Rational Herds
Author: Christophe Chamley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 420
ISBN-13: 9780521530927
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Publisher Description
Author: Christophe Chamley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 420
ISBN-13: 9780521530927
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Publisher Description
Author: Jonathan Gifford
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd
Published: 2012-02-15
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9814382655
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Modern management science seeks to streamline and rationalise the business process; to base decision-making on proven facts and to eliminate risk and uncertainty. Unfortunately, businesses are run by human beings and depend on other human beings for their custom. Human beings, it seems safe to say, are irredeemably selfish, greedy, short-sighted and prone to mass delusion. Time and again throughout history, business and society have been blindsided by people’s irrational and unpredictable behaviour. And it’s not just the consumers: well-respected business executives and their advisors get swept up with euphoria and panic along with the rest of us; they succumb to greed; they fail to plan for likely crises (and sometimes even for inevitable ones). Blindsided looks at the history of such outbreaks of irrational behaviour, at the occurrence of unpredictable but likely events, such as global pandemics and collapses of law and order, and at changes that have caught forecasters by surprise, such as the ageing and declining population of some affluent modern societies. This fascinating book reminds the world of business that it needs to plan for the unexpected, and to realise that neither its consumers nor even its own executives must be expected to act with cool rationality at all times.
Author: John Blewitt
Publisher: Earthscan
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 1844074552
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This textbook adopts a multi-perspective approach designed specifically to allow access to the topic from a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds and to develop understanding of a diversity of approaches and traditions at different levels.
Author: Jeffrey K. McKee
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2003-01-03
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 0813558778
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Are humans too good at adapting to the earth’s natural environment? Every day, there is a net gain of more than 200,000 people on the planet—that’s 146 a minute. Has our explosive population growth led to the mass extinction of countless species in the earth’s plant and animal communities? Jeffrey K. McKee contends yes. The more people there are, the more we push aside wild plants and animals. In Sparing Nature, he explores the cause-and-effect relationship between these two trends, demonstrating that nature is too sparing to accommodate both a richly diverse living world and a rapidly expanding number of people. The author probes the past to find that humans and their ancestors have had negative impacts on species biodiversity for nearly two million years, and that extinction rates have accelerated since the origins of agriculture. Today entire ecosystems are in peril due to the relentless growth of the human population. McKee gives a guided tour of the interconnections within the living world to reveal the meaning and value of biodiversity, making the maze of technical research and scientific debates accessible to the general reader. Because it is clear that conservation cannot be left to the whims of changing human priorities, McKee takes the unabashedly neo-Malthusian position that the most effective measure to save earth’s biodiversity is to slow the growth of human populations. By conscientiously becoming more responsible about our reproductive habits and our impact on other living beings, we can ensure that nature’s services will make our lives not only supportable, but also sustainable for this century and beyond.
Author: Derek Wall
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-03-07
Total Pages: 184
ISBN-13: 0262027216
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An argument that the commons is neither tragedy nor paradise but can be a way to understand environmental sustainability.
Author: Stephen Martin Fritz
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Published: 2020-09-04
Total Pages: 1538
ISBN-13: 1662903014
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Our Human Herds presents a new theory in moral and political philosophy, called "dual morality." The theory proposes that just as the physical senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing evolved to help us navigate our physical environment, two independent moral senses evolved to guide us to success in our social world. One prioritizes cooperation; the other, competition. The first bases moral justification on the egalitarianism that emphasizes our equal worth; the other finds moral justification in the inequalities that allow us to distinguish better from worse. "Liberal" and "conservative" are merely the names given to the political manifestations of these two forms of moral expression, just as "socialist" and "capitalist" describe their economic manifestations, and "personality" and "character" their psychological ones. Our Human Herds addresses what it means to be a human being, why we fight about the things that divide us, and why we unite behind the ideas that draw us together. The book examines all aspects of human social behavior, revealing how and why we often disagree in our approaches to education, history, war, crime, pleasure, happiness, politics, science and religion. "This is a learned, thoroughly researched study - and dazzlingly bright. The effervescent approach to writing makes its pages fly by ... Studies as brilliant as this one deserve a far wider audience. An engrossing and mind-expanding examination of morality" -Kirkus Reviews Book Review: A vast philosophical