Autonomy

In 1834 Havana, an enslaved woman’s alleged misconduct turned her sale into a legal battle over the boundaries of property, punishment, and personhood. This article reconstructs the life and legal dispute of Maria-Felipa Criolla to examine how Spanish colonial law translated judgments of moral character into determinations of human value. Centered on a redhibitory lawsuit between enslavers Martín Granacías and Pedro Pérez y Pita, the case offers a microhistorical view of how accusations of theft and immorality transformed Maria-Felipa from a (...) domestic laborer into criminalized property, precluding avenues of emancipation through coartación. The proceedings under the legal framework of the Siete Partidas and the authoritarian governance of Captain-General Miguel Tacón exposed how colonial law operated through deliberate ambiguity. Limited forms of enslaved agency, what historian Alejandro de la Fuente terms “normative cracks,” existed. By focusing on the lived experience of one enslaved creole woman, this microhistory explores how coartación, a fragile legal pathway toward freedom, collapsed into systemic criminalization for the enslaved and competitive dispossession for the enslaver. (shrink)

This treatise examines what it is to be a human being by taking seriously an ordinary yet arresting experience: the astonishment a person may feel at existing at all. Beginning from the recognition that any particular individual is radically contingent, the essay argues that three capacities jointly constitute the distinctive human mode of being: embodied agency, the disposition to build and test theories about the world, and the reflexive power to know oneself. Drawing together phenomenology, the enactive tradition in cognitive (...) science, contemporary work on predictive processing, and philosophical accounts of agency and personal identity, the treatise contends that the felt sense of being perfectly fitted to the world is a genuine datum in need of explanation rather than a self-evident truth. It defends the claim that this fittedness is better explained by observation selection effects together with the co-constitution of organism and world than by an inference to deliberate design, and it treats the manifest imperfections of human cognition and anatomy as consistent with, rather than fatal to, a sense of wonder. The conclusion holds that to be human is to be an improbable witness: a self-aware, world-engaging animal whose very unlikelihood grounds, rather than undermines, the meaning it finds in its condition. (shrink)

This treatise separates the defensible from the indefensible in Theodore Kaczynski’s 1995 manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, and argues that the violence through which he sought to advance his ideas was not only morally wrong but rhetorically self-defeating. A small set of Kaczynski’s observations—that industrial-technological arrangements can erode autonomy and meaningful agency, that large technical systems often develop according to internal logics indifferent to human welfare, and that modern life can frustrate genuine psychological needs—finds substantial support in the established (...) tradition of technology criticism and in empirical psychology. Yet these insights are embedded within grave philosophical errors: the reification of “the system” as an agent, technological determinism, a false dichotomy between total destruction and impotent reform, and the motivated psychologizing of opponents. This treatise contends that the bombing campaign destroyed the reception of even the defensible claims by triggering the discrediting association through which audiences discount arguments tied to atrocity, and by violating every criterion under which political violence has ever been thought justifiable. Comparison with critics who advanced overlapping concerns through legitimate means demonstrates that Kaczynski’s ideas failed not because they were uniformly wrong but because he chose terror over argument. The case functions as an exemplar of how not to realize an idea, for violence forfeits the moral standing on which persuasion depends. (shrink)

Modern political philosophy has theorized sovereignty through three dominant frameworks: liberal autonomy as boundary-maintenance against intrusion, republican non-domination as freedom from arbitrary interference capacity, and communitarian embedded recognition. This paper argues that the dominant operational models within each tradition rely on the Presupposition of Prior Boundedness (PPB): the assumption that a bounded, self-consistent subject existed prior to its constitutive entanglement with the political and technological systems that now shape it. PPB is false in the general case, and its falsity has (...) a sharp epistemic consequence, the Indistinguishability Thesis (IT): from within a sufficiently entangled relation, no reliable first-person method distinguishes genuine reflective endorsement from evaluative capture. The paper develops the positive concept this diagnosis demands. Navigational sovereignty is the recursive capacity to orient within constitutive entanglement: to retain the ability to participate in revising the loops through which one's agency is enacted. The concept is given formal content through two structural measures introduced here, Reversibility Symmetry (Rs), the ratio of exit cost to entry cost across energy, information, and network dimensions, and Minimum Exit Viability (MEV), the threshold proportion of simultaneous exit required for any agent to leave with utility parity. Because the IT bars first-person adjudication, these measures are deliberately third-personal: they assign capture detection to external structural assessment while locating severance, the preserved capacity to leave, with agents themselves. Institutional implications are derived for platform regulation, algorithmic governance, and AI alignment, and four objections are answered, including the framework's application to itself. (shrink)

(June 11, 2026. profit → benefit) <br> This paper examines the ideological position of the Causality Game. And for this purpose, also conducts an examination of postmodernism. Postmodernism, following the collapse of modernism's description of the world, denied the description of the world itself. Consequently, it results in sloppy, superficial, incompatible, and isolated descriptions with obscure preconditions. The promotion of fragmentation also follows this ideology. The Causality Game also remedies the neglect of causality, which was the cause of the collapse (...) of modernism. From this, characteristics such as "preconditions govern results," "I am my own king," and "grasp validly, handle validly" emerge. it also takes a critical stance toward Voltaire's famous quote. (shrink)

