In this paper I propose and develop a social account of global autonomy. On this view, a person is autonomous simply to the extent to which it is difficult for others to subject her to their wills. I argue that many properties commonly thought necessary for autonomy are in fact properties that tend to increase an agent’s immunity to such interpersonal subjection, and that the proposed account is therefore capable of providing theoretical unity to many of the otherwise heterogeneous requirements (...) of autonomy familiar from recent discussions. Specifically, I discuss three such requirements: (i) possession of legally protected status, (ii) a sense of one’s own self-worth, and (iii) a capacity for critical reflection. I argue that the proposed account is not only theoretically satisfying but also yields a rich and attractive conception of autonomy. (shrink)

The idea of coercion is one that has played, and continues to play, at least two importantly distinct moral-theoretic roles in our thinking. One, which has been the focus of a number of recent influential treatments, is a primarily deontic role in which claims of coercion serve to indicate relatively weighty prima facie wrongs and excuses. The other, by contrast, is a primarily axiological or eudaimonic role in which claims of coercion serve to pick out instances of some distinctive kind (...) of pro tanto human bad (such as unfreedom or interpersonal subjection). I argue that this turns out not to be a simple case of one idea put to two different uses, but rather a case of two subtly distinct ideas in need of separate philosophical treatment. Moreover, although often relatively neglected, the primarily eudaimonic idea of coercion is of enduring importance to both liberal-perfectionist and socialist political moralities, as well as to personal ethics. This paper aims to elucidate it and to examine its relationship to its better-theorised deontic cousin. In addition, the paper seeks to show how a better understanding of these aspects of the concept can enable us to resolve certain important and long-standing theoretical disagreements, such as the dispute over whether coercion is an ‘essentially moralised’ concept and the dispute over whether (genuine) offers can be coercive. (shrink)

I defend the idea that a liberal commitment to value neutrality is best honoured by maintaining a pure cardinality component in our rankings of opportunity or liberty sets. I consider two challenges to this idea. The first holds that cardinality rankings are unnecessary for neutrality, because what is valuable about a set of liberties from a liberal point of view is not its size but rather its variety. The second holds that pure cardinality metrics are insufficient for neutrality, because liberties (...) cannot be individuated into countable entities without presupposing some relevantly partisan evaluative perspective. I argue that a clear understanding of the liberal basis for valuing liberty shows the way to satisfying responses to both challenges. (shrink)

In A Metaphysics for Freedom, Helen Steward proposes and defends a novel version of the libertarian account of free action. Amongst several objections that she considers to her view, one that looms particularly large is the Challenge from Chance: ‘the most powerful, widely-promulgated and important line of anti-libertarian reasoning’. This paper begins by arguing that Steward’s response to the Challenge is not fully convincing. It then goes on to explore a further possible libertarian line of defence against the Challenge, arguing (...) that it, too, ultimately fails. The conclusion is that the Challenge remains an important source of dialectical advantage for the compatibilist. (shrink)

This is a critical review essay on John Martin Fischer's Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value.

It has been alleged that compatibilists are committed to the view that agents act freely and responsibly even when subject to certain forms of radical manipulation. In this paper I identify and elucidate a form of compatibilist freedom, social autonomy, that is essential to understanding what is wrong with ordinary indoctrination and argue that it also holds the key to understanding what goes wrong in more fanciful manipulation cases.

Many philosophers believe that agents are self-ruled only when ruled by their (authentic) selves. Though this view is rarely argued for explicitly, one tempting line of thought suggests that self-rule is just obviously equivalent to rule by the self . However, the plausibility of this thought evaporates upon close examination of the logic of ‘self-rule’ and similar reflexives. Moreover, attempts to rescue the account by recasting it in negative terms are unpromising. In light of these problems, this paper instead proposes (...) that agents are self-ruled only when not ruled by others. One reason for favouring this negative social view is its ability to yield plausible conclusions concerning various manipulation cases that are notoriously problematic for nonsocial accounts of self-rule. A second reason is that the account conforms with ordinary usage. It is concluded that self-rule may be best thought of as an essentially social concept. (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)

What is liberty, and can it be measured? In this paper I argue that the only way to have a liberty metric is to adopt an account of liberty with specific and controversial features. In particular, I argue that we can make sense of the idea of a quantity of liberty only if we are willing to count certain purely agential constraints, such as ignorance and physical incompetence, as obstacles to liberty in general. This spells trouble for traditional ‘negative’ accounts, (...) against which I argue directly. My aim is to establish the following somewhat surprising claim: that if a political theory is to contain a principle regarding the protection, maximisation, or equalisation of some liberty, it must concern itself--on pain of conceptual incoherence--with the positive preconditions (in addition to the negative preconditions) of that liberty’s effective exercise. (shrink)

I defend my pure social account of global autonomy from Steven Weimer's recent criticisms. In particular, I argue that it does not implicitly rely upon the very kind of nonsocial conception of autonomy that it hopes to replace.

