Commentators generally identify humanity (that which makes us distinctively human beings and sets us apart from all other animal species) with two closely related aspects of rationality: the capacity to set ends and the capacity to be autonomous, both of which are capacities to be a moral agent (for example, Wood 1999, Korsgaard 1996, Hill 1997).
Rationality, a capacity for coherent thought, is indeed fundamental to public life, as to all life.
They do so on the grounds that only those beings that have such characteristics as rationality, cognitive capacity, or sentiency can be oppressed.
At the same time, however, he also claimed that rationality possesses capacities of communicative integrity and phenomenological self-overcoming, and, if authentically exercised, it is able to escape its narrowly functional form, to expose itself to new contents beyond its limits and antinomies, and to elaborate new and more cognitively unified conceptual structures.
Certainly the grasp on reality enjoyed by such economists is hardly improved by a propensity to assume in their models a level of individual rationality, and a capacity for short-term interest calculations, that is literally beyond the capacity of ordinary human beings to deliver.
Great apes deliberate, plan, and reason, thus displaying rationality and the capacity for intentional action.
We are social beings in the sense that in the absence of society and social development we have but inchoate and unrealized capacities, including our capacities for rationality, morality, even language itself.
But so far for Basile, "the possibility for gibberish far outweighs the possibility of rationality", and even the capacity to digitally search the library's books "doesn't change much".
He argued that all human beings share the capacity for rationality and have natural rights that stem from this capacity.
Our abilities as knowers are instances of our capacity for rationality, which is part of what makes us human beings intrinsically valuable.