Pluralist societies lack a shared final authority, rendering accounts of legitimacy grounded in consensus, procedure, or normative agreement structurally insufficient. This paper advances a structural alternative. It argues that legitimacy is not a function of agreement among agents, but of whether the system within which they interact composes consistently under its own constraints. The analysis derives standing, capacity, and personal warrant as necessary conditions for participation, and identifies inclusion, symmetry, and directed repair as invariants required to preserve compositional consistency. It (...) further shows that capacity and autonomy are functions of viable exit—defined as the existence of at least one path that preserves an agent’s continued participation—and that domination consists in the reduction of such viable exits. These results are then formalized within a constraint algebra (Σᴿ), developed by the author in independent work, in which admissible configurations are those that remain closed under composition. The paper demonstrates that the pluralist invariants are equivalent to the conditions for constraint closure. The central claim is that legitimacy in pluralist systems is identical with structural admissibility: only those configurations that preserve viable exit and remain consistent under composition can produce binding outcomes. (shrink)

An AI-based ‘patient preference predictor’ (PPP) is a proposed method for guiding healthcare decisions for patients who lack decision-making capacity. The proposal is to use correlations between sociodemographic data and known healthcare preferences to construct a model that predicts the unknown preferences of a particular patient. In this paper, I highlight a distinction that has been largely overlooked so far in debates about the PPP—that between algorithmic prediction and decision-making—and argue that much of the recent philosophical disagreement stems from this (...) oversight. I show how three prominent objections to the PPP only challenge its use as the sole determinant of a choice, and actually support its use as a source of evidence about patient preferences to inform human decision-making. The upshot is that we should adopt the evidential conception of the PPP and shift our evaluation of this technology towards the ethics of algorithmic prediction, rather than decision-making. (shrink)

We develop a comprehensive account of self-trust in its role-mediated, general and universal forms, highlight the connectionbetween self-trust and personal autonomy, and argue that we can have too much or too little self-trust. Both can undermine per-sonal autonomy. Our account explicates and supports three compelling theses about trust: that interpersonal trust is often trustin a person in a social role (Thesis One); that self-trust is a nonprototypical variant of interpersonal trust (Thesis Two); and thatself-trust is essential to autonomy (Thesis Three).

David Enoch argues that nudges undermine autonomy because they sever an important connection between sovereignty (self-rule) and non-alienation (acting in line with one’s deepest commitments). I accept that nudges can sever the link, but challenge Enoch’s further claim that such disruption necessarily undermines the full value of autonomy. I introduce the concept of scaffolding nudges: nudges that sever the link temporarily in order to strengthen it over time. These nudges support, rather than subvert, the realization of autonomy, thereby undermining an (...) implicit uniformity assumption in Enoch’s account. The surprising conclusion is that some nudges may have a crucial but temporary role to play in enabling agents to live autonomous lives by helping sustain the integration between sovereignty and non-alienation – a point with implications for broader debates about nudging and autonomy. (shrink)

In 2021, in response to the Superior Court of Quebec’s decision in Truchon v. Canada, the Canadian Parliament amended the Criminal Code to allow Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) for some people who don’t have a “reasonably foreseeable natural death.” Debate rages over this amendment. In particular, some academics and activists argue that it should be repealed because it discriminates against disabled people. In 2024, these arguments appeared in a Canadian court proceeding; two disabled individuals and four disability rights organizations (...) filed a lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, challenging the amendment. In this paper, I critically analyze the harm-centric arguments in the applicants’ notice of application (which crystallizes the broader opposition to the amendment). In doing so, I draw on analysis from both sides of the ethical debate over the amendment. Ultimately, I conclude that the applicants’ arguments — and those from other opponents of the amendment — don’t succeed. Some of my recurring objections include that the alleged harmful effects of the amendment are either 1) harmful only if the applicants’ dubious ethical assumptions are true, 2) not attributable to the amendment, or 3) nonexistent, negligible, or unlikely. In defence of the amendment, I discuss how it respects people’s autonomy and avoids instrumentalization. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant was an 18th century German philosopher. He is famous for his critical philosophy in which he explores the grounds and limits of human knowledge and morality. He was also an important representative of the Enlightenment. Central ideals of this movement were an emphasis on scientific knowledge, reason, and individual rights in contrast to superstition, authority, and tyranny. In his essay “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, Kant states conditions that have to be met in order for an individual, (...) a group, or a state to become enlightened. In this piece, we will introduce Kant’s line of thought that Enlightenment is the emergence from self-imposed immaturity. His message is more relevant today than ever. In a world of filter bubbles, fake news, and algorithmically-curated content, we have to decide when to use our own reason and when to let others do the thinking for us. (shrink)

