Autonomy and Moral Psychology

Conscience is oft-referred to yet not understood. This text develops a theory of cognition around a model of conscience, the ACTWith model. It represents a synthesis of results from contemporary neuroscience with traditional philosophy, building from Jamesian insights into the emergence of the self to narrative identity, all the while motivated by a single mechanism as represented in the ACTWith model. Emphasis is placed on clarifying historical expressions and demonstrations of conscience - Socrates, Heidegger, Kant, M.L. King - in light (...) of the ACTWith model, while at once turning these resources to developing the basic architecture. In the end, this text aims to enrich moral theory by improving our understanding of moral cognition, while at once providing a useful tool in everyday moral practice and self-development. (shrink)

Mechanistic explanations of cognitive activities are ubiquitous in cognitive science. Humanist critics often object that mechanistic accounts of the mind are incapable of accounting for the moral agency exhibited by humans. We counter this objection by offering a sketch of how the mechanistic perspective can accommodate moral agency. We ground our argument in the requirement that biological systems be active in order to maintain themselves in nonequilibrium conditions. We discuss such consequences as a role for mental mechanisms in controlling active (...) systems and agents’ development of a self concept in which the self is represented as a moral agent. (shrink)

According to the traditional Western concept of freedom, the ability to exercise free will depends on the availability of options and the possibility to consciously decide which one to choose. Since neuroscientific research increasingly shows the limits of what we in fact consciously control, it seems that our belief in free will and hence in personal autonomy is in trouble. -/- A closer look at the phenomenology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) gives us reason to doubt the traditional concept of freedom (...) in terms of conscious control. Patients suffering from OCD experience themselves as unfree. The question is whether their lack of freedom is due to a lack of will power. Do they have too little conscious control over their thoughts and actions? Or could it be the opposite: are they exerting too much conscious control over their thoughts and actions? -/- In this chapter, we will argue that OCD patients testify to the general condition that exercising an increased conscious control over actions can in fact diminish the sense of agency rather than increase the experience of freedom. The experiences of these patients show that the traditional conception of freedom in terms of ‘free will’ has major shortcomings. There is an alternative, however, to be found in the work of Hannah Arendt. She advocates a conception of freedom as freedom in action. Combined with phenomenological insights on action, Arendt’s account of freedom helps us to get a more adequate understanding of the role of deliberation in the experience of freedom. We argue that the experience of freedom depends on the right balance between deliberate control and unreflective actions. (shrink)

Bipolar or Related Disorders (BoRD) present unique practical and existential problems for people who live with them. All agents experience changes in the things they care about over time, however people living with BoRD face drastic shifts in what seems valuable to them, which upset their longitudinal values (if, indeed, any stable longitudinal values are available in the first place). Navigating these evaluative high seas presents agents living with BoRD with a distinctive existential question, not shared by those on calmer (...) waters. I draw out two contrasting ways in which someone living with BoRD might seek to support their self-determination in these circumstances, by crafting appropriate self care and support regimes. The first strategy involves managing one’s affective episodes so that they do not interrupt one’s plans and long-term agency over time. The second involves a regiment that allows one the greatest degree of freedom in adapting to changes in one’s experiences of value. What distinguishes these sorts of self-determination is the scope at which they are predicated. Whilst both sorts of self-determination allow an individual to rule themselves, they alter the overall shape of one’s autonomy in quite different ways. (shrink)

In this paper, I challenge the argument that if we take health to be a meta-capability, we will be able to address the vulnerabilities that characterize human life. Instead, I argue that some vulnerabilities, like that attached to being a patient, can not be successfully addressed.

In the debates regarding the ethics of human enhancement, proponents have found it difficult to refute the concern, voiced by certain bioconservatives, that cognitive enhancement violates the autonomy of the enhanced. However, G. Owen Schaefer, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu have attempted not only to avoid autonomy-based bioconservative objections, but to argue that cognition-enhancing biomedical interventions can actually enhance autonomy. In response, this paper has two aims: firstly, to explore the limits of their argument; secondly, and more importantly, to develop (...) a more complete understanding of autonomy and its relation to cognitive enhancement. By drawing a distinction between the capacity for autonomy and the exercise and achievement of autonomy and by exploring the possible effects of cognitive enhancement on both competence and authenticity conditions for autonomy, the paper identifies and explains which dimensions of autonomy can and cannot, in principle, be enhanced via direct cognitive interventions. This allows us to draw conclusions regarding the limits of cognitive enhancement as a means for enhancing autonomy. (shrink)

