Overview

This open access book explores the conditions under which habit – and pre-reflective agency – can remain at the service of our ethical lives. What if data-intensive technologies’ ability to mould habits with unprecedented precision is also capable of triggering some mass disability of profound consequences? What if we become incapable of modifying the deeply-rooted habits that stem from our increased technological dependence? On an impoverished understanding of habit, the above questions are easily shrugged off. Habits are deemed rigid by definition: ‘as long as our deliberative selves remain capable of steering the design of data-intensive technologies, we’ll be fine’. To question this assumption, this book first articulates the way in which the habitual stretches all the way from unconscious tics to purposive, intentionally acquired habits. It also highlights the extent to which our habit-reliant, pre-reflective intelligence normally supports our deliberative selves. It is when habit rigidification sets in that this complementarity breaks down. The book moves from a philosophical inquiry into the ‘double edge’ of habit — its empowering and compromising sides — to consideration of individual and collective strategies to keep habits at the service of our ethical life. Allowing the norms that structure our forms of life to be cotton-wooled in abstract reasoning is but one of the factors that can compromise ongoing social and moral transformations. Systems designed to simplify our practical reasoning can also make us ‘sheep-like’. Drawing a parallel between the moral risk inherent in both legal and algorithmic systems, the book concludes with concrete interventions designed to revive the scope for normative experimentation. It will appeal to any reader concerned with our retaining an ability to trigger change within the practices that shape our ethical sensibility. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Mozilla Foundation.

Full Product Details

Author:   Sylvie Delacroix (King's College London, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Hart Publishing
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781509961894

ISBN 10:   1509961895
Pages:   176
Publication Date:   22 February 2024
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

I. What is a Habit? II. The Habitual and the Ethical: Unhappy Marriage? III. Why Does ‘Habitual Ethics’ Matter Today? IV. Chapters Overview PART I HABIT AND INDIVIDUAL AGENCY 1. From Facts to Norms (and Back) I. Defining ‘the Natural’ (and the Role of Science) A. When ‘the Natural’ is Restricted to that which is the Result of Elementary Forces B. Inhabited Nature II. The ‘Motivation Problem’ III. ‘Following a Rule’ A. ‘Primitive Appropriateness’ B. Dispositions, the Possibility of Mistakes and ‘Primitive Inappropriateness’ 2. Habit and Skill Acquisition I. Skilful Coping and Skilful Action II. The Structure of the Environment and its Impact on Skill Acquisition A. The ‘Skilled Intuitions’ Stance B. The ‘Heuristics and Bias’ Stance C. Explaining Divergent Stances on Intuitive Expertise by Reference to the Structure of the Environment III. ‘Tacit’ Learning Attitude(s) A. Automaticity and Availability to Conscious Awareness B. Automaticity and Adaptability i. External Goal Adaptability ii. Adaptability of One’s Self-understanding 3. Routine and Rigidified Habits I. Teleologically Indeterminate Professional Encounters A. The Situational Vulnerability at the Heart of the Lay–Professional Encounter B. The Particular Responsibility that Stems from Lay Situational Vulnerability II. Humility and ‘Sophia’: Pre-Conditions of Habit Plasticity? III. Obstacles to Habit Plasticity in Professional Contexts A. Case Study B. The Emotional and Physiological Costs of Habit Reversal C. Balancing Model Stability and Habit Plasticity within the Learning Process 4. Growing Out of the Habitual I. Growing Out of the Habitual: Habit versus Reason II. When ‘Reason’ Shields Us from Normative Significance 5. Growing within the Habitual I. Responsiveness to Reasons A. Why ‘Reasons’? B. The Gap between ‘Reasons’ and Normative Significance II. Habit and the Work of Attention A. GP Consultation with Seemingly ‘Peripheral’ Child Safeguarding Concerns B. Imposing a Mental Defence in Criminal Law C. Seeing Past Habitual Salience and the Role of Personal Encounters III. Responsiveness to the Other: A Forgotten Capability? A. Selective Responsiveness and the Possibility of Immanent Critique B. A Pervasive – Yet Optimistic – ‘Mode of Being Ethical’? C. Compromised ‘Forms of Life’ PART II COLLECTIVE HABITS AND MORAL TRANSFORMATIONS 6. Law and Habits I. The Narrow View: The Step from ‘the Pre-Legal to the Legal’ A. Organically Grown Customs versus ‘Constitutive’ Practices B. Addressing a ‘Defective’ Form of Social Control Through ‘Official’ Rules C. Accounting for the Emergence of Law as a Normative Phenomenon II. Non-Deliberative Components within a Genealogy of Legal Normativity A. Habit Hostility B. Habit Ambivalence i. The Wittgensteinian Take on ‘Custom’ ii. The Weberian Narrative C. From Collective Patterns of Behaviour to Legal Norms III. The Types of Habits Law May Foster A. Qualitatively Different Habits B. Division of Normative Labour and its Moral Risks C. Legal Institutional Structures, Alienation Risks and Habit Rigidification 7. Algorithmic Habits and Social Transformations I. Inferred Traits and Optimisation Endeavours A. Profile-based, Personalised Optimisation Tools B. Manipulation as Hidden and Non-deliberative Interventions II. Precluded Transformations: Alienation Through Reification A. Narrowing of Imaginative Horizons B. Habitats and their Inherent Narrowing of Encountered Worldviews C. Habitat Co-construction and the Possibility of Experimentation III. Ensemble Contestability A. Case Study B. From ‘Passive’ and Individualist Explanations to Ensemble Contestability IV. Bottom-up Data Trusts

Reviews

The flow of thought is compelling, but it is also a dance of the intellect, where you need to stand back after each section to marvel at where it has taken you and is about to take you. * BJGP Life *

Author Information

Sylvie Delacroix is the Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law at King's College London, UK.

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