There is a simple story about how and why patients’ desires and preferences are relevant to their treatment. Here’s how it goes: there is a strong reason to respect patients’ autonomy; a patient’s desires determine what they prefer; and respecting autonomy requires doing as they prefer—as they expressly prefer when they’re able to decide and as they would prefer when they’re not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, the simple story is too simple—it ignores and obscures the often complicated ways in which desires (...) and preferences interact in actual agents and are relevant to what it means to respect autonomy in practice. In this chapter, we explore some of the complex ways in which patients’ desires are relevant in the clinical setting and outline a general theoretical framework that can provide a more accurate—yet still practicable—alternative to the simple story about how and why patients’ desires and preferences are relevant to their care. (shrink)

This paper identifies and critiques a pervasive but unexamined assumption in ethical discourse about technology, cognition, and selfhood: the Presupposition of Prior Boundedness (PPB), the claim that a bounded, self-consistent subject existed prior to its constitutive entanglement with the systems that now shape its evaluative and practical capacities. Drawing on the recursive ethical framework of Arkemedics (Arkema 2024) and the phenomenological sequence of the concept album Dragoon Nightmares, I argue that PPB is false in the general case, that invasion narratives (...) depend on it to generate their ethical force, and that its dissolution requires a relocation of sovereignty from boundary-maintenance to recursive orientation within entanglement. I develop the Indistinguishability Thesis (IT): for any sufficiently entangled system-self relation, there exists no epistemically reliable method for distinguishing, from within the relation, between a self that has achieved accurate awareness of its constitutive entanglements and a self whose evaluative capacities have been captured by those entanglements. IT is a limit on first-person confirmation from within the relation; it does not imply that third-person evidence is irrelevant. I argue that this indistinguishability is not a failure of ethical reasoning but its most important constraint, and that the fundamental ethical obligation in conditions of constitutive entanglement is not to achieve certainty about one’s position but to maintain the recursive capacity to keep asking. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a framework — here termed jurisdictional sovereignty — for evaluating claims of divine authority through the analytical tools of consent-based political philosophy. Rather than engaging the dominant ontological question of whether God exists, the paper argues that the logically prior and practically more tractable question is whether any being — real or hypothetical, proven or merely posited — possesses legitimate authority over rational agents in the absence of consent. Drawing on the social contract tradition (Locke, (...) Rousseau, Rawls), the political theory of legitimate authority (Raz, Wolff), and constructivist metaethics (Korsgaard, Scanlon), this paper constructs a three-axiom framework grounded in the independence of legitimacy from ontology, the principle of interactive accountability, and the consent constraint. Its most philosophically distinctive feature is ontological invariance: the framework's normative conclusions are sustained regardless of how the metaphysical question of God's existence is resolved. The paper carefully distinguishes the position from atheism, apatheism, and misotheism; addresses sophisticated theological objections from Thomistic participatory metaphysics, skeptical theism, and the free will defence; and engages non-Abrahamic theological structures including process theology, apophatic traditions, and Advaita Vedanta. A sustained treatment of the axiom of shared vulnerability — grounded in Korsgaardian reflective endorsement and Scanlonian contractualism — provides a secular ethical foundation that does not derive moral obligation from divine command. The paper concludes with a nuanced treatment of political implications, engaging the Rawls-Wolterstorff debate on public reason, and a candid appraisal of the framework's limitations. The position discussed here has also attracted the designation Omittoism — a term I have introduced in broader discourse to name the principled refusal of unjustified jurisdictional claims — though this paper proceeds strictly within the norms of systematic philosophical analysis. -/- Keywords: divine authority, jurisdictional sovereignty, consent theory, political theology, social contract, Omittoism, ontological invariance, jurisdictional turn, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, ethics, metaethics. (shrink)

Instrumentalist accounts of authority seek to justify relations of authority—that is, relations in which one person has the ability to give binding directives to another—on the basis of some good, benefit or service that such relations provide for those subject to them. These accounts of authority are often criticized for justifying too much authority, and in particular, for justifying forms of authority which appear blatantly paternalistic. Some authority relations do not seem justified even though they are, or would be, clearly (...) beneficial to those subject to them. In this article, I defend instrumentalist accounts of authority against this objection. I focus, in particular, on Joseph Raz’s well-known and influential formulation of instrumentalism about authority, as articulated in his service conception of authority, and on a version of the objection formulated by Stephen Darwall. I begin by arguing that, contrary to the suggestions made by several philosophers, instrumentalist justifications of authority would not be more plausible if restricted in scope to cases involving pre-existing obligations, or some particularly weighty subset of moral or categorical concerns. I suggest, instead, that worries about paternalism can be accommodated by instrumentalist accounts of authority in other ways. (shrink)

