Do we Always Act on Maxims?

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-255
Author(s):  
Sven Nyholm
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Basic Principles

AbstractIt is commonly thought that on Kant’s view of action, ‘everyone always acts on maxims’. Call this the ‘descriptive reading’. This reading faces two important problems. First, the idea that people always act on maxims offends against common sense: it clashes with our ordinary ideas about human agency. Second, there are various passages in which Kant says that it is ‘rare’ and ‘admirable’ to firmly adhere to a set of basic principles that we adopt for ourselves. This article offers an alternative: the ‘normative reading’. On this reading, it is a normative ideal to adopt and act on maxims: it is one of the things we would do if our reason were fully in control of our decision-making.

Working Women’s Decision-Making Power at Home: Evidence from Four North Indian Urban Clusters

Urbanisation ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 245574712110258
Author(s):  
Megan Maxwell ◽  
Milan Vaishnav
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Significant Heterogeneity ◽  
Household Decision ◽  
Household Decision Making ◽  
Theoretical Foundations ◽  
Shed Light

Do working women enjoy greater levels of human agency? While the theoretical foundations underlying this connection are clear, the empirical evidence is quite mixed. We leverage detailed, new data on intra-household decision-making and labour market behaviour from four north Indian urban clusters to shed light on this question. We find that women who work exercise greater say in important decisions around the home. However, this ‘work advantage’ exhibits significant heterogeneity across decision types, decision-making domains, and definitions of work.

Wise Agents & Organisational Moral Learning

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iznan Tarip
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Strategic Change ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Critical Factors ◽  
Moral Learning ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Functional Relevance ◽  
Learning Forward

The processes of strategic change, undertaken from time to time by organisations so as to maintain its functional relevance and effectiveness, are often conflict-ridden. This is in large part due to the nature of the human agency. Humans bring not only rationality into the decision-making processes, but also their inherent dispositions: intuitions, biases, emotions, and so on. In order to understand the factors that cause conflict in the processes of strategic change, this paper employs al-Ghazali’s concept of the ‘purification of the heart’, and ‘organisational moral learning’. An analytical framework is constructed using these two concepts to illustrate the interplay between contextual organisational configurations, the wider socio-environmental forces, and the human agents’ potentials and powers. This paper proposes some strategies that may help to drive ‘organisational moral learning’ forward, and conversely, hinder ‘organisational immoral learning’ from taking root. Ultimately, it is human agents –­ or rather, wise human agents – who are the critical factors for maintaining and/or transforming themselves and their surroundings.

Pelaksanaan Sistem Tribunal di Malaysia: Ke Arah Penambahbaikan

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-242
Author(s):  
Fariza Romli ◽  
◽  
Harlida Abdul Wahab
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Administration System ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Administrative Body

The existence of a tribunal system, in addition to helping to smooth the administration system, is considered as sharing power with the judiciary in making decisions. Thus arose the question of decision- making power and prevention of abuse by the administrative body. In line with the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 to ensure justice in support of effective, responsible and inclusive institutions, transparent and fair practices are essential for ensuring people’s trust in the administrative body and government. This paper, therefore, discusses the tribunal system and its implementation in Malaysia. In view of this, tribunal systems that exist in other countries, especially the United Kingdom, are also examined as models for improvement. Matters such as autonomy or control of power and the trial process are among the issues raised. Recommendations for improvement are proposed based on three basic principles—openness, fairness and impartiality—to further strengthen the implementation of the existing tribunal system in line with developments abroad.

scholarly journals Application of TOPSIS and AHP in the Multi-Objective Decision-Making Problems

2018 ◽  
Vol 228 ◽  
pp. 05002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yihan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Optimization Problems ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Multi Objective ◽  
New Methods

The problems of multi-objective decision making are analysed and studied. In order to solve its optimization problems, the basic principles and application steps of TOPSIS and AHP are introduced in this paper. Then some practical examples are given to show how to apply these two new methods in multi-objective decision making problems. Finally, the advantage and feasibility of the TOPSIS and AHP methods are demonstrated by theoretical analysis.

scholarly journals Artificial Minds with Consciousness and Common sense Aspects

2020 ◽  
pp. 1430-1449
Author(s):  
K.R. Shylaja ◽  
M.V. Vijayakumar ◽  
E. Vani Prasad ◽  
Darryl N. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Energy Level ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Dynamic Environments ◽  
Consciousness Level ◽  
Common Purpose ◽  
The Common