At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation through the lens of Simone de (...) Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism: a form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today – well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance. (shrink)

It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as reason (...) to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect. (shrink)

Much of the literature on impairment to self-governance focuses on cases in which a person either lacks the ability to protect herself from errant urges or cases in which a person lacks the capacity to initiate self-reflective agential processes. This has led to frameworks for thinking about self-governance designed with only the possibility of these sorts of impairments in mind. I challenge this orthodoxy using the case of melancholic depression to show that there is a third way that self-governance can (...) be undermined: an agent may fail to form the desire she most wants to act on. (shrink)

This essay demonstrates the prominence of imitation in Kierkegaard’s ethics. I move beyond his idea of authentic existence modeled on Christ and explore the secular dimension of Kierkegaard’s insights about human nature and imitation. I start with presenting imitation as key to understanding the ethical dimension of the relationship between the universal and individual aspects of the human self in Kierkegaard. I then show that Kierkegaard’s moral concepts of “primitivity” and “comparison” are a response to his sociological and psychological observations (...) about imitation from an ethical point of view. In the final section of this paper, I briefly engage Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “ethics of individuality” and Gabriel Tarde’s “laws of imitation” to explore Kierkegaard’s consideration of ethics and imitation as situated within the context of a broader conversation on imitation. (shrink)

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit (...) und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl. (shrink)

The notion of authenticity, i.e., being “genuine,” “real,” or “true to oneself,” is sometimes held as critical to a person’s autonomy, so that inauthenticity prevents the person from making autonomous decisions or leading an autonomous life. It has been pointed out that authenticity is difficult to observe in others. Therefore, judgments of inauthenticity have been found inadequate to underpin paternalistic interventions, among other things. This article delineates what justifies judgments of inauthenticity. It is argued that for persons who wish to (...) live according to the prevailing social and moral standards and desires that are seriously undesirable according to those standards, it is justified to judge that a desire is inauthentic to the extent that it is due to causal factors that are alien to the person and to the extent that it deviates from the person’s practical identity. The article contributes to a tradition of thinking about authenticity which is known mainly from Frankfurt and Dworkin, and bridges the gap between theoretical ideals of authenticity and real authenticity-related problems in practical biomedical settings. (shrink)

Given the ubiquity and centrality of social and relational influences to the human experience, our conception of self-governance must adequately account for these external influences. The inclusion of socio-historical, externalist considerations into more traditional internalist accounts of autonomy has been an important feature of the debate over personal autonomy in recent years. But the relevant socio-temporal dynamics of autonomy are not only historical in nature. There are also important, and under-examined, future-oriented questions about how we retain autonomy while incorporating new (...) values into the existing set that guides our interaction with the world. In this paper, we examine these questions from two complementary perspectives: philosophy and neuroscience. After contextualizing the philosophical debate, we show the importance to theories of autonomous agency of the capacity to appropriately adapt our values and beliefs, in light of relevant experiences and evidence, to changing circumstances. We present a plausible philosophical account of this process, which we claim is generally applicable to theories about the nature of autonomy, both internalist and externalist alike. We then evaluate this account by providing a model for how the incorporation of values might occur in the brain; one that is inspired by recent theoretical and empirical advances in our understanding of the neural processes by which our beliefs are updated by new information. Finally, we synthesize these two perspectives and discuss how the neurobiology might inform the philosophical discussion. (shrink)

This paper concerns the relationship between two questions. The first is a question about inner freedom: What is it to be rendered unfree, not by external obstacles, but by aspects of oneself? The second is a question about agency: What is it to fail at being a thing that genuinely acts, and instead to be a thing that is merely acted upon, passive in relation to its own behaviour? It is widely believed that answers to the first question must rest (...) on or be partly explained by answers to the second. Here I argue that this is a mistake: losses of inner freedom are not, after all, explicable in terms of failures of agency. To establish this conclusion, I consider three familiar lines of thought that appear to tie ideas about inner freedom to ideas about agency, each relating to a different conception of inner freedom: absence of inner constraint, self-government, and absence of determination by external forces. I argue that, in each case, any apparent conceptual reliance on a special conception of agency is merely illusory, the result being that we must allow clear water between our theories of inner freedom and our theories of agency. This conclusion is of significance for contemporary theories of agency and personal autonomy, as well as for ‘positive’ conceptions of political liberty. (shrink)