Intellectual property (IP) is commonly described as the ownership of ideas. This essay argues that this framing obscures how IP operates in practice. IP is better understood as a state-backed system of enforceable restrictions on copying, distribution, adaptation, and reuse—restrictions that manufacture scarcity over non-rival information. The core question is not whether incentives matter in principle, but what happens when enforcement must scale. -/- At scale, IP enforcement tends to migrate from case-by-case adjudication into infrastructure: platform policies, automated detection and (...) filtering, contractual controls, and intermediary risk management. These layers function as permission checkpoints that gate participation by default. As checkpoint density rises, clearance becomes a recurring cost—an effective clearance tax—that privileges large rightsholders and well-resourced intermediaries while narrowing practical access for smaller creators, researchers, and new entrants. The result is an architecture in which doctrine and exceptions may remain on paper, but operational constraints increasingly shape what can be published, built, remixed, preserved, or learned from. -/- Generative AI intensifies this dynamic by expanding the permission surface area: more routine workflows become legible as ingestion, transformation, or derivative use at scale. In this environment, enforcement defaults and portfolio leverage play an outsized role in determining who can participate and on what terms. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that respecting a child’s autonomy requires feeding them a plant-based diet, at least until they develop the capacity to formulate their own judgments about the morality of animal consumption. Drawing on the independence view of autonomy, I begin with the premise that a child’s autonomy is violated when their parents enrol them into particular moral, religious, or philosophical doctrines before they are capable of independently examining those doctrines. I then argue that feeding children animal products (...) constitutes such a violation, as it presupposes a contested view about the morality of animal consumption and involves forcing children to participate in a practice that is based on that view. (shrink)

This paper examines the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States as a manifestation of state power over bodily sovereignty rather than as a moral dispute over life. Situating the post–Roe v. Wade legal landscape within political philosophy, feminist ethics, and international human rights law, the analysis argues that abortion restrictions function as instruments of governance that discipline bodies, regulate gender, and reproduce structural inequality. The paper demonstrates how compelled pregnancy disproportionately burdens women, the poor, racialized communities, and those (...) already subject to social surveillance, while reframing autonomy as conditional rather than inherent. Drawing on global ethical frameworks and comparative religious traditions, it challenges the selective use of theology and morality in state legislation, highlighting the tension between moral pluralism and imposed belief. The analysis further situates U.S. reproductive policy within a broader international context, where forced continuation of pregnancy is increasingly recognized as a violation of human rights and bodily integrity. By treating the body as a political site, the paper argues that reproductive coercion represents a broader authoritarian drift in contemporary governance, revealing how rights once grounded in privacy and autonomy can be reconstituted as privileges subject to state control. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I investigate a hierarchical analysis of personal autonomy which is developed through Harry Frankfurt’s theory of free will and Gerald Dworkin’s theory of personal autonomy. Hierarchical analysis of personal autonomy considers per-son autonomous regarding desire A if he has the desire to have desire A. One of the main advantages of hierarchical analysis of autonomy is that it does not require a person to have any specific values to be considered autonomous. In spite (...) of this and other advantages, hierarchical analysis of personal autonomy is facing the problem of manipulation which I will discuss in the second part of the paper. Frankfurt`s theory is purely structural and ahis-toric because it does not take into consideration a way of acquiring second-order desires or desire to desire or not desire A. That allows the possibility of influences on a person that would diminish their autonomy. On another hand, Dworkin apparently avoids the problem of manipulation by introducing a requirement for procedural independence which protects a person from influences that are paradigmatic cases of violating autonomy. However, Dworkin`s contribution is not theoretically satisfying because it is not enough for acceptable analysis of autonomy to just list a few intuitive examples of constraining personal autonomy, but it is necessary to propose a reason why that kind of inluences is considered dangerous for personal autonomy viz to establish some kind of criteria. Such criteria will enable us to evaluate borderline cases about which people have diferent intuitions according to it. That is the reason why the inal goal of this paper is to contribute to the deinition of criteria on which procedural independence will be based, through a systemic approach to the problem of manipulation. (shrink)

The research approaches the problem of illegitimate external influences through the hierarchical analysis of personal autonomy and the analysis of theories of personal autonomy that arose as a constructive and critical reaction to it, which contributes to the establishment of criteria for demarcation between legitimate and illegitimate external influences. In addition, the relationship between personal autonomy and political legitimacy in a democratic context is examined, and the preconditions for political decision-making by autonomous citizens are defined. Using conceptual analysis, the critical-evaluative (...) method, and thought experiments, it is shown that personal autonomy cannot completely depend on the subjective assessment of the agent. The criterion of independence ought to have the status of a social convention that implies uniformity in its application to all agents in a relatively similar position. Personal autonomy implies being able to resist the possible arbitrary influence of others. In the political context, this means that respecting the personal autonomy of each citizen requires a participatory deliberative democracy in which the quality of the argument will be the only relevant factor in the formation of a collective decision. The legitimacy of a political decision is based on respect for personal autonomy, not only during the democratic process but also in the period that preceded it. Given that citizens are exposed to the arbitrary use of power that affects the impartiality of their judgment, autonomy-sensitive participatory deliberative democracy should take into account deliberative constraints in order to ensure the legitimacy of political decision-making. (shrink)

This essay examines the emergence of a post-work order in which advanced automation allows production, logistics, and finance to operate with minimal human labor, while political legitimacy and social identity remain anchored in the idea that most adults should work. It develops the concept of the post-work paradox: a structural configuration in which populations are no longer materially necessary as workers, yet remain indispensable as audiences, beneficiaries, and moral reference points for the system. The analysis traces how humans are maintained (...) as necessary fictions that perform four core system-level functions—legitimacy, compliance, identity, and continuity—even as machines increasingly carry out the underlying work. The essay then follows this tension through three vantage points: governments that function as a legitimacy interface between automated infrastructures and citizens; corporations and platforms that take on quasi-sovereign roles in a techno-feudal landscape; and populations whose participation is increasingly channeled into symbolic inclusion, consumption, and managed forms of agency. Rather than offering a single forecast, the essay maps several possible trajectories for post-work societies and asks what it would mean to design institutions that acknowledge production without people while preserving meaningful forms of agency, care, and collective self-determination. (shrink)

