granted that science is intrinsically social and that competition is part and parcel of science. Four kinds of competition are distinguished and related to four kinds of rationalities: technological, normal scientific, political, and philosophical. It is argued that science as a whole is rational when there is interaction between the different (sub-) rationalities. Science needs not only different disciplines, but a methodological division of labor.

If fast and frugal heuristics are as good as they seem to be, who needs logic and probability theory? Fast and frugal heuristics depend for their success on reliable structure in the environment. In passive environments, there is relatively little change in structure as a consequence of individual choices. But in social interactions with competing agents, the environment may be structured by agents capable of exploiting logical and probabilistic weaknesses in competitors' heuristics. Aspirations toward the ideal of a demon reasoner (...) may consequently be adaptive for direct competition with such agents. (shrink)

In this study the influence of irrational beliefs and perfectionism on the emergence of competitive anxiety was investigated. While previous studies indicate that higher irrational beliefs predict greater competitive anxiety, in the present study it is hypothesized that this relationship is mediated by perfectionism. A serial atemporal multiple mediation analysis revealed that both adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism were significant partial mediators between irrational beliefs and competitive anxiety. The total score and all four subscale scores on irrational beliefs had both direct (...) and indirect effects on cognitive competitive anxiety, the latter effects mediated by both forms of perfectionism. Depreciation beliefs had a direct effect, and demandingness and awfulizing had indirect effects, on somatic competitive anxiety when both forms of perfectionism were entered as mediators. These findings suggest that both irrational beliefs and perfectionism influence the emergence of competitive anxiety, therefore rational emotive behavioral therapy with a focus upon perfectionism may be an effective means of reducing competitive anxiety in athletes. (shrink)

Standard applications of evolutionary game theory look at a single game and focus on the evolution of behavior for that game alone. Instead, this article uses tools from evolutionary game theory to study the competition between choice mechanisms in a rich and variable multigame environment. A choice mechanism is a way of subjectively representing a decision situation, paired with a method for choosing an act based on this subjective representation. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by a case (...) study that shows how subjective representations in terms of regret that differ from the actual fitness can be evolutionarily advantageous. (shrink)

This paper considers whether, and if so how, the modelling of joint action in social philosophy – principally in the work of Margaret Gilbert and Michael Bratman – might assist in understanding and applying the concept of concerted practices in European competition law. More specifically, the paper focuses on a well-known difficulty in the application of that concept, namely, distinguishing between concerted practice and rational or intelligent adaptation in oligopolistic markets. The paper argues that although Bratman's model of (...) joint action is more psychologically plausible and phenomenologically resonant, its less demanding character also makes it less useful than Gilbert's in our understanding of the legal concept of concerted practice and in dealing with the above difficulty. The paper proceeds in two parts: first, a discussion of the concept of concerted practices in European competition law; and second, a discussion of Gilbert and' Bratman's models of joint action, including a comparative assessment of their ability to provide an evidentiary target and an evidentiary platform for conceited practices. (shrink)

Political psychology and rational choice approaches are often regarded as standing in direct competition with one another. In this paper, we put this postulated rivalry to the test by examining the conditions which would need to be fulfilled so as to set up a conflict between political psychology and rational choice. Since our analysis shows that the perceived competition rests on a mistaken conception of the respective approaches, we argue that our main aim should be to (...) investigate how to combine these approaches so as to maximise their fruitfulness for political science. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Spinoza’s treatment of a problem in early modern moral philosophy: the potential conflict between the pursuit of happiness and virtue. The problem is that people are thought to attain happiness by pursuing their self-interest, whereas virtue requires them to act with benevolence, for the benefit of others. Given the inevitability that people will have different and often competing interests, how can they be both virtuous and happy and, where the two are in conflict, which should (...) they prefer? While there were an array of treatments of the problem, most agreed on the general strategy of arguing that people’s true interests—as revealed through reason—are not in competition; rather, they coincide, such that promoting the interests of others promotes people’s own interests and vice versa. Such a response aims to show that people’s happiness is best served by being virtuous and their virtue is best served by making themselves happy.Spinoza agreed with the general outline of this solution, equating virtue with power, thereby defining virtuous behavior as the pursuit of one’s own interests. Since, for Spinoza, happiness arises from increasing one’s power, happiness and virtue are necessarily connected. Furthermore, he does not equate virtue and happiness at the expense of benevolence. This point may be overlooked since Spinoza’s single comment in the Ethics on benevolentia is denigrating: he defines benevolence as a desire arising from pity and “in a man who lives under the guidance of reason, pity in itself is useless and bad” . 1 However, we should distinguish Spinoza’s benevolentia, a kind of piteous desire, from a common notion of benevolence as acting to the benefit of others, which he defends. (shrink)

We describe a first experiment on whether product complexity affects competition and consumers in retail markets. We are unable to detect a significant effect of product complexity on prices, except insofar as the demand elasticity for complex products is higher. However, there is qualified evidence that complex products have the potential to induce consumers to buy more than they would otherwise. In this sense, consumer exploitability in quantities cannot be ruled out. We also find evidence for shaping effects: consumers’ (...) preferences are shaped by past experience with prices, and firms may in principle exploit this to sell more. (shrink)