This article for the PHILOKLES Journal for Popular Philosophy surveys a few common theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of self-deception before putting forward a thus far relatively unexplored intentionalist option, namely what the author calls the "project model of self-deception". On this model, self-deception is understood as a dynamic, diachronic activity, aimed at the preservation of a certain self-image, to which an agent is implicitly committed. The author shows how this model can make subjects responsible for their self-deceptions without running (...) straightforwardly into the so-called "paradoxes" of self-deception. (shrink)

Von einem Leben der Freiheit zu sprechen hat eine doppelte Bedeutung. Auf der einen Seite legt diese Wendung nahe, dass schon dem Leben das Merkmal der Freiheit zukommt. Zum anderen deutet der Ausdruck darauf hin, dass die Freiheit ein ihr eigenes Leben besitzen mag. In diesem doppelten Genitiv wird so ein Übergang angedeutet von der Freiheit, die dem Leben als solchem zukommt, zu dem eigenen Leben, das die Freiheit führt. Inwiefern aber ist schon das Leben frei und inwiefern besitzt auch (...) die Freiheit immer noch ein Leben? Warum mag es unserem Verständnis der Freiheit und des Lebens dienen, ihren inneren Zusammenhang zu begreifen? Und in welchem Sinne genau sind Leben und Freiheit aufeinander zu beziehen? -/- Die folgenden Überlegungen werden drei aufeinander bezogene Weisen erläutern, in denen Freiheit und Leben in einem wesentlichen Zusammenhang stehen: (1) Freiheit ist ein Vermögen, das sich nur in lebenden Wesen herausbilden kann. (2) Um die Form der Freiheit zu verstehen, müssen wir die Form des Lebens verstehen. (3) Um die Wirklichkeit der Freiheit zu begreifen, müssen wir verstehen, inwiefern die Freiheit ein Leben eigener Art gewinnt. In diesem Sinne sind wir auf den Lebensbegriff verwiesen, um die Genese, die Form und die Wirklichkeit der Freiheit zu verstehen. Um diese drei Gedanken zu entwickeln, wendet sich dieses Buch zwei Autoren zu, die zwar als Philosophen der Freiheit geläufig sind, wohl aber kaum als »Lebensphilosophen« gelten können: Kant und Hegel. (shrink)

According to our traditional conception of agency, most human beings are agents and most, if not all, nonhuman animals are not. However, recent developments in philosophy and psychology have made it clear that we need more than one conception of agency, since human and nonhuman animals are capable of thinking and acting in more than one kind of way. In this paper, I make a distinction between perceptual and propositional agency, and I argue that many nonhuman animals are perceptual agents (...) and that many human beings are both kinds of agent. I then argue that, insofar as human and nonhuman animals exercise the same kind of agency, they have the same kind of moral status, and I explore some of the moral implications of this idea. (shrink)

Kant realizes the principle of autonomy of the will as the sublime principle of morality. To him, if the principles we will are constituted by a being which poses universal laws, our "will or want" also acts autonomously and independently. Accordingly, moral laws are not only posed by humankind herself but she obliges herself to act according to the laws she herself has posed. Therefore, Kant takes autonomy into meticulous consideration in the realm of action and agency. With this in (...) mind, the current article analyzes this principle on the basis of three extant interpretations of autonomy that is individual, moral, and political autonomies; it elucidates these three kinds of autonomy while referring to their propinquity with Kant's. Ultimately, it comes in conclusion that whereas they have been grounded in different contexts, they do not mainly differ from Kant's autonomy of the will because of their commonality in the two meanings of "being free from dependence" and "capability to pose laws". For Kant, the autonomy of the will can be treated as some kind of moral autonomy: one must be bound/subjected to duties of morality in order to apply or act according merely to one's individual autonomy thereby the political sovereignty can also achieves its entire autonomy. (shrink)

