scholarly journals Robotic Nudges for Moral Improvement through Stoic Practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Klincewicz ◽  

This article offers a theoretical framework that can be used to derive viable engineering strategies for the design and development of robots that can nudge people towards moral improvement. The framework relies on research in developmental psychology and insights from Stoic ethics. Stoicism recommends contemplative practices that over time help one develop dispositions to behave in ways that improve the functioning of mechanisms that are constitutive of moral cognition. Robots can nudge individuals towards these practices and can therefore help develop the dispositions to, for example, extend concern to others, avoid parochialism, etc.

Author(s):  
Jaime Kucinskas

The mindful elite attracted new high-status sympathizers in targeted organizations by using their professional symbolic power, social status, and social skill to build legitimacy for meditation and other contemplative practices. In this chapter the author builds upon scholarship on legitimation by identifying the various kinds of legitimation the contemplatives are able to secure. These different kinds of legitimacy are interrelated and build upon each other over time, creating a cultural movement that is increasingly difficult to derail. However, in building their base among a privileged coterie of social, economic, and intellectual elites, the contemplatives risk losing touch with ordinary people and the issues of inequality that affect them. This weakens the contemplatives’ ability to stand by and implement direct social reforms to influence root causes of the issues they care about, such as rising inequality, greed, and materialism.


Author(s):  
Christine Cheng

This chapter introduces the concept of extralegal groups and a theoretical framework for analyzing them—how they emerge, develop, and become entrenched over time. It explores their dual nature as threats to the state and as local statebuilders. Formally, an extralegal group is defined as a set of individuals with a proven capacity for violence who work outside the law for profit and provide basic governance functions to sustain its business interests. This framing shows how political authority can develop as a by-product of the commercial environment, even where the state has little or no presence. In post-conflict societies, the predatory nature and historical abuses of citizens conducted in the name of the state means that government is not always more trusted or better able to look after the interests of local populations than an extralegal group. Ultimately, extralegal groups blur the lines between the formal and informal; the licit and illicit.


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin C. Medina

Distribution of firearm victimization is not equal within cities. Victimization can persistently concentrate in a small number of neighborhoods, while others experience very little violence. Theorists have pointed to one possible explanation as the ability of groups to control violence using social capital. Researchers have shown this association at the U.S. county, state, and national levels. Few studies, however, have examined the relationship between neighborhood social capital and violence over time. This study uses longitudinal data to ask whether neighborhood social capital both predicts and is influenced by firearm victimization over 3 years in Philadelphia. The results of several regression analyses suggest that trusting others and firearm victimization are inversely related over time. Implications for neighborhood policy planning and social capital as a theoretical framework are discussed.


Author(s):  
A. Roncaglia

After recalling the Sraffian critiques to marginalist distribution theory, and hence the need for a different approach, the paper illustrates the classical conceptualization of social classes and its flexibility for the application to the modern world. The relationships among market forms-above all oligopoly, mark-up pricing, and income distribution-are then discussed, in search of a theoretical framework for the analysis of the evolution of distributive variables over time: an approach suggested as superior to the traditional one which aims at determining equilibrium values for the distributive variables at a moment in time.


Geografie ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 119 (3) ◽  
pp. 218-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Štefánková ◽  
Dušan Drbohlav

The article deals with regional and residential preferences of the Czech population. Regional and settlement preferences represent an interdisciplinary issue, which is relevant mostly to geography and sociology. In this article, the given issue is presented under the umbrella of a broader theoretical framework in the context of Czech and foreign studies. Selected important outputs of previous research activities in the field of regional and settlement preferences are discussed within this study, which enables it to draw a coherent picture of the given issues in Czechia and their developments over time. The main analysis is devoted to the current state of preferences of the Czech population. It is based on a representative survey, which was carried out in December 2010. The aim of the article is not only to make a comparison of regional and residential preferences over a period of almost 40 years, but also to juxtapose the patterns of regional preferences with real migration movements of the Czech population.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azza Abbaro

This thesis explores the ideology of the United Nations (UN) as manifested through external visual communications materials which have been produced in collaboration with artists and graphic designers since the organization’s inception in 1945. Initial research showed frequent usage of the symbols of the dove and olive branch, which have been known to connote “peace” over time and across a variety of cultures. A detailed examination of two specific works of socially conscious art and design, Translating War Into Peace and Pablo Picasso’s Peace Dove by Palestinian Children in Jericho, shows the multilayered and more meaningful adoption of these symbols by their respective designer Armando Milani and artist John Quigley. Using the theoretical framework of visual social semiotics and the “visual grammar” outlined by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen in their seminal work Reading Images, this paper examines how Milani and Quigley have produced compositions that represent how the UN views peace— namely, as a process that requires not just ending wars but working to continuously build peaceful infrastructures.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (11) ◽  
pp. 1613-1629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Accard

Self-organizing systems are social systems which are immanently and constantly recreated by agents. In a self-organizing system, agents make changes while preserving stability. If they do not preserve stability, they push the system toward chaos and cannot recreate it. How changes preserve stability is thus a fundamental issue. In current works, changes preserve stability because agents’ ability to make changes is limited by interaction rules and power. However, how agents diffuse the changes throughout the system while preserving its stability has not been addressed in these works. We have addressed this issue by borrowing from a complex system theory neglected thus far in organization theories: self-organized criticality theory. We suggest that self-organizing systems are in critical states: agents have equivalent ability to make changes, and none are able to foresee or control how their changes diffuse throughout the system. Changes, then, diffuse unpredictably – they may diffuse to small or large parts of the system or not at all, and it is this unpredictable diffusion that preserves stability in the system over time. We call our theoretical framework self-organiz ing criticality theory. It presents a new treatment of change and stability and improves the understanding of self-organizing.


Author(s):  
David T. Buckley

How do countries reconcile religion and democracy, both at critical junctures and over time? This chapter sets out a theoretical framework linking institutions of “benevolent secularism” to maintaining what Stepan has called the twin tolerations between religion and democracy. Institutions shape preferences within religious and secular elites over the place of religion in public life, and build religious-secular and interfaith partnerships that stabilize the twin tolerations when they face new challenges over time. After setting out the theoretical framework, the chapter discusses case selection and data collection.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Martin Innes ◽  
Colin Roberts ◽  
Trudy Lowe ◽  
Helen Innes

This chapter situates Neighbourhood Policing in a social and policing context, arguing that in order to understand how and why it gained traction at the particular moment when it did, it is necessary to establish how it relates to a longer and deeper history of policing ideas. It proposes that, as a particular iteration of the community policing philosophy, Neighbourhood Policing reflects a defining tension in the police mission as to whether the principal focus should be upon crime management, or a broader notion of community support and order maintenance. This analysis develops a detailed discussion of the community policing tradition and how it has ebbed and flowed over time in terms of its popularity, outlining a theoretical framework for thinking about how and why community policing interventions impact upon public perceptions and experiences of crime, disorder, and security.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Joe Lamantia

This article is a case study that explores the use of the Building Blocks portal design framework over a series of enterprise portal projects spanning several years. This article describes the business contexts that shaped each portal as it was designed, showing the use and reuse of design and development elements based on the Building Blocks. This article discusses the changes and adaptations that shaped the elements of the Building Blocks design framework over time.


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