Technoscientific research, a kind of scientific research conducted within the decontextualized approach (DA), uses advanced technology to produce instruments, experimental objects, and new objects and structures, that enable us to gain knowledge of states of affairs of novel domains, especially knowledge about new possibilities of what we can do and make, with the horizons of practical, industrial, medical or military innovation, and economic growth and competition, never far removed from view. The legitimacy of technoscientific innovations can be appraised only (...) in the course of considering fully what sorts of objects technoscientific objects are: objects that embody scientific knowledge confirmed within DA; physical/chemical/biological objects, realizations of possibilities discovered in research conducted within DA, brought to realization by means of technical/experimental/instrumental interventions; and components of social/ecological systems, objects that embody the values of technological progress and (most of them) values of capital and the market. What technoscientific objects are - their powers, tendencies, sources of their being, effects on human beings and social/economic systems, how they differ from non technoscientific objects - cannot be grasped from technoscientific inquiry alone; scientific inquiry that is not reducible to that conducted within DA is also needed. The knowledge that underlies and explains the efficacy of technoscientific objects is never sufficient to grasp what sorts of object they are and could become. Science cannot be reduced to technoscience. (shrink)

The article discusses the genealogy of 20th-century Norwegian ecophilosophies as deriving from a specific philosophy of climbing, one which is irreducible to philosophy of alpinism so far as it is based on the principle of cooperation and on the intrinsic value of interacting with the mountain rather than on competition, which makes the mountain an arena for sport activities. In this context, the expression to think like a mountain will be analyzed as something more than an impressive metaphor, and (...) examined as a new way of thinking that avoids the extremes of both radical anthropocentrism and biocentrism. (shrink)

Bioethicists are increasingly commenting on health care resource allocation, and sometimes suggest ways to solve various rationing dilemmas ethically. I argue that both because of the assumptions bioethicists make about social reality, and because of the methods of argument they use, they cannot possibly make a useful contribution to the debate. Bioethicists who want to make a practical difference should either approach health care resource allocation as if the matter hinged upon tribal competition (which is essentially what it does), (...) or they should do political philosophy in the traditional sense, and examine the health system from the outside. (shrink)

Rationing health care is not new. As governments world wide struggle to contain the costs of health care, health policy analysts debate how rationing should be done. However, they too often neglect how the mechanisms for funding and allocating health care resources are themselves vehicles for rationing treatment. In the UK, where health care rationing debates currently abound, there has been no formal evaluation of the role of the market in allocating scarce health care resources.The market in health care has (...) increased administration, fragmented services, eroded local accountability, and decreased choice.This fragmentation, and the associated competition between purchasers and providers, means that resource allocation can no longer be monitored and evaluated in a national context. The loss of a population focus has left a vacuum in planning. Services cannot be planned rationally, and so are not able consistently to avoid duplication or to respond cogently to estimates of need.The loss of accountability means that decisions about the allocation of health care resources are no longer open to scrutiny by local people. Increasingly, especially in social and long term care the cost of care is being transferred to the individual. The new mechanisms for resource allocation are distributing resources unfairly: away from the poor, the sick and the elderly.The great myth of the market is that it has enabled decision-making to become explicit. This is not the case. To make health care resource allocation appear rational and acceptable to the public, health authorities have resorted to exercises in consumer consultation, and value laden guidelines where clinical cloaks are used to disguise political decisions on funding. In the UK, until the true role of the internal market is acknowledged, myths and subterfuge will conceal the winners and losers in the new system of rationing health care. (shrink)

A quantitative interpretation is given of the (in)coherence that moral agents experience as a tension between their ordered moral judgments over n physically incompatible actions, and the competitive ordering of motivating intensities (or, desires). Then a model describing one’s tendency to reduce the experienced in-coherence is constructed. In this model, moral sensitivity (S) and desire attachment (e) function as primitives that motivate from opposing perspectives the reduction of incoherence. Two distinct sub-processes of this reduction are therefore initiated by (S) and (...) (e) co-ordinated (more or less efficiently) by the agent’s degree of rationality (R) characteristic of her capacity to handle such internal tensions. This process ends when a new equilibrium between what motivates and what resists (further) reduction has been reached. A macro-equilibrium is described involving (R) constrained by weakness-of-will (W w ). A reinterpretation of the Aristotelian characters (enkratês, akratês, etc.) and an exegesis of Hume’s ‘Calm Passions’ follow as applications. (shrink)

The use of recent research on variations in medical practice to promote competitive market oriented cost containment strategies is critically examined. Research demonstrating widespread variations in physician practices for similar patient populations undermines the medical profession's claims about the scientific objectivity of medical practice and indicates the existence of widespread waste and inappropriate utilization of health care resources. Cost containment programs which rely on market-based care avoidance incentives, such as Medicare prospective payment or cost sharing plans, attempt to impact medical (...) practice variations by creating economic barriers between doctor and patient. An alternative interpretation of research on practice variations is presented, emphasizing containing costs while improving quality of care and achieving greater equity through planning and regulation of medical supply factors. (shrink)