The idea that payment for research participation can be coercive appears widespread among research ethics committee members, researchers, and regulatory bodies. Yet analysis of the concept of coercion by philosophers and bioethicists has mostly concluded that payment does not coerce, because coercion necessarily involves threats, not offers. In this article we aim to resolve this disagreement by distinguishing between two distinct but overlapping concepts of coercion. Consent-undermining coercion marks out certain actions as impermissible and certain agreements as unenforceable. By contrast, (...) coercion as subjection indicates a way in which someone’s interests can be partially set back in virtue of being subject to another’s foreign will. While offers of payment do not normally constitute consent-undermining coercion, they do sometimes constitute coercion as subjection. We offer an analysis of coercion as subjection and propose three possible practical responses to worries about the coerciveness of payment. (shrink)

The connection of value-experience with activity has led to the widespread modern tendency to interpret value in terms of interest. To value a thing is certainly to take an interest in it, and there can be no doubt that the value any object has for us tends to vary with the interest we take in it. The suggestion readily arises, therefore, that the value of any object simply is the interest we take in it. The difficulty with views of this (...) type is that interest is a distinctly subjective category while value is persistently spoken of as if it were somehow objective. Indeed, the term “value” would lose the most essential element of its meaning if it could not be applied to objects of common knowledge in such a way that two people could significantly discuss the question as to whether the object A is not more valuable than the object B and each, on the basis of his own interest and experience, defend a different view. I do not think the subjectivity of value can be as easily disposed of as does Laird1 in discussing the argument, “Beauty is not in the aurora. Therefore it is in the beholder's mind.” This, he says, leads to the absurdity, “Therefore the beholder's mind is beautiful.” The apparent absurdity is due to the ambiguity of the term “beautiful.” It is applied either to an experience or to the object of that experience. (shrink)

This is a critical review essay of Christine Korsgaard's Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (OUP 2009).

The aim of psychology is first of all to describe how we think, or the flow of our consciousness, and then to sum up the facts in terms of principles, generalizations, or “laws” which “govern” our thinking. These laws must enable us to foretell what a man will think and how he will act when we know his environment and the state of his thought at any given moment, provided that no unforeseeable exercise of free will intervenes. Psychology has also (...) to inquire whether interventions of “free will” ever do occur and, if they do, what is their nature and scope. (shrink)

It is hard to imagine a threat to international security or a tension within U.S. foreign policy that does not involve the imposition of economic sanctions. The United Nations Security Council has fourteen sanctions regimes currently in place, and all member states of the United Nations are obligated to participate in their enforcement. The United States has some thirty sanctions programs, which target a range of countries, companies, organizations, and individuals, and many of these are autonomous sanctions that are independent (...) of the measures required by the United Nations. Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and others also have autonomous sanctions regimes, spanning a broad range of contexts and purpose. Most well-known are those concerning weapons proliferation, terrorism, and human rights violations; but sanctions are also imposed in such contexts as money laundering, corruption, and drug trafficking. States may also impose sanctions as a means to achieve foreign policy goals: to pressure a foreign state to bend to the sanctioner's will, to punish those who represent a threat to the sanctioner's economic or political interests, or to seek the end of a political regime toward which the sanctioner is hostile, to give but a few examples. (shrink)

The paper challenges Bevir's failure to engage with issues of gender in his attempt to establish a logic of the history of ideas. It argues that this exclusion both compromises his claim to have articulated a comprehensive logic, and suggests the limitations of his model as a way in which we might bring greater subtlety and texture to the understanding of history.

Originally published in 1939, this book builds on Garnett's earlier work on similar topics to re-emphasise the role of education in integrating 'the character of every man and woman' for the overall benefit of both the individual and society. Garnett also surveys previous aims of education and the role of education in moulding the future. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education.

Originally published in 1937. This book addresses the importance of the theory of values that rests on a general metaphysical understanding founded on a comprehensive view of all aspects of the world. The author speaks against the absolutist theories with a realistic one encompassing a theory of space and time and considering value as an object of immediate intuition. These great philosophical questions feed into discussions of the philosophy of religion and of science. Garnett distinguishes between spiritual and other (...) values on the ground that the spiritual values are not subjective to satiety, while other values are. He contends that our knowledge of mind is as direct and reliable as our knowledge of the physical world. This is an important early book by an influential 20th Century thinker. (shrink)