We outline a framework of multilevel neurocognitive mechanisms that incorporates representation and computation. We argue that paradigmatic explanations in cognitive neuroscience fit this framework and thus that cognitive neuroscience constitutes a revolutionary break from traditional cognitive science. Whereas traditional cognitive scientific explanations were supposed to be distinct and autonomous from mechanistic explanations, neurocognitive explanations aim to be mechanistic through and through. Neurocognitive explanations aim to integrate computational and representational functions and structures across multiple levels of organization in order to explain (...) cognition. To a large extent, practicing cognitive neuroscientists have already accepted this shift, but philosophical theory has not fully acknowledged and appreciated its significance. As a result, the explanatory framework underlying cognitive neuroscience has remained largely implicit. We explicate this framework and demonstrate its contrast with previous approaches. (shrink)

Political philosophy presents a static conception of childhood as a state of lack, a condition where intellectual, physical, and moral capacities are undeveloped. This view, referred to by David Kennedy as the deficit view of childhood, is problematic because it systematically disparages certain universal features of humanity—dependency and growth—and incorrectly characterizes them as features of childhood only. Thus there is a strict separation between childhood and adulthood because adults are characterized as fully autonomous agents who have reached the end of (...) their moral and cognitive development. I argue that this view is mistaken, and limits both the developmental abilities of adults and ongoing moral development within an organized state. I propose that we view dependency as a human condition. By doing so, children and adults form the kind of relationship with one another that encourages the growth and development of our moral sense in both childhood and adulthood. (shrink)

The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st (...) and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation. (shrink)

This article takes the following two assumptions for granted: first, that gifts influence physicians and, second, that the influences gifts have on physicians may be harmful for patients. These assumptions are common in the applied ethics literature, and they prompt an obvious practical question, namely, what is the best way to mitigate the negative effects? We examine the negative effects of gift giving in depth, considering how the influence occurs, and we assert that the ethical debate surrounding gift-giving practices must (...) be reoriented. Our main claim is that the failure of recent policies addressing gift giving can be traced to a misunderstanding of what psychological mechanisms are most likely to underpin physicians’ biased behavior as a result of interaction with the medical industry. The problem with gift giving is largely not a matter of malicious or consciously self-interested behavior, but of well-intentioned actions on the part of physicians that are nonetheless perniciously infected by the presence of the medical industry. Substantiating this claim will involve elaboration on two points. First, we will retrace the history of policies regarding gift giving between the medical profession and the medical industry and highlight how most policies assume a rationalistic view of moral agency. Reliance on this view of agency is best illustrated by past attempts to address gift giving in terms of conflicts of interest. Second, we will introduce and motivate an alternate view of moral agency emerging from recent literature in social psychology on implicit social cognition. We will show that proper consideration of implicit social cognition paints a picture of human psychology at odds with the rationalistic model assumed in discussions of COIs. With these two pieces on the table we will be able to show that, without fully appreciating the social-psychological mechanisms of implicit cognition, policy-makers are likely to overlook significant aspects of how gifts influence doctors. (shrink)

I argue that acting autonomously is often a far more difficult achievement than much of the recent literature on this topic would suggest. Several of the most influential autonomy achievement theories have low achievement thresholds, and there are conceptual and empirical reasons to hold that autonomy achievement ought to be viewed as having much higher thresholds in general. I consider and rebut a variety of reasons for keeping the autonomy achievement threshold low, and conclude with a brief word on the (...) normative implications of my thesis. (shrink)

This essay examines whether Confucian role ethics offers resources to identify and redress gender inequality and oppression. On its face, Confucian role ethics seems ill suited for this task for two reasons. First, a central tenet of role ethics is that a person is constituted by her roles. Because roles are constituted by norms that govern them, many social roles are, and have been, historically oppressive. Second, discussions of Confucian role ethics tend to avoid talk of autonomy, yet autonomy is (...) helpful in identifying and rectifying gender inequalities insofar as autonomy tracks the ways oppression disables individuals’ abilities to achieve personhood. My goal in this essay is to work... (shrink)

What is it for a person to be autonomous? Starting with a philosophical puzzle about personal autonomy and by way of critically discussing contemporary accounts, this monograph argues that AUTONOMY is a thick normative concept – the concept of a certain kind of practical authority. It then develops a conception of autonomy which solves the puzzle and offers an adequate understanding of what it means to determine oneself.