The present study deals with the notion of revolt, as present in the thought of Albert Camus and Peter Kropotkin. Although coming from different social, political and philosophical backgrounds, the two thinkers share a deep commitment to the values of freedom, solidarity, justice, and the necessity of revolt against oppression. Camus sees revolt as appealing to a shared human nature, uniting the person in revolt in a metaphysical solidarity with the rest of humanity. Kropotkin emphasizes the collective power of natural (...) solidarity, grounded in mutual aid, as the key principle of organization that can spark a revolt against authority and lead to revolutionary societal emancipation. Despite the differences between Camus’ person in revolt and Kropotkin’s anarchist, both are committed to a resistance against the world of masters and slaves. (shrink)

Decision-making capacity (DMC) plays an important role in clinical practice—determining, on the basis of a patient’s decisional abilities, whether they are entitled to make their own medical decisions or whether a surrogate must be secured to participate in decisions on their behalf. As a result, it’s critical that we get things right—that our conceptual framework be well-suited to the task of helping practitioners systematically sort through the relevant ethical considerations in a way that reliably and transparently delivers correct verdicts about (...) who should and should not have the authority to make their own medical decisions. Unfortunately, however, the standard approach to DMC does not get things right. It is of virtually no help in identifying and clarifying the relevant ethical considerations. And, embedded in the prevailing anti-paternalist paradigm, DMC assessments obfuscate and distort the underlying ethical justification for granting or withholding decisional authority. Here, we describe the core commitments of the standard approach to DMC and then highlight three problems with it. We then argue that these problems are significant enough that they call for more than merely tinkering and fine tuning—variations of the standard approach cannot adequately address them. Instead, we should ditch DMC. (shrink)

This essay argues that Big Tech companies have evolved into a new class of geopolitical actors—corporate sovereigns—whose authority increasingly rivals or constrains that of nation-states. Their power does not derive from territorial control, but from the ownership and operation of digital infrastructures that have become essential to communication, commerce, administration, and security. Through cloud platforms, identity systems, data pipelines, algorithmic governance, lobbying networks, satellite networks, and AI capabilities, these firms now exercise forms of operational authority once reserved for public institutions. (...) This paper examines how infrastructural dependence, data visibility, economic concentration, political leverage, and security functions collectively produce a form of non-state sovereignty that reshapes global governance. It concludes that the rise of corporate sovereignty marks a structural transformation in the organization of power—one that existing regulatory frameworks cannot fully address, and that demands new philosophical and political models for accountability and democratic oversight. (shrink)

Spoilers consist in the revelation of major plot points of fictions prior to the time at which we’re intended to discover them. The small literature on spoilers argues that we dislike them because they have a negative effect on story enjoyment. I argue that our dislike of spoilers is wildly disproportionate to their actual effects on story enjoyment. The real puzzle of spoilers is why we dislike them, given their small and inconsistent effects on story enjoyment. I argue that the (...) dislike of spoilers arises from a desire not to be subject to other agents in how we come to acquire certain kinds of knowledge about fictions. (shrink)

What is persuasion and how does it differ from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation? Which persuasive strategies are effective, and which contexts are they effective in? The aim of persuasion is attitude change, but when does a persuasive strategy yield a rational change of attitude? When is it permissible to engage in rational persuasion? In this paper I address these questions, both in general and with reference to particular examples. The overall aims are (i) to sketch an integrated picture of the (...) psychology, epistemology, and ethics of persuasion and (ii) to argue that there is often a tension between the aim we typically have as would-be persuaders, which is bringing about a rational change of mind, and the ethical constraints which partly distinguish persuasion from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation. (shrink)

Despite a heavy philosophical focus on issues pertaining to immigration, little discussion is taken up that examines the duties we owe to migrant children. This article works to bridge the gap between global justice literature and work on children’s autonomy and well-being. To capture what migrant children experience in the context of immigration and detention, the article examines the conditions on the island country of Nauru, where at least 222 migrant children experienced detention between the years of 2013 and 2019. (...) Using this lived experience as an example, the article argues that we owe children specific positive duties, which are further supported by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Throughout this article, the aim is to indicate how migrant children occupy a particularly vulnerable and nonautonomous status in the context of detention. Because of this, children are owed especially weighty positive duties that are not discussed in the current global justice literature. (shrink)

Paving the Way to Sustainable Societies by Correcting the Erroneous Assumptions Present in Finance, Technology, and Psychology Today.

