Outsourcing self-government

Ethics

Volumn 120, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 761-790

  Valdman, Mikhail ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77955701981     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/653435     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 9.
2. Roger Crisp, Mill on Utilitarianism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 61.
3. Steven Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism and Restraint (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 146.
4. One can distinguish prudential value from ethical, perfectionist, and aesthetic value, though, for present purposes, there is no reason to insist that these are nonoverlapping categories. See L. W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 20-25.
5. The view that one has moral reason not to outsource self-government is beyond this article's scope. Such a view is defended by Robert Paul Wolff on the grounds that such outsourcing would constitute an abdication of moral responsibility. See his In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Note, however, that in Sec. III.B I consider the possibility that such outsourcing would have negative prudential implications by virtue of one's losing responsibility for one's actions and choices.
6. There is some tension between this view and Griffin's commitment to an informed desire-satisfaction account of welfare, though it is open to Griffin to argue that a desire to outsource self-government likely would not be an informed one.
7. To be sure, one can make decisions about one's commitments, perhaps shaping their content. Nothing in this article, however, turns on a distinction between commitments that (partly) stem from decisions and those that do not. Indeed, my view is that there is no intrinsic value in making any decision for oneself, even if it concerns one's deepest commitments. I address this in more detail in Secs. III.A and III.B.
8. I lack the space to explore these implications in any detail. For more on liberalism and the idea of a freely chosen life, see John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 18:267.
9. Agent-control conceptions can be contrasted with mere authenticity conceptions, according to which no such decision making is required. Such views come inmany varieties. For instance, the centerpiece of John Christman's view is that a person is autonomous with respect to a desire if he attended to the process of its development and did not resist it (see his "Autonomy and Personal History," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 [1991]: 1-24).
10. Merely attending to this process and not resisting it seems like a far cry from having managerial control over it (in any reasonable sense). Or consider Harry Frankfurt's view that person P's desire D is autonomous if P accepts D as revealing "something about himself" (see his "Reply to Gary Watson," in Contours of Agency, ed. Sarah Buss and Lee Overton [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002], 160).
11. Frankfurt's insistence that autonomous agents accept their desires makes it seem as if, on his view, some agential decision making is required. But, as Frankfurt explains, for one's decision to accept D to be autonomy conferring, one need only be satisfied with it in the sense that one has no interest in changing it. On Frankfurt's view, then, one can be autonomous merely by being satisfied with a standing judgment that one's desires, in some sense, reflect who one is; no genuine managerial control or decision making, it seems, is required. See also his "The Faintest Passion," in Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104-5.
12. Michael Bratman, "Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason," Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 11.
13. See Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4-7.
14. Ibid., 5-6.
15. Interestingly, quite a few autonomy theorists gesture toward an agent-control view without clearly committing themselves to it. For instance, Gerald Dworkin describes autonomy as a "second-order capacity to reflect critically upon one's first-order preferences and desires, and the ability either to identify with these or to change them in light of higher-order preferences and values." Here, "in light of" is ambiguous. If it means "in consultation with," then Dworkin may be advocating an agent-control view, according to which autonomous agents must be able to survey their motivations at a distance, so to speak, and decide with which to identify. If, however, it means "according to," then being autonomous, on Dworkin's view, would consist mainly in coherence relations between firstorder desires and higher-order commitments, making agential decision making unnecessary. There is a similar ambiguity in Laura Ekstrom's view, on which "a person acts autonomously only when acting from a motivation of a certain sort: one that (1) has undergone critical evaluation with respect to his conception of the good, (2) was uncoercively formed, and (3) coheres with his other acceptances and preference states." Here, "with respect to" could mean "in consultation with" or "according to." See Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 108;
16. Laura Waddell Ekstrom, "Autonomy and Personal Integration," in Personal Autonomy, ed. James Stacey Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 154.
17. Mere authenticity conceptions (see n. 9) have little to fear from my arguments because they do not require autonomous agents to be deciders in any meaningful sense. Indeed, on such views, being autonomous may well be compatible with outsourcing decision making. To be sure, such views often include a nonmanipulation condition, which would rule out, say, being governed by a personal despot. But such views also tend to make an exception when the manipulation is consensual.
18. To be clear, not all defenders of agent-control views are committed to the view that outsourcing self-government would make one nonautonomous. On Mele's view, for instance, such outsourcing, if voluntary, may well be autonomy preserving (see his Autonomous Agents, 172). Bear in mind, however, that my concern is not with whether someone who outsources self-government could still be autonomous but with whether something of intrinsic value would be lost by such outsourcing.
19. To be clear, my focus is not on the plausibility of agent-control conceptions of autonomy but on their normative importance. I am not directly challenging Bratman's or Mele's accounts of autonomy.
20. Mill perhaps would deny this on the grounds that no amount of a "lower" pleasure could compensate one for losing any amount of a "higher" pleasure. I reject this view, but even if it were true it would not pose a problem for my view, as should be clear momentarily. See J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 168-75.
21. There are other strategies available as variations of the ones just mentioned. For instance, one variation on strategy A is to promote the goals and values a person would have if he were rational and well informed.
22. On a private ownership theory of welfare of the sort defended by G. E. Moore, for instance, according to which something is good for you (roughly) if it is objectively good and if it is in your possession, living according to your deepest commitments need not be good for you. See his Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 98-99.
23. Perhaps one's life is acceptable so long as it is a life that, given one's starting commitments, one could have lived had one been allowed to act without interference. That is, it may be any life that, given an initial set of commitments and no illegitimate interference, one might have chosen to have lived.
24. Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism and