This article discusses the manipulation and measurement of levels of situational self-focus, which is generally labeled ''self-awareness.'' A new scale was developed to quantify levels of public and private self-awareness. Five studies were conducted to assess the psychometric properties, reliability, and validity of the Situational Self-Awareness Scale (SSAS). The SSAS was found to have a reliable factor structure, to detect differences in public and private self-awareness produced by laboratory manipulations, and to be sensitive to changes (...) in self-awareness within individuals over time and across situations. The SSAS can be used as a manipulation check of laboratory self-awareness manipulations and as a means of assessing naturally occurring fluctuations in public and private self-awareness in order to clarify the relation between self-awareness and other variables (e.g., mood and memory). (shrink)

This reissued work, originally published in 1985, is a uniquely broad and original survey of theories and beliefs about the growth, behaviour, performance and reform of the governments of modern Western democracies. After analysing the external pressures which have shaped modern governments, the author examines four different schools of political thought which seek to explain the behaviour and performance of governments, and which offer different remedies for the pluralism, corporatism and bureaucracy. To examine and test these general theories, the author (...) looks closely at how governments actually work. The book is illustrated with examples drawn from various Western societies. The final chapters present the author’s own conclusion about the future role of government, the limits of market philosophy, the future of politics, and the principles and problems of institutional reform. (shrink)

The paper develops two objections to Michael Bratman’s self-governance approach to the normativity of rational requirements. Bratman, drawing upon work by Harry Frankfurt, argues that having a place where one stands is a necessary, constitutive element of self-governance, and that violations of the consistency and coherence requirements on intentions make one lack a place where one stands. This allows for reasons of self-governance to ground reasons to comply with these rational requirements, thereby vindicating the normativity of rationality. (...) The first objection is that the account under-generates reasons, since not all cases of incoherence will involve a failure to have a place where one stands. The second objection is that the account over-generates reasons: we would have strong reasons to avoid both incoherence and ambivalence. However, if we follow Frankfurt in thinking that ambivalence is a “disease of the will” that is as irrational as having contradictory beliefs, this second objection doesn’t get off the ground. Thus, the first part of the paper is devoted to explaining why Frankfurt’s argument for the irrationality of ambivalence fails. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Planning, Time, and Self-Governanace, Bratman argues that the notion of self-governance plays an important role in grounding the rational principles such as means-ends coherence in the synchronic case, and principles of stability and coherence through time in the case of self-governance over time. In this paper, I grant Bratman’s claim for the synchronic case, however I argue that it is not clear that one can extend the reasoning to the diachronic case. More specifically, I raise (...) a number of doubts about whether any notion of diachronic self-governance can play the role in the theory of practical rationality that Bratman assigns to it. (shrink)

I argue against the view that there is intrinsic value in making one's own decisions about the direction and shape of one's life.

At the heart of Kant’s legal-political philosophy lies a liberal, republican ideal of justice understood in terms of private independence (non-domination) and subjection to public laws securing freedom for all citizens as equals. Given this basic commitment of Kant’s, it is puzzling to many that he does not consider democracy a minimal condition on a legitimate state. In addition, many find Kant ideas of reform or improvement of the historical states we have inherited vague and confusing. The aim of this (...) paper is to untangle both puzzles by exploring Kant’s idea of self-governance. I argue that Kant’s idea of self-governance gives us a very good starting point for thinking about how to leave room for a variety of political systems—different ideals—that have grown out of and responding to different contingent historical and cultural circumstances. It also helps us identify those areas where we want to take extra care to build in safeguards to secure stability and to take sufficiently seriously humankind’s truly nasty sides. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the changes in the conceptual understanding of the institution of local self-government that has been taking place in the last three decades. The submission to the State Duma of the Russian Federation of the Draft Federal Law «On the general principles of the organization of local self-government in the unified system of public authority», which took place at the end of 2021, allows analyzing the trajectory of the development of the institute (...) of local self-government in post-Soviet Russia from the point of view of a more global time and conceptual perspective. The purpose of this work is to identify the trajectory of the development of the conception of local self-government in RF. Research attention is focused on identifying the conception of local self-government formulated in official documents, a gradual change in the conceptual interpretation of this institution. It is shown that the main shiftin the conceptual understanding of local self-government occurs along the axis of institutional independence / institutional dependence of local self-government on state authorities. The development of the conceptual understanding of local self-government in post-Soviet Russia proceeds along the trajectory from a public concept (local self-government as an independent activity) to a state one (local self-government as a form of exercising power) and to a hyperstate one (local self-government as a link in a unified system of exercising authority). (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)

Book Information Self-Governance and Cooperation. By Robert H. Myers. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1999. Pp. vi + 179. Hardback, £30.00.

Algorithms are used to calculate and govern varying aspects of public life for efficient use of the vast data available about citizens. Assuming that algorithms are neutral and efficient in data-based decision making, algorithms are used in areas such as criminal justice and welfare. This has ramifications on the ideal of democratic self-government as algorithmic decisions are made without democratic deliberation, scrutiny or justification. In the book Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont argued against “shortcutting” democratic self-government. (...) Lafont’s critique of shortcuts turns to problematise taken-for-granted practices in democracies that bypass citizen inclusion and equality in authoring decisions governing public life. In this article, I extend Lafont’s argument to another shortcut: the algocratic shortcut. The democratic harms attributable to the algocratic shortcut include diminishing the role of voice in politics and reducing opportunities for civic engagement. In this article, I define the algocratic shortcut and discuss the democratic harms of this shortcut, its relation to other shortcuts to democracy and the limitations of using shortcuts to remedy algocratic harms. Finally, I reflect on remedy through “aspirational deliberation”. (shrink)

Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the (...) seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments. (shrink)

Self-Governance and Cooperation offers solutions to two fundamental problems in moral philosophy, one concerning the nature and requirements of morality and the other the nature and requirements of practical reason. Robert Myers’s achievement is not just that his solutions are original and plausible, but that his arguments acknowledge and demonstrate the need to approach the problems as an inseparable pair. Philosophical tradition tells us that questions about the content of morality cannot be answered in isolation from questions about its (...) rational force, and that, even more so, questions about the place of morality in practical reason cannot be answered without taking a stand on contested questions of substantive ethics. Myers’s book is a welcome counterforce to a tendency in contemporary moral philosophy to artificially subdivide the subject. (shrink)

Self-Governance and Cooperation offers solutions to two fundamental problems in moral philosophy, one concerning the nature and requirements of morality and the other the nature and requirements of practical reason. Robert Myers’s achievement is not just that his solutions are original and plausible, but that his arguments acknowledge and demonstrate the need to approach the problems as an inseparable pair. Philosophical tradition tells us that questions about the content of morality cannot be answered in isolation from questions about its (...) rational force, and that, even more so, questions about the place of morality in practical reason cannot be answered without taking a stand on contested questions of substantive ethics. Myers’s book is a welcome counterforce to a tendency in contemporary moral philosophy to artificially subdivide the subject. (shrink)

Our capacity for planning agency is central to our human lives. These essays aim both to deepen our understanding of basic norms that guide our plan-infused thinking and to defend their status as norms of practical rationality. This defense appeals both to forms of pragmatic support and to the ways in which these norms track conditions of a planning agent's self-governance, both at a time and over time.

This paper identifies, develops, and argues for an interpretation of Mary Astell’s understanding of self-government. On this interpretation, what is essential to self-government, according to Astell, is an agent’s responsiveness to her own reasoning. The paper identifies two aspects of her theory of self-government: an “authenticity” criterion of what makes our motives our own and an account of the capacities required for responsiveness to our own reasoning. The authenticity criterion states that when our motives (...) arise from some external source without validation by our own understanding of the reasons supporting them, then they are not our own. The capacities requisite for responsiveness to our own reasoning are those of examining and evaluating our own motives and of resisting the social pressure to conform to others’ opinions. An upshot of this interpretation of Astell’s theory of self-government is that it reveals her insights into the ways “custom” can undermine an individual’s ability to govern oneself. (shrink)

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the article discusses Roma Pentecostalism as nomad self-governance or self-ministry and political affirmation, in a dialectical conversation with stable apparatuses of power such as state and transnational polities advancing a neoliberal program of social integration as semiological apparatus of capture. The latter is upheld by expert social sciences as royal sciences, which translate alternative forms of self-governance into the conceptual apparatus of the state and transnational polities. On the other hand, Pentecostal (...) class='Hi'>self-ministry works as disaffected power undoing the architecture of the state subject, authorizing new hermeneutics of the self to take control over semiological acts of translation, and engenders a political resubjectivation of the governed. The article identifies Roma Pentecostalism as a source of political reawakening of Romani civil society, a creative line of flight with an immense power of deterritorialization of the main domains of subjection. (shrink)

Robert Myers presents an original moral theory which charts a course between the extremes of consequentialism and contractualism. He puts forward a radically new case for the existence of both agent-neutral and agent-relative values, and gives an innovative answer to the question how such disparate values can be weighed against each other. Practical judgement is shown to be guided in this by two very different ideals: an ideal of cooperation, which is held to shape the content of morality's demands, and (...) one of self-governance, which is held to determine the nature of reason's requirements. Examination of the ideal of cooperation reveals that principles of impartial beneficence and rights protecting individual freedoms are equally fundamental to morality. Examination of the ideal of self-governance reveals that morality's dictates, though not necessarily overriding, are always in an important sense inescapable. The result is a theory of morality which combines a balanced account of its content with a ringing affirmation of its authority. (shrink)

Gideon Yaffe has recently argued that children should be subject to lower standards of criminal liability because, unlike adults, they ought to be disenfranchised. Because of their disenfranchisement, they lack the legal reasons enfranchised adults have to comply with the law. Here I critically consider Yaffe’s argument for such disenfranchisement, which holds that disenfranchisement balances children’s interest in self-government with adults’ interest in having an equal say over lawmaking. I argue that Yaffe does not succeed in showing that (...) these two values need to be balanced, nor that disenfranchising children is a justifiable method of achieving this balance. In my conclusion, I sketch an alternative contractualist approach to disenfranchising children that, like Yaffe’s, appeals to the implications that enfranchisement has for political relations among citizens, but unlike Yaffe’s, rests on empirical claims about the influence of parents on children’s voting patterns rather than on a priori claims regarding who has a rightful say over lawmaking. (shrink)

This essay explains how to use the calculus of consent framework to think more rigorously about self-governance, and applies this framework to the issue of evaluating federal regulatory agencies. Robust political economy is the idea that institutions should be designed to work well even under weak assumptions about decision-makers’ knowledge and benevolence. I show how the calculus of consent can be used to analyze both incentives and knowledge problems. The calculus is simultaneously a theory of self-governance and a (...) tool for robust political economy analysis. Applying this framework to the case of public administration leads to the conclusion that private goods (such as medicine) tend to be over-regulated, public goods tend to be under-regulated (such as enabling too much pollution), and regulatory agencies tend to be over-centralized (and should in most cases either be replaced with certification markets or moved to state level). (shrink)

Current debates as to whether “republican liberty” is a negative or a positive concept of liberty take as their starting point the distinction between these concepts as outlined in Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin’s essay has stimulated a considerable debate about the precise nature of the distinction between the two concepts, whether there are indeed two concepts of liberty or only one, the triadic concept, and whether the two concepts are systematically connected to the foundational assumptions of (...) different traditions of political philosophy. Republican liberty has traditionally been placed under the positive heading as one variant of positive liberty, but this has been challenged by the argument that republican liberty is a form of negative liberty which is more extensive than the liberal form of negative liberty in incorporating the notion of freedom from potential as well as actual interference or constraint. According to this interpretation, therefore, the main distinction between the political traditions of liberalism and republicanism is to be found not in the distinction between negative and positive liberty, but in a distinction within negative liberty. (shrink)

Andreas Schmidt argues that ethicists have misplaced moral qualms about nudges insofar as their worries are about whether nudges treat us as rational agents, because nudges can enhance our rational agency. I think that Schmidt is right that nudges often enhance our rational agency; in fact, we can carry his conclusion further: nudges often enhance our self-governing agency, too. But this does not alleviate our worries that nudges fail to treat us as rational. This is shown by disambiguating two (...) conceptions of treating-as-rational. The more plausible conception of treating-as-rational undermines Schmidt’s case that nudges often treat us as rational. (shrink)

Neuroscience has illuminated the neural basis of decision-making, providing evidence that supports specific models of decision-processes. These models typically are quite mechanical, the realization of abstract mathematical “diffusion to bound” models. While effective decision-making seems to be essential for sophisticated behavior, central to an account of freedom, and a necessary characteristic of self-governing systems, it is not clear how the simple models neuroscience inspires can underlie the notion of self-governance. Drawing from both philosophy and neuroscience I explore ways (...) in which the proposed decision-making architectures can play a role in systems that can reasonably be thought of as “self-governing”. (shrink)

Current debates as to whether “republican liberty” is a negative or a positive concept of liberty take as their starting point the distinction between these concepts as outlined in Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin’s essay has stimulated a considerable debate about the precise nature of the distinction between the two concepts, whether there are indeed two concepts of liberty or only one, the triadic concept, and whether the two concepts are systematically connected to the foundational assumptions of (...) different traditions of political philosophy. Republican liberty has traditionally been placed under the positive heading as one variant of positive liberty, but this has been challenged by the argument that republican liberty is a form of negative liberty which is more extensive than the liberal form of negative liberty in incorporating the notion of freedom from potential as well as actual interference or constraint. According to this interpretation, therefore, the main distinction between the political traditions of liberalism and republicanism is to be found not in the distinction between negative and positive liberty, but in a distinction within negative liberty. (shrink)

In chapter 2, Myers introduces the conception of morality as a cooperative undertaking to promote the overall good on terms fair to everyone involved. Fair promotion of the overall good, he argues, requires impartial beneficence to be restrained by prerogatives and restrictions. The rationale for prerogatives turns, ultimately, on the premise that promoting the overall good fairly must account for the fact that we inevitably have values other than our concern for impartial beneficence. It would be unfair, because too demanding, (...) to require people fully to subordinate these competing values to their goal of promoting overall goodness. For “acting in ways that are true to all one’s values is an important ideal of individual behaviour” and so must be given some play. Fairness, then, requires balancing one’s concern to promote the overall good with one’s concern to be faithful to the other values that apply to one. Myers favors a “no-harm” version of prerogatives that allows people to give their own interests and desires a disproportionate weight only in cases where advancing their own ends would prevent them from giving aid to others. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the special provision made for grant maintained schools through the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act and suggests that the compromise it represented may be considered as an example of New Labour's Third Way in politics. The latter is discussed in terms of general and educational policies with specific regard to the characteristics of self-governing schools.

My aim in this paper is to initiate and contribute to debate concerning the possibility of behavior that is both self-defeating and self-governed. In the first section of the paper, I review a couple of points that figure in the literature as platitudes about (the relevant notion of) self-governance. In the second section, I explain how these points give rise to what seems to be a dilemma that suggests that informed self-defeating behavior, wherein one is aware (...) of the consequences of each choice one makes, is impossible. In the third and fourth sections, I consider two types of cases that appear to be cases of informed self-defeating behavior and argue that one of the cases is a genuine case of self-defeating self-governance. I end with some remarks concerning self-governance, self-defeat, and dynamic choice. I suggest that the notion of self-defeat here employed provides a simple and compelling answer to the question “Are there any diachronic rationality constraints on agents?” The answer (or at least part of the answer) is “Yes, agents must avoid self-defeating behavior.” In section 5, I give reasons for thinking that all cases of diachronic irrationality are cases of self-defeating behavior in the relevant sense. As will become apparent, to the extent that the requirement to avoid self-defeating behavior calls for any cross-temporal coherence, it does so without endorsing a sort of conservatism that can interfere with personal growth and change. (shrink)

Robert Myers presents an original moral theory which charts a course between the extremes of consequentialism and contractualism. He puts forward a radically new case for the existence of both agent-neutral and agent-relative values, and gives an innovative answer to the question how such disparate values can be weighed against each other. The result is a theory of morality which combines a balanced account of its content with a ringing affirmation of its authority.

Robert Myers presents an original moral theory which charts a course between the extremes of consequentialism and contractualism, portraying morality not simply as a matter of promoting the overall good but rather as a matter of cooperating in its promotion. This gives him answers to two of the most vexing questions in moral philosophy: how can increasing general welfare and respecting individual rights be equally fundamental features of moral activity, and what gives morality's demands their special character of inescapability?

The book analyzes the sources of widespread dissatisfaction with democracies around the world and identifies directions for feasible reforms"--Provided by publisher.

This paper attempts to determine the best way to understand-and, thus, treat—patients who claim to hold certain health—related values and goals yet consistently act in ways that undermine and work against those values and goals. Since at least the 1970s, this phenomenon has been known in the medical community as patient noncompliance. This can come in the form of failure to take medication as prescribed, as well as failure to adhere to any number of doctors' orders, including recommendations to modify (...) diet, exercise, quit smoking, and so forth. Such cases are a source of great frustration for health care professionals because these patients present in their clinics with a health problem... (shrink)