Compassionate Reasoning, the Mind, and Moral Choice

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-130
Author(s):  
Marc Gopin
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Choice ◽  
Extensive Training ◽  
Positive Social Change ◽  
Fierce Competition ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Obedience To Authority

The ethical schools of thought are essential to decision-making for peacebuilding and positive social change. The directives emerging from ethical schools often contradict each other, but Compassionate Reasoning can help resolve these contradictions and guide people in a more coherent direction of thinking and acting. The cultivation of compassion is shown to be a glue that bonds schools of ethics into one enterprise of moral reasoning as seen through several lenses. People who reason together are more adept at problem solving than when reasoning alone, but only if they have cultivated caring and compassionate relationships as a group. Moral reasoning in fierce competition with others, by contrast, retards the discovery of solutions to thorny problems. Compassionate Reasoning encourages collective reasoning rather than isolated and selfish reasoning. Excessive obedience to authority is also one of the most dangerous aspects of the human lower brain. A critical antidote is extensive training in taking the perspectives of others through Compassionate Reasoning.

The Principles and Practices in Action

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-178
Author(s):  
Cynthia Rayner ◽  
François Bonnici
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Slow Pace ◽  
The Face ◽  
Strategic Conversation

This book asks a rather simple but bold question: “How do organizations create systemic social change?” This question is growing in importance, becoming part of the strategic conversation for all types of organizations, not just those specifically focused on social change. Business leaders, politicians, educators, employees, and parents are grappling with the realization that complex social change can rapidly impact their everyday lives. As frustration at the slow pace of change grows, and the world’s wicked problems—such as inequality, climate change and racial justice—proliferate, people are increasingly recognizing that we need to find ways to tackle the root causes of these issues rather than just addressing the symptoms. In the face of these challenges, it is easy to default to our more traditional views of leadership and problem-solving, which celebrate an us-versus-them mentality, top-down decision-making, and aggressive power stances. Systems work—with its focus on the process of change including our day-to-day actions and relationships—may feel counterintuitive in this rapidly emerging future. Yet, as the authors’ research has shown, the future is demanding a different kind of leadership, one that emphasizes the ways we work as much as the outcomes we pursue.

scholarly journals Dialogue and the Creation of Transformative Social Change: The Case of Social Enterprises

10.28945/4012 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 107-132
Author(s):  
Chitvan Trivedi ◽  
Shalini Misra
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Organizational Context ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Collective Wisdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
Positive Social Change ◽  
The Creation

Aim/Purpose: To understand the process of social change creation in social entrepreneurial ventures (SEVs), specifically emphasizing the role and nature of the communicative process in social change creation. Background: Drawing on data from seven SEVs from India and the US and employing a grounded theory methodology, this research scrutinizes the social change process and uncovers the role and characteristics of dialogue in this process. Methodology: Qualitative data was collected from seven social entrepreneurial organizations over a period of eight months from July 2011 to February 2012. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a wide range of members within these social entrepreneurial organizations (n=27) with additional informal interviews with field workers and volunteers. Data from the semi-structured interviews and notes from observations were integrated with analyses of archival resources. Contribution: There is little scholarship about the process of social change creation and the necessary conditions to promote social change over time. Understanding the process of social change creation and the individual, interpersonal, and organizational conditions that facilitate the process is central to design of effective trans-sector TD problem solving ventures. This paper focuses on the process of social change creation in social entrepreneurial settings, specifically emphasizing the role and nature of the communicative process in social change creation. Findings: The reflections and experiences of the members of SEVs revealed that social entrepreneurship is a collective endeavor and this collective character is essential to its success. Collective organization and synergy, deep intra-organizational communication, and a conducive organizational context are critical for the creation of collective wisdom and knowledge networks for long-term collaborative community capacity building. Dialogue emerged as a central category linking the other categories to explain the process of social change creation. Organic organizational structure enables knowledge creation and integration through the process of organizational learning through deep and continuous social interaction, or dialogue. Recommendations for Practitioners: This research elucidated the key characteristics of the organizational context required to support the creation of social change. It also identified the critical role and characteristics of the communicative process required to generate structural knowledge and collective wisdom at the organizational level. Recommendation for Researchers: For individual and organizational learning, trans-sector transdisciplinary organizations require an appropriate organizational context. Key elements of such an organizational context include (1) understanding the ecology of the social problem; (2) organic organizational structure; (3) continuous and deep social interaction among all levels of the organization; (4) employee and community autonomy and empowerment; and (5) attention to subtle environmental changes in the system. These elements in combination lead to the creation of collective wisdom. Collective wisdom then feeds back into the conception, planning, and action stages of the iterative cycle of organizational knowledge creation to create positive social change. Impact on Society: Same as above Future Research: Future research model theoretically and study empirically the ecology of social entrepreneurship and trans-sector TD problem solving more broadly. For example, the ways in the personal attributes of social entrepreneurs (e.g., their leadership style, networking abilities) combine with circumstances at organizational, institutional, and international levels to influence the effectiveness of their efforts to promote positive social change within local and global communities. Second, the grounded theoretical framework developed here should be further refined and elaborated through the identification of additional key contextual factors that affect SEVs’ capacity to promote positive social change and to achieve sustainability in different socio-environmental contexts. There is also a need to translate the findings from this research to facilitate the creation of more inclusive problem solving contexts and practices.

