Chris Ranalli – författare

Written by global, multidisciplinary experts, Responsibility for Extreme Beliefs and Behaviors explores the relation between responsibility and extreme beliefs and behaviors. The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the issue of who or what is responsible, such as individuals, groups, the community, or even structural factors. It also addresses how individual responsibility relates to group responsibility. The second part concerns agency and various kinds of responsibility. It studies to what extent we can ascribe agency, both moral and epistemic, to extremists, and explores how epistemic agency depends on cognitive and affective capacities, self-knowledge, and intellectual self-trust, self-esteem, and self-respect. Moreover, it examines which environments foster extreme beliefs and behaviors and whether extremists and terrorists can be described as evil and how that bears on responsibility. The third and final part investigates when responsibility attributions are appropriate. It looks at various excusing and exculpating conditions of individual or group responsibility for extreme beliefs. It studies indoctrination and how much room it leaves for responsibility, and considers factors such as experiencing peer pressure, being in an epistemic bubble or echo chamber, and living in a society dealing with fake news and propaganda, and to what extent such factors can provide an excuse. In doing so, it takes not only the legal but equally the moral and epistemic dimensions of responsibility into account and how these relate to one another.

This book develops and defends a novel social epistemological account of indoctrination. It answers important epistemological, ethical, and political questions about what indoctrination is, why it is epistemically harmful, how it can be practiced, and how we should talk about indoctrination.The author presents three views related to the epistemology of indoctrination. First, he argues that indoctrination is most fundamentally a structural epistemic phenomenon which results in closed-minded beliefs. The sources of indoctrination are diverse: institutional structures, technological systems, ideological frames, and individual actions. What unites them is that they lead to the systematic failure to consider seriously the relevant alternatives to what we are taught, whether by accident or by design. Second, he makes the case that indoctrination is always wrong because it disrespects agents in their capacity as epistemic agents, even when it results in true belief. Third and finally, he contends that public indoctrination-ascriptions are political propaganda; they function to promote political agendas, which can, ironically, breed the conditions for indoctrination rather than forestall it.The Philosophy of Indoctrination is an essential resource for researchers and advanced students working in social and political epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and terrorism and radicalization studies.