Why does ethics only weakly contribute to the most crucial problems of the current world? Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics: A Journey Beyond Humanism as We Know It explores how the concept of moral agency embedded in modern humanist ethics, in its reliance on environmentally harmful and scientifically implausible presuppositions, prevents ethics from efficiently supporting a sustainability transition. The modernist individualist notion of agency includes conceptual dichotomies between moral agency and human nature, mind and body, reason and emotion, and knowledge and will, yet it should be revised without dismissing responsibility, normativity, and a shared ground for critical assessment. Suvielise Nurmi proposes an agential shift resting on a relational concept of agency, combining ecofeminist and evolutionary criticisms of modernism together with various interdisciplinary discussions involving philosophy of mind, cognitive science, anthropology, social ontology, and developmental biology and psychology. This book argues that the relational shift can resolve the dilemma and bring environmental relationships to the core of ethical discourse: there is no ethics distinct from environmental ethics. Environmental responsibilities can be justified as responsibilities for one’s relationally considered agency.

This volume LNCS 14282 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th European Conference EUMAS 2023, held in Naples, Italy, during September 2023. This volume includes 24 full papers and 5 short papers, carefully selected from 47 submissions. Additionally, the volume features 16 short papers, rigorously reviewed from 20 submissions for the PhD day. The conference focused on the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, covering a wide range of topics.

This book takes an in-depth look at how education and psychology relate to each other, and at the current state of this relationship. Through comprehensive analysis of the ideological, historical, social and professional contexts of this interaction, the author develops the theme that, despite basic differences in aims, the fields are interconnected.