study charts the shifting moral landscape while tackling the weightiest question of human existence: what is the meaning of life? Humanity’s moral framework remains in a constant state of reconstruction. As the author points out in his opening chapter: “Two hundred years ago if a woman was raped and became pregnant we’d kill the rapist and spare the baby. Today, we spare rapist and kill the baby. Centuries ago many cultures condoned polygamy; today we put people in jail for it.” Over the course of this weighty tome, which is just shy of 1,000 pages, the author ponders what morality is (with an emphasis on humans as grouping or “herding” creatures) and the causes of its flux and reflux. Furthermore, there is an attempt to reconcile opposing philosophical theories by introducing a new conceptual model called “Dual Morality,” proposed as an “all-encompassing blueprint of human morality.” The study is logically structured, divided into four sections: “The Theory of Dual Moralism,” “The Explanation” (including investigations of the group and the self), “The Derivations” (which considers family, country, religion, and science/nature/technology), and finally “The Extrapolations” (a far-reaching look at everything from pleasure and happiness to suicide, murder, and abortion). The author possesses the rare skill of being able to explore himself with an enviable ease, drawing on palatable references to popular culture. For example: “Comedian Woody Allen said he laughs at his own jokes when they first come to him because humor originates in the unconscious. When his conscious mind hears them for the first time, it is as if they came from another place, and so we are, in a way, an audience to our own humor.” This approach, applied throughout, makes complex ideas not only accessible, but entertaining and enjoyable as well. The result is far from the predictable, dry academic thesis. This is a learned, thoroughly researched study—and dazzlingly bright. The effervescent approach to writing makes its 951 pages fly by. Fritz’s dedication is to “that miniscule fragment of humanity who read books like this.” Studies as brilliant as this one deserve a far wider audience. An engrossing and mind-expanding examination of morality. -- Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744 indie@kirkusreviews
Author: William Greenway
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2024-05-14
Total Pages: 205
ISBN-13: 166676924X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →We see children squealing with delight in new-fallen snow. We see shocked survivors of the tsunami hugging broken bodies. We are not first objective, detached, or neutral. Instantly we are joyful or horrified. A singular force fuels our joy and our horror: agape. Agape is as palpable as gravity. As weight is to gravity, so good is to agape (or, in violation, so evil is to agape). Predominant Western rationalities preclude theorizing of agape. So secular intellectuals, awakened to agape but conceptually hobbled, lament a “crisis of foundations” in ethics and a “legitimization crisis” in political theory. In the light of agape, however, there is no question about any sovereign’s basic ethical responsibilities nor about myriad ethical issues (the evils of pedophilia, rape, slavery, racism, exploiting illness for profit). Thus, agape can ground ethics globally. Moreover, insofar as “faithful” signifies not propositional assent but living fidelity to agape, agape can ground interfaith spiritual consensus. Engaging intellectuals from Augustine and Dostoevsky to Emmanuel Levinas and Peter Singer, tackling issues from animal rights and the essence of spirituality to the passion of Torah and interfaith relations, Greenway demonstrates the spiritual fecundity and real-world ethical potentials that flow from philosophical exploration of agape.
Author: Harvey Starr
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2000-01-26
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780472086276
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Managing increasing global interdependence
Author: Xiangdong He
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2009-09-23
Total Pages: 339
ISBN-13: 3642048927
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Logic, Rationality, and Interaction, LORI 2009, held in Chongqing, China, in October 2009. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 8 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from a flood of submissions. The workshops topics include but are not limited to semantic models for knowledge, for belief, and for uncertainty, dynamic logics of knowledge, information flow, and action, logical analysis of the structure of games, belief revision, belief merging, logics for preferences and utilities, logics of intentions, plans, and goals, logics of probability and uncertainty, argument systems and their role in interaction, as well as norms, normative interaction, and normative multiagent systems.
Author: Martin Reynolds
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Published: 2009-08-15
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1848134010
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Environmental Responsibility Reader is a definitive collection of classic and contemporary environmental works that offers a comprehensive overview of the issues involved in environmental responsibility, steering the reader through each development in thought with a unifying and expert editorial voice. This essential text expertly explores seemingly intractable modern-day environmental dilemmas - including climate change, fossil fuel consumption, fresh water quality, industrial pollution, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss. Starting with 'Silent Spring' and moving through to more recent works the book draws on contemporary ideas of environmental ethics, corporate social responsibility, ecological justice, fair trade, global citizenship, and the connections between environmental and social justice; configuring these ideas into practical notions for responsible action with a unique global and integral focus on responsibility.