In the mid 1970s labor-saving technology was introduced into a Maya subsistence agricultural community that markedly increased the efficiency with which maize could be ground and water collected. This increased efficiency introduces a possible savings in the time that women allocate to work, which can be reapportioned to child care, food production, domestic work, or leisure. An earlier study suggested that this labor-saving technology had a positive effect in decreasing the age at which these Maya women begin their reproductive careers. (...) Although there is a statistical association between the age at which women bear their first child and the introduction of modern technology, this association does not demonstrate that the decline in age at first birth is causally related to the presence of technology. This paper pursues two objectives to evaluate this potential causal relationship in greater detail. First, a theory relating technological change to the initiation of a reproductive career is briefly developed in order to make qualitative predictions about behavioral changes as a response to changing technology. Second, these predictions are then tested against time allocation data recently collected in this same Maya community.We suggest that both of the conditions necessary to initiate reproduction—fecundity and access to mates—fundamentally depend on the amount of help that a girl provides to her family. Further, the help that a girl provides can be affected by technological changes. Analyses show that when modern technology is available, unmarried young women do not change the time allocated to domestic tasks and child care, and allocate more time to low-energy leisure activities. This lack of perceived benefit to working more and a potential concomitant shift towards a positive energy balance may in part explain why Maya women leave home and initiate reproduction at a younger age after labor-saving technology is introduced. (shrink)

Scholars in the early seventeenth century who studied ancient Greek scientific theories often drew upon philology and history to reconstruct a more general picture of the Greek past. Gassendi's training as a humanist historiographer enabled him to formulate a conception of the history of philosophy in which the rationality of scientific and philosophical inquiry depended on the historical justifications which he developed for his beliefs. Professor Joy examines this conception and analyzes the nature of Gassendi's historical training, especially its relationship (...) to his career as a physicist and astronomer. She shows how he rehabilitated Epicurean atomism by bringing together the arguments of the Greek atomists and those of his contemporaries. In doing so, he produced an account of the natural world which made it an object of empirical study and mechanical explanation. (shrink)

Certain forms of practical deference seem to be incompatible with personal autonomy. I argue that such deference undermines autonomy not by compromising the governance of an authentic self, nor by constituting a failure to track objective reasons, but by constituting a particular social relation: one of interpersonal rule. I analyse this social relation and distinguish it from others, including ordinary relations of love and care. Finally, I argue that the particular form of interpersonal rule constituted by dispositions of practical deference (...) in itself entails a partial, though not total, disconnection from the good of a self-authored life. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two irreducibly distinct negative concepts of liberty: freedom as non-prevention, and freedom as non-coercion. Contemporary proponents of the negative view, such as Matthew Kramer and Ian Carter, have sought to develop the Hobbesian idea that freedom is essentially a matter of physical non-prevention. Accordingly, they have sought to reduce the freedom-diminishing effect of coercion to that of prevention by arguing that coercive threats function to diminish freedom by preventing people from performing certain combinations of (...) actions. Against this, this paper argues that coercion diminishes people’s freedom in ways that cannot be fully captured in terms of prevention. Focusing on two types of case, those involving coercive threats and those involving coercive preference manipulation, it argues that non-coercion and physical non-prevention are importantly different goods. It concludes that a complete negative account of liberty must draw not only on the (Hobbesian) ‘non-prevention’ strand of the negative tradition but also on its (Hayekian) ‘non-coercion’ strand. (shrink)

Newcomb's problem supposedly involves your choosing one or else two boxes in circumstances in which a predictor has made a prediction of how many boxes you will choose. We argue that the circumstances which allegedly define Newcomb's problem generate a previously unnoticed regress which shows that Newcomb's problem is insoluble because it is ill-formed. Those who favor, as we do, a ``no-box'' reply to Newcomb's problem typically claim either that the problem's solution is underdetermined or else that it is overdetermined. (...) We are no-boxers of the first kind, but the underdetermination we identify is more radical than any previously identified: it blocks the very set-up of the problem and not just potential solutions to the problem once it has been set up. The defect is subtle, but it cripples every genuine version of the problem, regardless of variations in such things as the predictor's degree of reliability, the basis on which the prediction is made, or the amount of money in each box. The regress shows that, surprisingly enough, no one can understand Newcomb's problem, and so no one can possibly solve it. (shrink)

A multidisciplinary text for the health professions, with relevance across the various health disciplines. International scholars, researchers, and teachers contribute their ideas, research findings, and experiences to promote discussion on the nature and teaching of clinical reasoning. Models, guidelines, and strategies are presented. These aim to promote effective clinical reasoning in practice, creative and successful clinical reasoning learning programs, and directions for future research. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In order to investigate whether addressees can make immediate use of speaker‐based constraints during reference resolution, participant addressees' eye movements were monitored as they helped a confederate cook follow a recipe. Objects were located in the helper's area, which the cook could not reach, and the cook's area, which both could reach. Critical referring expressions matched one object (helper's area) or two objects (helper's and cook's areas), and were produced when the cook's hands were empty or full, which defined the (...) cook's reaching ability constraints. Helper's first and total fixations showed that they restricted their domain of interpretation to their own objects when the cook's hands were empty, and widened it to include the cook's objects only when the cook's hands were full. These results demonstrate that addressees can quickly take into account task‐relevant constraints to restrict their referential domain to referents that are plausible given the speaker's goals and constraints. (shrink)

Peter A Joy reviews Assessing Lawyer's Ethics: A Practitioner's Guide by Adrian Evans.