Yuan Cheng

One of the merits of practical rationality is to organize our practical tasks effectively and to put practical activities in order, such as plan-making, which includes prioritizing, instrumental calculation, strategy-adapting, etc. In this chapter, starting from the B. Williams’ critique to John Rawls’ notion—taking life plans as “an external view of one’s own life,” the author establishes the external view of rationality and internal view of rationality in contrast. The author holds that practical rationality not only means pros-cons weighing or strategical manipulation, but also is one kind of internal power, which can hold oneself as whole and go through our inner emotions, perceptions, desires, and even the deepest dimensions of our structure. With internal rationality, the agent could reconstruct personal beliefs and be oriented again in the absence of orientation.

According to the emotion studies in recent decades, it is widely acknowledged that emotion is consciousness-involved, or contains evaluative elements. In this chapter, “Deliberative Emotion” will be established as an independent notion, which is distinguished from poetic passion, romantic love, or untutored feelings such as motherhood, or sentimental moods, etc. This emotion with deliberative structure is used widely in professional practices, such as juristic judge, education & teaching, medical care & nursing, etc. It plays the role of recognizing particularity, in fact, practical reasoning, and affective communication. Moreover, some types of emotion, regret, for example, is deliberative since it contains specifically reflective attitude and quasi-counterfactual thinking (“it would be better”)

Moral deliberation is usually characterized as one kind of mental process which provides us convincing reason to make morally right choice by clear reasoning, forming judgments, or explicit self-reflection guided by moral principles. However, this kind of understanding renders an intellectualist illusion: one can acquire moral quality only by reasoning skillfully. In this chapter, by re-reading Socrates’ thesis and following suggestions of philosophers such as B. Williams and John McDowell, the author explores the intrinsic connection between deliberation with perception, as well as connection between deliberation with disposition: one can make deliberations morally, which can be regarded as the natural result produced and released by the person who has been already morally cultivated and therefore is equipped with such moral perception. Similarly, a good performance of deliberation tightly relies on or even is rooted in a well-formed disposition which prevents deliberator from being distracted by disturbing “deliberation.”

Our philosophical understanding to “rationality,” explicitly and implicitly, is involved with or dominated by the metaphor of “architecture” (considering Kant’s “the architectonic of pure reason” and other philosophers’ stances). It roughly means that every action, every decision, and even everything should be rested on a rational “foundation.” Without rational foundation, they are nothing. Instead of it, in the last chapter, the author moves to the metaphor of music: there are no rational “foundation”; the rational actions, the rational person, and even many other things standing in opposite are rationality itself. Human intellect is generated when it is played. By this, the author wants to turn our philosophical exploration from inquiring into the foundation of rationality to the phenomenological survey of the various presences and performances of it.

Political deliberation and decisions, for example, enacting a policy or making judgment in count, should meet rational requirements, such as they are logically organized or contains convincing arguments. However, Butler’s case of “burning a cross” and Oakeshott’s discussion about argumentative political discourse remind us that there are many other historical-social forces behind all of these political-legal deliberation. It doesn’t mean that there is nothing but manipulating political power. Instead, as the author holds, the success of logical structure doesn’t purely rely on the validity and fallibility of arguments and reasoning. It also rests on how well it is performed to response contingent situations and echoes the prior actions within practical tension.

Although developing from different aspects, the three parts of this chapter is motivated by the same thought: the classical definition of “rational animals” brings out a very strict and narrow notion of rationality. We are speaking animals, which not only can formulate a propositional attitude or make explicit assertion, but also manifest in our implicit exercise of perceptual attentions such as taking things as things, recognition, discrimination, and other pre-linguistic adoption in effective practice (Part I). In Part II, the author makes rational defense for desire: desire is no longer just the object of rational thinking to suppress; it can contribute to our deliberation and let the agent to be motivated by the right reason authentically and intrinsically. The hallmark of mature deliberator is to act on reason and his own purpose independently. In part III, the author demonstrates that this miraculous achievement of intellect, however, has its pre-history and infantile roots. Its acquisition depends on the fostering from mother and some other persons, and its improvement depends on the trust of other deliberators.

Overconsumption, which leads to considerable adverse effects on sustainability, is a significant concern in the tourism sector, especially under flat-rate pricing (e.g., buffets), where consumption is unlimited after consumers pay a fixed price. When charged with higher prices, will people consume more regardless of how much they need? Previous findings are mixed. To answer this question, by conducting three laboratory experiments and one field experiment, our research introduces an influential ideology and shows that this higher-price-driven overconsumption behavior only holds among people who believe in the Protestant Work Ethic, an influential concept used to explain the historical rise of capitalism. People who believe in the Protestant Work Ethic emphasize input-outcome correspondence and are therefore more likely to feel entitled to consume more as their expenditure increases. This belief leads them to overconsume under flat-rate pricing. In contrast, people who do not subscribe to the Protestant Work Ethic consume similar quantities regardless of their spending. Our findings extend the Protestant Work Ethic literature, revealing how this virtuous construct can lead to not-so-virtuous behavior like overconsumption. Marketers can leverage this to influence consumer overconsumption, enhancing profitability and sustainability.

Healthcare workers’ voice is of importance in decreasing medical accidents and improving the efficacy of hospital units. To investigate the impact and the underlying mechanisms of supervisors’ negative mood on healthcare workers’ voice behavior, based on the mood contagion perspective, we designed a cross-sectional study, with 299 healthcare workers from mainland China completed the questionnaires. The results indicated supervisors’ negative mood was positively related to healthcare workers’ negative mood, which further led to less constructive voice and more defensive voice. Moreover, the healthcare worker’s emotional intelligence aspect of self-emotion appraisal moderated this relationship, but not others-emotion appraisal. We believe healthcare workers’ supervisors should pay attention to their negative mood expression and regulation. In the hope of reducing being influenced by supervisors’ negative mood, training about noticing and recognizing their own emotions are needed for healthcare workers.

This book presents an anti-intellectualist view of how the cognitive-mental dimension of human intellect is rooted in and interwoven with our embodied-internal components including emotion, perception, desire, etc., by investigating practical forms of thinking such as deliberation, planning, decision-making, etc. With many thought-provoking statements, the book revises some classical notions of rationality with new interpretation: we are “rational animals”, which means we have both rational capabilities, such as calculation, evaluation, justification, etc., and more animal aspects, like desire, emotion, and the senses. According to the traditional position of rationalism, we use well-grounded reason as the fundamental basis of our actions. But this book argues that we simply perform our practical intellect intuitively and spontaneously, just like playing music. By this the author turns the dominant metaphor of “architecture” in understanding of human rationality to that of “music-playing”. This book presents a groundbreaking and compelling critique of today’s pervasively reflective-intellectual culture, just as Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor and other philosophers diagnose, and makes any detached notion of rationality and formalized understanding of human intellect highly problematic.Methodologically, it not only reconciles the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition with analytical approaches, but also integrates various theories, such as moral psychology, emotional studies, action theory, decision theory, performativity studies, music philosophy, tacit knowledge, collective epistemology and media theory. Further, its use of everyday cases, metaphors, folk stories and references to movies and literature make the book easy to read and appealing for a broad readership.