Social conceptions of freedom allow that a person can be free even when unable to act, so long as her inability is not due to the conduct of others. Yet despite permitting the conceptual possibility of freedom without ability, these accounts have not addressed whether such freedom retains any value. I argue that freedom has ability-independent value as it can be valuable even when it cannot be exercised. To explore this possibility, I adopt a negative conception of freedom as my (...) working definition and develop a typology that distinguishes between content-dependent and content-independent values of freedom, each of which can be either ability-dependent or ability-independent. I show that freedom can have ability-independent instrumental value when it causally contributes to valuable phenomena such as happiness or social progress; ability-independent constitutive value when it is conceptually necessary for valuable phenomena such as citizenship and personal autonomy; and ability-independent contributory value when a valuable phenomenon such as respect supervenes on freedom. These findings challenge the prevailing assumption that only exercisable freedoms are valuable, and expand the normative landscape by introducing a new category of contributory value, which captures how freedom can be valuable even when it plays neither a causal nor a conceptual role in relation to other valuable phenomena. (shrink)

This paper takes a rights-based discourse on the material conditions for the realization of human freedom – and flourishing – and re-centers this discourse on the necessary, physiological activity of sleep. It utilizes one principal case study (Shaunak Sen’s 2015 documentary 'Cities of Sleep') to re-calibrate normative insights about liberty, capability, physical integrity and corporeal security to the ‘mundane’ scale of basic body functionings (sleeping, but also eating, drinking, washing, excreting), and, crucially, to these functionings’ space-bound nature. As such, it (...) proposes an alternative theoretical exploration of the key role of domestic spaces in relation with bodily subsistence; with life and limbs. (shrink)

This essay conceptualises uncertainty in architectural interiors as ‘plan flexibility’, with a normative focus on its future-oriented qualities, and on one specific typology, housing. I argue that a future-ready plan refers to the quality of conserving options and resources for coming generations of dwellers. This builds from principles of architectural resilience, or exaptation, where design ambitions link to preparing for an increasingly vague future where ecological, economic, political, and socio-cultural conditions of human life are difficult to anticipate. Despite risks of (...) temporal agnosticism, focusing on housing allows me to discuss the forthcoming architectural needs of individuals without fully committing to an era-bound programme. I assert the long-term value of dwellings’ flexibility in terms of programme indeterminacy (multipurpose use of space; hard-then-soft) rather than formal indeterminacy (adaptable elements; soft-then-hard). I define the notions of programme indeterminacy and formal indeterminacy, which I briefly tie back to the modernist history of alternative models of flexible domestic dwelling. Then, I comment the interiors of Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira’s Wohnhaus Schlesisches Tor (Berlin, Internationale Bauausstellung, 1984–1987), making the case for some of the abovementioned principles. I contextualise these interiors aims and effects in light of contemporary characterisations of housing adequacy, and argue for the potential of the ‘extra room’ as one possible manifestation of the desired plan flexibility. This, inter alia, develops into a broader reflection on measures such as the ‘bedroom tax’ policies, and into a celebration of future-ready attitudes in planning houses. (shrink)

In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, (...) such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.". (shrink)

The essays in Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom are the personal stories of philosophers who were brought up religiously and have broken free, in one way or another, from restraint and oppression. As trained philosophers, they are well equipped to reflect on and analyze their experiences. In this book, they offer not only stories of stress and liberation but ruminations on the moral issues that arise when parents and other caregivers, in seeking to do good by their children, (...) sometimes end up doing real harm to their personal development and sense of autonomy as individuals. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Raymond D. Bradley, Damien Alexander DuPont, Diane Enns, Paul H. Hirst, Amalia Jiva, Irfan Khawaja, Christine Overall, Tasia R. Persson, and Glen Pettigrove. (shrink)

Children are treated differently compared to adults in many domains, including in health care, education, employment, and criminal justice. The differential treatment of children—to adults, and in the case of younger children and adolescents, to each other—makes it both practically and theoretically important to examine the justification of when and why this treatment is permissible. Because the justifications of children’s differential treatment typically appeal to foundational normative considerations—matters of autonomy, responsibility, and well-being—they provoke considerable controversy and disagreement in law and (...) ethics, especially, though not exclusively in the contexts of health care, sexual relations, and criminal justice. Consenting Children brings together philosophers and academic lawyers to grapple with these matters and domains and to share disciplinary and interdisciplinary insights and understanding. The volume’s contributors engage in deep and fruitful discussions of children’s consent and responsibility, decision-making capacity and best interests, as well as the role, powers, and duties of parents and state institutions. The volume lays the groundwork for future engagement in the legal and philosophical literature with the controversies raised by children’s autonomy, responsibility, and well-being, and the myriad interactions between them concerning children’s consent. (shrink)

