Deontology, Consequentialism, and Rationality
Do rationality and morality stand in opposition to one another? Can a person act rationally in a moral cause, and is it possible to act morally without doing just that? One's answer to these questions may vary with one's conception of morality, and also with one's conception of rationality. This paper argues that, while our conventional views of rationality are not very helpful in answering these questions, a different (and new) conception of rationality offers the possibility of an answer which is not sensitive to some large issues in moral theory. The proposed new view of rationality is discussed with its context in the first major section of the paper, while the second begins with an expository review of some concepts from moral philosophy which have application in a study of rationality, and then confronts the role of values in economics.
We examine the antecedents of customer satisfaction in the restaurant sector, paying particular attention to perceived value and price level. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we extract latent topics from the text of Yelp! reviews, then analyze the relationship between these topics and satisfaction, measured as the difference between review rating and user average review rating.