The research work presented in this article investigates and explains the conceptual mechanisms of consciousness and common-sense thinking of animates. These mechanisms are computationally simulated on artificial agents as strategic rules to analyze and compare the performance of agents in critical and dynamic environments. Awareness and attention to specific parameters that affect the performance of agents specify the consciousness level in agents. Common sense is a set of beliefs that are accepted to be true among a group of agents that are engaged in a common purpose, with or without self-experience. The common sense agents are a kind of conscious agents that are given with few common sense assumptions. The so-created environment has attackers with dependency on agents in the survival-food chain. These attackers create a threat mental state in agents that can affect their conscious and common sense behaviors. The agents are built with a multi-layer cognitive architecture COCOCA (Consciousness and Common sense Cognitive Architecture) with five columns and six layers of cognitive processing of each precept of an agent. The conscious agents self-learn strategies for threat management and energy level maintenance. Experimentation conducted in this research work demonstrates animate-level intelligence in their problem-solving capabilities, decision making and reasoning in critical situations.

scholarly journals A journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step – human agency, hydrological processes and time in socio-hydrology

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 14265-14304 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. W. Ertsen ◽  
J. T. Murphy ◽  
L. E. Purdue ◽  
T. Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Small Step ◽  
Time Step ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
Day To Day Operations

Abstract. When simulating social action in modeling efforts, as in socio-hydrology, an issue of obvious importance is how to ensure that social action by human agents is well-represented in the analysis and the model. Generally, human decision-making is either modeled on a yearly basis or lumped together as collective social structures. Both responses are problematic, as human decision making is more complex and organizations are the result of human agency and cannot be used as explanatory forces. A way out of the dilemma how to include human agency is to go to the largest societal and environmental clustering possible: society itself and climate, with time steps of years or decades. In the paper, the other way out is developed: to face human agency squarely, and direct the modeling approach to the human agency of individuals and couple this with the lowest appropriate hydrological level and time step. This approach is supported theoretically by the work of Bruno Latour, the French sociologist and philosopher. We discuss irrigation archaeology, as it is in this discipline that the issues of scale and explanatory force are well discussed. The issue is not just what scale to use: it is what scale matters. We argue that understanding the arrangements that permitted the management of irrigation over centuries, requires modeling and understanding the small-scale, day-to-day operations and personal interactions upon which they were built. This effort, however, must be informed by the longer-term dynamics as these provide the context within which human agency, is acted out.

Common-Sense Epidemiology in the Age of Electronic Patient Records (EPR)

2020 ◽  
pp. 343-364
Author(s):  
Shirly Bar-Lev ◽  
Dizza Beimel
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Clinical Information ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Patient Records ◽  
Electronic Patient Records ◽  
Professional Help ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Practical Recommendations

Encouraging patients to play a more active role in their health care is crucial for healthcare planning and for the design of services. This chapter shifts the scholarly focus from practitioners' decision making to that of laypersons' trying to make sense of the lab results available on their EPRs. The authors developed a methodology to capture the relationship between information formats (graph, numeric, or verbal), laypersons' assessment of the conditions' gravity, and their preferred course of action. Focusing on the effect of “not knowing” on laypersons' preferred courses of action, our findings show that formats that left respondents less able to understand the results—namely, the numeric and verbal formats—produced a lower sense of urgency, and correspondingly, less inclination to actively seek professional help. The chapter takes a step toward deriving practical recommendations as to how personal clinical information should be communicated, to improve laypersons' interpretation of the information's significance.

Deciding Novel and Routine Cases without Evidence

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-208
Author(s):  
Peter Applegarth
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Duty Of Care ◽  
The Law

AbstractIn novel cases, judges often weigh policy considerations based on common sense assumptions and personal experience about how certain individuals, groups and institutions behave. For example, in assessing the consequences of creating a new category of duty of care, a new immunity from suit or even a new tort, judges are invited to predict (or speculate about) how individuals, groups, professions and institutions would behave if the law was different. In routine cases, judges also rely on assumptions and experience in deciding questions of reasonableness and past hypothetical facts about causation. In deciding both novel and routine cases on the basis of assumptions and experience, judges are prone to cognitive biases that affect decision-making in general.

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