MacKay and Robinson (2016) claim that some legal procedures that regulate organ donations (VAC, opt-in, opt-out) bypass people's rational capacities and thus are “potentially morally worse than MAC”, which only employs a very mild form of coercion. We provide a critique of their argumentation and defend the opposite thesis: MAC is potentially morally worse than the three other options.

Recently, many philosophers have been inclined to ascribe mentality to animals on the main grounds that they possess certain complex computational abilities. In this paper I contend that this view is misleading, since it wrongly assumes that those computational abilities demand a psychological explanation. On the contrary, they can be just characterised from a computational level of explanation, which picks up a domain of computation and information processing that is common to many computing systems but is autonomous from the domain (...) of psychology. Thus, I propose that it is possible to conceive insects and other animals as mere computing agents, without having any commitment to ascribe mentality to them. I conclude by sketching a proposal about how to draw the line between mere computing and genuine mentality. (shrink)

What makes it possible to affect one another, to move and be moved by another person? Why do some of our encounters transform us? The experience of moving one another points to the inter-affective in intersubjectivity. Inter-affection is hard to account for under a cognitivist banner, and has not received much attention in embodied work on intersubjectivity. I propose that understanding inter-affection needs a combination of insights into self-affection, embodiment, and interaction processes. I start from Michel Henry's radically immanent idea (...) of self-affection, and bring it into a contrastive dialogue with the enactive concepts of autonomy and (participatory) sense-making. I suggest that the latter ideas can open up Henry's idea of self-affection to inter-affection (something he aimed to do, but did not quite manage) and that, in turn, Henry's work can provide insights into underexplored elements of intersubjectivity, such as its ineffable and mysterious aspects, and erotic encounters. (shrink)

In this short piece of work, an attempt has been made to revisit the skepticism about free will, which has historically been directed to it due to certain mistaken assumptions about determinism and iron it out. Determinism is often conflated with fatalism, and this is where the skepticism about the possibility of agential autonomy and control begins. If fatalism is true with respect to volitional actions of agents, then there is no point in planning or choice making as fatalism dissolves (...) the idea of control. The main argument proposed in this work consists in showing that even though deterministic causation involves the possibility of a single unique outcome as a necessary consequence of the antecedent conditions and the governing laws of nature, the history of rational behaviour of every agent can be explained within a global deterministic kind of causal framework. If rightly interpreted, it provides a glimpse into how different courses of action remain feasibly open to an agent at a given time. The concept of free will has been outlined first to enable the reader to see later that looking at the doctrine of determinism with the right kind of mindset only reveals its pro-free will nature. (shrink)

“Di Iorio offers a new approach to Hayek’s Sensory Order, linking neuroscience to the old Verstehen tradition and to contemporary theories of self-organizing systems; this should be on the reading list of everyone who is interested in Hayek’s thought.” Barry Smith University at Buffalo, editor of The Monist “This impressive and well-researched book breaks new ground in our understanding of F.A. Hayek and of methodological individualism more generally. It shows that methodological individualism sanctions neither an atomistic view of society nor (...) a mechanical determinism. The book carefully analyzes an important tradition in the social sciences, and compares it to many important philosophical, sociological and economic systems of thought. This is an enlightening book for all scholars interested in the methodological problems of the social sciences.” Mario J. Rizzo New York University “One of Hayek’s most important contributions is his linking of complex methodological individualism, which deals with the emergence of spontaneous orders and unintended collective structures in complex self-organizing social systems, with a cognitive psychology. What makes Francesco Di Iorio’s book of great interest is that, by building on Hayek’s seminal book The Sensory Order, it deepens the connections between cognition and rules of just conduct, taking into account relevant theories on subjectivity and consciousness such as phenomenology, hermeneutics and enactivism.” Jean Petitot École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHESS, Paris “In this thoughtful and enlightening book Francesco Di Iorio uses Hayek’s cognitive psychology as the starting point for investigation of the relationship between the autonomy of the agent and socio-cultural influences within methodological individualism. The book provides an illuminating and innovative analysis of a central issue in the philosophy of social science by setting Hayek’s view on mind and action in fruitful relation to approaches such as Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Varela’s and Maturana’s enaction, Boudon’s interpretative sociology, Popper’s fallibilism and Mises’ praxeology. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is its argument that hermeneutics and fallibilism refer not to two different methods but to the same one.” Dario Antiseri Emeritus Professor at LUISS University, Rome “Francesco Di Iorio’s book explores, in an original way, the connections between Hayek’s methodological individualism and his fascinating idea that human mind is both an interpretative device and a self-organizing system. It is a brilliant, clearly written work, characterized by a certain intellectual courage, which makes a remarkable contribution to the sociology of knowledge.” Gérald Bronner Paris Diderot University. (shrink)

Strategies for improving individual decision making have attracted attention from a range of disciplines. Surprisingly, neuroscience has been largely absent from this conversation, despite the fact that it has recently begun illuminating the neural bases of how and why we make decisions, and is poised for further such advances. Here we address empirical and normative questions about “nudging” through the lens of neuroscience. We suggest that the neuroscience of decision making can provide a framework for understanding how nudges work, and (...) how they can be improved. Towards this end, we first examine how nudges can be incorporated into a leading model of decision making supported by neurobiological data, and use the model to make predictions about the relative effectiveness of different classes of nudges. We then use the model to demonstrate how nudges can both infringe upon and promote autonomy. Finally, we explore the normative implications of the converging consensus from neuroscience and related fields that many everyday decisions are susceptible to covert external influences. (shrink)

Recently Jason Hanna has argued that a particular type of susceptibility to framing effects—namely, the tendency to reverse one’s choice between certain logically equivalent frames—invalidates actual tokens of consent. Here I argue that this claim is false: proneness to choice-reversal per se between the relevant types of frames does not invalidate consent.

Moral patients deserve moral consideration and concern – they have moral standing. What factors drive attributions of moral standing? Understanding these factors is important because it indicates how broadly individuals conceptualize the moral world, and suggests how they will treat various entities, both human and non-human. This understanding has recently been advanced by a series of studies conducted by both psychologists and philosophers, which have revealed three main drivers of moral standing: the capacity to suffer, intelligence or autonomy, and the (...) nature of an entity's disposition. These studies have also revealed causal links between moral standing and other variables of interest, namely, mental state attributions and moral behavior. In this review, I consider this recent research, aiming to clarify what the balance of evidence indicates about how moral standing is judged and about its links to mind perception and behavior. I conclude by suggesting open questions for future research on this exciting topic. (shrink)

The authors argue that Erving Goffman developed concepts that contribute to an understanding of historical changes in the construction of the self and enable us to see the new forms that self-construction is taking in a society driven by consumption, marketing, and media. These concepts include: commercial realism; dramatic scripting; hyper-ritualization; the glimpse; and the dissolution or undermining of the real, the authentic, and the autonomous. By placing Goffman's under-discussed work, Gender Advertisements, in rapprochement with the work of Guy Debord, (...) Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson, we draw out shared concerns over the ways that the self becomes externally defined and incoherent in advanced consumer capitalism. We then turn to Goffman's “Territories of the Self” in order to show that Goffman balances his historicist analysis with a theory of a self that can maintain its coherence amidst the fragmenting forces of the media and the consumer society. Thus we document the continuing relevance of Goffman's thought for cultural and media analysis in contemporary consumer society. (shrink)

There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science regarding how best to interpret the relationship between neuroscience and psychology. It has traditionally been argued that either the two domains will evolve and change over time until they converge on a single unified account of human behaviour, or else that they will continue to work in isolation given that they identify properties and states that exist autonomously from one another (due to the multiple-realizability of psychological (...) states). In this paper, I argue that progress in psychology and neuroscience is contingent on the fact that both of these positions are false. Contra the convergence position, I argue that the theories of psychology and the theories of neuroscience are scientifically valuable as representational tools precisely because they cannot be integrated into a single account. However, contra the autonomy position, I propose that the theories of psychology and neuroscience are deeply dependent on one another for further refinement and improvement. In this respect, there is an irreconcilable codependence between psychology and neuroscience that is necessary for both domains to improve and progress. The two domains are forever linked while simultaneously being unable to integrate. (shrink)

Considerable ferment exists around the changing nature of children’s play and its place in contemporary childhood. Traditional perspectives on early childhood research have tended to trivialize and obscure the possibilities inherent in children’s ways of knowing. Researchers seldom ask children what play means to them. This article proffers a relatively new image of childhood, one that presents young children as collaborators in research, as competent interpreters of their lived experience. This study investigates children’s knowledge: their knowledge about what play is, (...) how it is experienced, and its role in their lives, at school and at home. Interviews conducted with primary school students reveal how they perceive their lives in relation to the mainstream world of adults. Teachers and parents are seen as those who define, control, and sanction play. These children rely on the particularities and situatedness of everyday events to describe the meaning of play in their lives. Play emerges, to some degree, akin to a state of mind, invariably related to issues of autonomy, agency, and power. (shrink)

Law functions on the basis of some presuppositions of what a person is. The purposes and tasks that are projected on a legal system depend on an understanding of personhood. Also, courts continuously find themselves in situations where they have to define the person or the legal subject, at times with surprising consequences. However, legal theory lacks clear criteria for personhood. We do not know who or what a legal person is, nor do we know what kind of being we (...) want her to be. There is clearly a need for critical examination of the concept of legal personhood. This article takes its inspiration from a historical theory, which sheds light on the complex logics of subjectivity. Reflecting on the thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte we can contemplate fundamental aspects of personhood, especially in its politico-legal dimensions. It is claimed in this article that even though the legal subject has to be autonomous to some degree, acknowledging otherness inside the self is a compelling way of understanding legal personhood. (shrink)

There is preliminary evidence, from case reports and investigational studies, to suggest that Deep Brain Stimulation could be used to treat some patients with Anorexia Nervosa. Although this research is at an early stage, the invasive nature of the intervention and the vulnerability of the potential patients are such that anticipatory ethical analysis is warranted. In this paper, we first show how different treatment mechanisms raise different philosophical and ethical questions. We distinguish three potential mechanisms alluded to in the neuroscientific (...) literature, relating to desire, control, and emotion, respectively. We explain why the precise nature of the mechanism has important implications for the patient’s autonomy and personal identity. In the second part of the paper, we consider practical dimensions of offering DBS to patients with AN in certain cases. We first discuss some limited circumstances where the mere offering of the intervention might be perceived as exerting a degree of coercive pressure that could serve to undermine the validity of the patient’s consent. Finally, we consider the implications of potential effects of DBS for the authenticity of the patient’s choice to continue using stimulation to ameliorate their condition. (shrink)

What we traditionally call ‘conscious thought’ actually is a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content. Conceptually, it must be described as an unintentional form of inner behaviour. Empirical research shows that we are not mentally autonomous subjects for about two thirds of our conscious lifetime, because (...) while conscious cognition is unfolding, it often cannot be inhibited, suspended, or terminated. The instantiation of a stable first- person perspective as well as of certain necessary conditions of personhood turn out to be rare, graded, and dynamically variable properties of human beings. I argue that individual representational events only become part of a personal-level process by being functionally integrated into a specific form of transparent conscious self-representation, the ‘epistemic agent model’. The EAM may be the true origin of our consciously experienced firstperson perspective. (shrink)

Choice architecture is heralded as a policy approach that does not coercively reduce freedom of choice. Still we might worry that this approach fails to respect individual choice because it subversively manipulates individuals, thus contravening their personal autonomy. In this article I address two arguments to this effect. First, I deny that choice architecture is necessarily heteronomous. I explain the reasons we have for avoiding heteronomous policy-making and offer a set of four conditions for non-heteronomy. I then provide examples of (...) nudges that meet these conditions. I argue that these policies are capable of respecting and promoting personal autonomy, and show this claim to be true across contrasting conceptions of autonomy. Second, I deny that choice architecture is disrespectful because it is epistemically paternalistic. This critique appears to loom large even against non-heteronomous nudges. However, I argue that while some of these policies may exhibit epistemically paternalistic tendencies, these tendencies do not necessarily undermine personal autonomy. Thus, if we are to find such policies objectionable, we cannot do so on the grounds of respect for autonomy. (shrink)

The debate in philosophy of science in the twentieth century over the theory-laden-ness of observation showed both that there are many ways in which scientific observation depends on theory, and also highlighted some ways in which it is blind to theoretical assumptions. Debates in the philosophy of medicine have shown how concepts and theories of illness are value-laden, especially in psychiatry. Kious in his helpful and stimulating target article argues that the mainstream approach to autonomy depends on assumptions about value, (...) and this conclusion is surely correct. However, his focus on the concept of non-voluntariness is problematic, as I argue, and we are better off not seeing it as laden with. (shrink)