Compassionate Reasoning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Gopin
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Compassionate Care ◽  
Emotional Skills ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

This book presents the case for Compassionate Reasoning as a moral and psychosocial skill for the positive transformation of individuals and societies. It has been developed from a reservoir of moral philosophical, cultural, and religious wisdom traditions over the centuries, combined with compassion neuroscience, contemporary approaches to conflict resolution, public health methodologies, and positive psychological approaches to social change. There is an urgent need for human civilization to invest in the broad-based cultivation of compassionate thoughts, feelings, and especially habits. This skill is then combined with moral reasoning to move the self and others toward less anger and fear, more joy and care in the pursuit of reasonable policies that build peaceful families, communities, and societies. There are many people who work for the sake of others, and tend to be kinder, more reasonable, more self-controlled, and more goal-oriented to peace. They are united by a set of moral values and the emotional skills to put those values into practice. The aim of this book is to articulate the best combination of those values and skills that lead to personal and communal sustainability, not burnout and self-destruction. The book pivots on the observable difference in the mind—and proven in neuroscience imaging experiments—between destructive empathic distress on the one hand, and on the other, joyful, constructive, compassionate care. Facing existential threats to life on the planet, humans can and must make such skills universally sustainable and ingrained.

‘A Radical causation’: Coleridge's Lyrics and Collective Guilt

Romanticism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittany Pladek
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Collective Guilt ◽  
Ideal Form ◽  
Ethical Work ◽  
Positive Social Change ◽  
Meaningful Relationships

This paper argues that the early lyrics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge explore the ethical work of collective guilt, a feeling with enormous Romantic and contemporary significance. Coleridge's lyrics formally model collective guilt while making a cautious case for its social value. By reading ‘Fears in Solitude’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner through recent work in social psychology and the philosophy of ethics, I show how Coleridge creates causalities of feeling, affirming meaningful relationships of responsibility that go beyond personal guilt. I conclude that Romantic lyric offers an ideal form not only for illustrating how collective guilt works as a ‘structure of feeling’, but also for examining the emotion's potential to create positive social change.

Truth Matters: Cognitive Integrity as an Intervention for Self-Deception

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenia Isabel Gorlin ◽  
Michael W. Otto
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Therapeutic Interventions ◽  
Empirical Validation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adaptive Problem

To live well in the present, we take direction from the past. Yet, individuals may engage in a variety of behaviors that distort their past and current circumstances, reducing the likelihood of adaptive problem solving and decision making. In this article, we attend to self-deception as one such class of behaviors. Drawing upon research showing both the maladaptive consequences and self-perpetuating nature of self-deception, we propose that self-deception is an understudied risk and maintaining factor for psychopathology, and we introduce a “cognitive-integrity”-based approach that may hold promise for increasing the reach and effectiveness of our existing therapeutic interventions. Pending empirical validation of this theoretically-informed approach, we posit that patients may become more informed and autonomous agents in their own therapeutic growth by becoming more honest with themselves.

Extended Emulation Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Rade
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Action Planning ◽  
Weak Form ◽  
External Input ◽  
Motor Action ◽  
Abstract Thought ◽  
Thought Patterns ◽  
Stored Information ◽  
Short Term Prediction ◽  
The Mind

Emulators are internal models, first evolved for prediction in perception to shorten the feedback on motor action. However, the selective pressure on perception is to improve the fitness of decision-making, driving the evolution of emulators towards context-dependent payoff representation and integration of action planning, not enhanced prediction as is generally assumed. The result is integrated perceptual, memory, representational, and imaginative capacities processing external input and stored internal input for decision-making, while simultaneously updating stored information. Perception, recall, imagination, theory of mind, and dreaming are the same process with different inputs. Learning proceeds via scaffolding on existing conceptual infrastructure, a weak form of embodied cognition. Discrete concepts are emergent from continuous dynamics and are in a perceptual, not representational, format. Language is also in perceptual format and enables precise abstract thought. In sum, what was initially a primitive system for short-term prediction in perception has evolved to perform abstract thought, store and retrieve memory, understand others, hold embedded action plans, build stable narratives, simulate scenarios, and integrate context dependence into perception. Crucially, emulators co-evolved with the emergence of societies, producing a mind-society system in which emulators are dysfunctional unless integrated into a society, which enables their complexity. The Target Emulator System, evolved initially for honest signaling, produces the emergent dynamics of the mind-society system and spreads variation-testing of behavior and thought patterns across a population. The human brain is the most dysfunctional in isolation, but the most effective given its context.

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