This paper examines the challenges behavioural public policy faces in reconciling its interventions with liberal principles, as illustrated by Adam Oliver’s concept of “budging.” While “nudging,” a prominent application, aims to steer individuals towards better choices using subtle “choice architecture” tweaks, it has been criticized for its paternalism and potential for manipulation. As a purportedly non-paternalistic alternative, Adam Oliver proposed “budging,” which shifts the focus from the individual to regulating third parties (especially market actors) that exploit known cognitive biases for (...) profit. Oliver argues budging aligns with John Stuart Mill’s harm principle by preventing harm caused by others, specifically “behavioural externalities,” without dictating personal choices. This paper critically evaluates budging’s claim to non-paternalistic legitimacy within a Millian liberal framework, incorporating insights from Feinberg and Raz. It argues that budging often fails to escape paternalism, frequently becoming a form of ‘crypto-paternalism’: interventions justified with the non-paternalistic rationale of preventing third-party harm that nevertheless have the primary effect of steering an individual’s self-regarding choices. The core issue lies in the entanglement of regulating third-party exploitation (externalities) and influencing individual choices potentially affected by biases (internalities). Regulating exploitative practices inevitably steers individuals away from choices deemed suboptimal, which can be interpreted both paternalistically and non-paternalistically. The paper explores challenges related to defining exploitation versus legitimate catering, the difficulty in isolating non-paternalistic justifications, and the potential overlap with existing regulations. Ultimately, it concludes that while budging offers valuable insights, it struggles to cleanly separate itself from paternalism and requires further refinement to be fully compatible with robust liberal principles. (shrink)

AI systems increasingly support human decision-making across domains of professional, skill-based, and personal activity. While previous work has examined how AI might affect human autonomy globally, the effects of AI on domain-specific autonomy -- the capacity for self-governed action within defined realms of skill or expertise -- remain understudied. We analyze how AI decision-support systems affect two key components of domain-specific autonomy: skilled competence (the ability to make informed judgments within one's domain) and authentic value-formation (the capacity to form genuine (...) domain-relevant values and preferences). By engaging with prior investigations and analyzing empirical cases across medical, financial, and educational domains, we demonstrate how the absence of reliable failure indicators and the potential for unconscious value shifts can erode domain-specific autonomy both immediately and over time. We then develop a constructive framework for autonomy-preserving AI support systems. We propose specific socio-technical design patterns -- including careful role specification, implementation of defeater mechanisms, and support for reflective practice -- that can help maintain domain-specific autonomy while leveraging AI capabilities. This framework provides concrete guidance for developing AI systems that enhance rather than diminish human agency within specialized domains of action. (shrink)

This book, explores the complex moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) and its recent classification in the ICD-11. The examination offers a pioneering view into a condition that remains deeply controversial within medical and public discourse. -/- BID is characterised by a persistent desire to acquire a physical impairment, often through amputation. Such a situation forces the medical world to take a stance by either granting the amputation request or rejecting it with the risk of pushing individuals (...) toward self-made solutions. -/- Through a review of the contemporary understanding of BID as well as original data obtained during extensive fieldwork with medical professionals, this book addresses the ethical and moral aspects of the condition. Fundamental questions are posed about the relationship between bodily autonomy and embodiment, identity and gender, well-being and moral responsibility, and how these elements intertwine, shape and are shaped by sociocultural understanding of illness and body. -/- The book aims to move beyond traditional understandings of body functionality to consider the implications of autonomy and the extent to which an individual considered mentally and physically sound can dispose of one's own body within the contemporary medical paradigm. This is done to question long-standing assumptions about bodily integrity and traditional views on the wholeness and naturalness of the human form. As postmodern theories challenge established frameworks, a paradigm shift emerges in medical and societal approaches to identity, embodiment, and impairment, and this needs to be addressed. -/- Drawing on insights from medicine, psychology, sociology, and ethics, this book situates BID within a broader cultural and philosophical context. It raises essential questions about where individuals' rights intersect with medical responsibility and societal perceptions of normalcy and health. By doing so, the book provokes readers to reconsider the boundaries between health, pathology, and self-determination. (shrink)

_Augustine and Liberal Education_ sheds light on liberal education past and present, from an Augustinian point of view. Ranging from historical investigations of particular themes and issues in the thought of Saint Augustine, to reflections on the role of tradition and community and the challenges and opportunities facing universities in the next century, the contributors return to the sources of traditional reflection while exploring contemporary issues in education.

Sustainability and environmental protection are sometimes discredited by being stylised as enemies of personal or social autonomy. The paper argues that this is a short-sighted and short-sighted view, and that sustainability should rather be seen as an enabling policy that secures the possibility of autonomy for the future. To this end, the paper first briefly explains what sustainability and autonomy are, and then use Hobbes' thought experiment of a state of nature to show the undesirable consequences of radical personal autonomy (...) without self-commitment. From it will be deduced that meaningful autonomy goes hand in hand with self-commitment. A self-commitment to sustainability is, or so it is argued, unavoidable, in order to enable meaningful autonomous action for future generations. (shrink)

This paper explores the agency of marginalized individuals navigating negative social scripts, arguing that such scripts threaten autonomy and authenticity by acting as external guiding principles that do not reflect the individual's self-conception. I call agents that navigate these social scripts double agents because they are constituted by double consciousness – an acute awareness of how they are perceived by others. This awareness leads double agents to endorse a new guiding principle that tells them to use social scripts strategically. This (...) preserves autonomy and authenticity by allowing the agent to be guided by a principle she endorses and perform actions she believes reflect her self-conception. However, one aspect of authenticity, otherauthenticity, is undermined as others fail to recognize double agents as the agents they are. This highlights the harms of marginalization and social scripts as double agents risk becoming alienated from their own self-conception and contributing to their own marginalization. (shrink)

This monograph contrasts two prominent models of education, Competence-Based Education (CBE), more recent and currently dominant in most school systems around the world, and Bildung-Oriented Education (BOE), once the basis of the school systems of Northern Europe. CBE is assessment-oriented and interprets learning as the acquisition of clearly definable and allegedly measurable competences, and is supported by supranational organisations, such as the OECD, which approach education from the perspective of human capital theory. BOE is instead teaching-oriented and characterises learning holistically (...) as aimed at the progressive articulation of a meaningful ‘big picture’ in the student’s mind. Emerged in Northern Europe under the influence of the ideals of the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism of individual and collective autonomy and responsibility, BOE was subsequently enriched with a hermeneutical approach to teaching and socio-political objectives of emancipation and solidarity originating within Critical Theory. The book first analyses CBE and argues that, in spite of its celebrated ‘scientificity’, it is internally incoherent and unreliable, contributes to structural forms of oppression and injustice, can foster social pathologies, and fails to provide students with the kind of intellectual autonomy they need as both human beings and citizens of our complex post-industrial societies. Then, it introduces BOE and articulates and defends an updated version of it from objections raised by critical theorists, poststructuralists and postcolonial thinkers. It argues that BOE is a coherent and flexible model of education that endows students with autonomy and responsibility, can reduce structural forms of oppression and injustice, and can heal social pathologies. (shrink)

We expand and transform our habitual agency with countless technologies most moments of the day. Our environments, bodies, thoughts and social interactions are thoroughly shaped and mediated by tapestries of interweaving layers of old and new technologies. Perhaps this intimate relation with technology is at the core of our humanity. But our relation to technology has also repeatedly been feared as a Faustian deal that will be the dystopian end of us, or—in more utopian viewpoints— will bring us beyond our (...) earthbound finitudes toward virtual existences. What many agree on is that dramatic changes to our basic ecological and existential conditions are nearing. I suggest we should look for such critical tipping points and phase shifts not just in our biological bodies and environments but also in the informational and behavioral environments we rely on in our intentional and habitual agency. When thinking particularly about technologically mediated habitual agency an obvious place to start is with Don Ihde’s 4 classic human–technology relations. Interestingly, fellow post-phenomenologist Peter- Paul Verbeek has proposed new additional kinds of relations to e.g. “smart”and virtually “augmenting” technologies. While I find each of these analyses insightful, I worry that a focus on individual relations to particular spatio-temporally circumscribed artifacts falls short—or even obscures—some of the particular new challenges to our agency that networked, and data-driven smart technologies give rise to. I will therefore attempt to broaden the focus to how our agency is scaffolded by not just particular technological artifacts, but by our understanding of the broader informational and behavioral environment. To do this, I start by introducing some core theoretical background ideas that will support a more contextual approach and then proceed to consider both the classic and newer post-phenomenological relations from this more contextual perspective. The goal is not only to affirm the value of analyzing concrete technology relations but also to expand and contextualize the analyses. The latter is key if we want a post-phenomenological analysis that can help us understand how our habitual agency might be transformed as we come to live in increasingly “smart worlds”. These new data and algorithmically driven technologies not only transform our relation to a given context, but due to networked dataflows and “smart” decision-making (1) recursively act on us and (2) collapse and transcend the present context. This chapter will also highlight the uncertainties that informationally leaky and “smart” technologies introduce to our understanding of the kind of affordance space we are in and even what the expected outcomes of our actions will be. I suggest that technology relations with such effects might challenge some of the core contextual stabilities and informational segregations that our habitual agency have hitherto relied on. A further issue is if these new technological configurations challenge our habitual processes in ways we cannot easily adapt to. We certainly seem able to create new habits and adapt to these new technologies locally, but the new information flows, hidden audiences, and context collapses appear to challenge some conditions of agency that are typically out of sight, and the effects of which untraceably shows up well outside the present context. Overall, I shall argue that “smart” technologies can both expand and shrink our habitual agency—but that in terms of our ability to guide our action through various contexts in a perceived world something more fundamental appears to be breaking. (shrink)

Karl Widerquist is one of the world’s leading theorists and proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). His argument for UBI, however, is only one important cornerstone of his broader theory of justice and freedom. This theory entails a critical reassessment of the justification and proper scope of property rights. This is the task of The Problem of Property, a nifty little book which originates in previously unpublished parts of his doctoral thesis—the same thesis that formed the foundation of his Independence, (...) Propertylessness, and Basic Income: Freedom as the Power to Say No (2013, New York: Palgrave MacMillan). The current book is thus a welcome companion piece to that magnum opus. At the same time, The Problem of Property, thanks to its brevity and clarity, is a decent standalone introduction to Widerquist’s philosophy. While some fans of his previous works might be disappointed that UBI takes an unexpected backseat, the book’s narrow critical focus on the normative justifications of property rights makes it a goldmine for political philosophers. Even Lockean right-libertarians, his ostensible main targets, should find its freedom-based arguments familiar and easy to grasp, even if they may be puzzled by some of the radical conclusions that he draws from them. (shrink)