This paper offers a revisionary interpretation of Sartre's early views on human freedom. Sartre articulates a subtle account of a fundamental sense of human freedom as autonomy, in terms of human consciousness being both reasons-responsive and in a distinctive sense self-determining. The aspects of Sartre's theory of human freedom that underpin his early ethics are shown to be based on his phenomenological analysis of consciousness as, in its fundamental mode of self-presence, not an object in the world. Sartre has a (...) multi-level theory of the reasons-sensitivity of consciousness. At one level, consciousness's being alive to reasons is a matter of the affective perception of values and disvalues as features of phenomenal objects. This part of his theory, a development of Scheler's, is, however, situated within a broader phenomenological analysis resulting in the claim that the ultimate reasons acknowledged by consciousness neither are nor justifiably could be values adequately presentable as intentional objects. Consciousness's ultimate reasons are, in this sense, not given by the world but by itself. Section 4 reconstructs and assesses Sartre's argument that consciousness cannot rationally have an ultimate end other than self-transparent freedom itself. (shrink)

Familial determination, replete with its frequent usurping of patient autonomy, propagation of collusion, and circumnavigation of direct patient involvement in their own care deliberations, continues to impact clinical practice in many Asian nations. Suggestions that underpinning this practice, in Confucian-inspired societies, is the adherence of the populace to the familial centric ideas of personhood espoused by Confucian ethics, provide a novel means of understanding and improving patient-centred care at the end of life. Clinical experience in Confucian-inspired Singapore, however, suggests that (...) personhood is conceived in broader terms. This diverging view inspired a study of local conceptions of personhood and scrutiny of the influence of the family upon it. From the data gathered, a culturally appropriate, clinically relevant and ethically sensitive concept of personhood was proposed: the Ring Theory of Personhood that better captures the nuances of local conceptions of personhood. The Ring Theory highlights the fact that, far from being solely dependent upon familial centric ideals, local conceptions of personhood are dynamic, context dependent, evolving ideas delineated by four dimensions. Using the Ring Theory, the nature of familial influences upon the four dimensions of personhood – the Innate, Individual, Relational and Societal – are examined to reveal that, contrary to perceived knowledge, conceptions of personhood within Confucian societies are not the prime reason for the continued presence of this decision-making model but remain present within local thinking and practices as a sociocultural residue and primarily because of inertia in updating ideas. (shrink)

Most accounts of immigration ethics implicitly rely upon neoclassical migration theory, which understands migration as the result of poverty and unemployment in sending countries. This paper argues that neoclassical migration theory assumes an account of the human person as solely an autonomous rational agent which then leads to ethics of migration which overemphasize freedom and self-determination. This tendency to assume that migration works as neoclassical migration theory describes is shared by political philosophers, such as Joseph Carens, Michael Walzer, and David (...) Miller. This paper argues that all three philosophers incorrectly frame migration as a contest between the freedom of the migrant and the communal self-determination of the political community. Migration systems theory is presented as a theory that draws upon a relationally embedded understanding of autonomy in order to begin to develop a migration systems ethics. This paper concludes by arguing that the central ethical category for an ethics of migration is not freedom or self-determination, but justice-in-relation. (shrink)

Decision-making capacity is a key concept in contemporary healthcare ethics. Previous research has mainly focused on philosophical, conceptual issues or on evaluation of different tools for assessing patients’ capacity. The aim of the present study is to investigate how the concept and its normative role are understood in Swedish psychiatric care. Of special interest for present purposes are the relationships between decisional capacity and psychiatric disorders and between health law and practical ethics.

Dual-process models of cognition suggest that there are two types of thought: autonomous Type 1 processes and working memory dependent Type 2 processes that support hypothetical thinking. Models of creative thinking also distinguish between two sets of thinking processes: those involved in the generation of ideas and those involved with their refinement, evaluation, and/or selection. Here we review dual-process models in both these literatures and delineate the similarities and differences. Both generative creative processing and evaluative creative processing involve elements that (...) have been attributed to each of the dual processes of cognition. We explore the notion that creative thinking may rest upon the nature of a shifting process between Type 1 and Type 2 dual processes. We suggest that a synthesis of the evidence bases on dual-process models of cognition and of creative thinking, together with developing time-based approaches to explore the shifting process, could better inform the development of i.. (shrink)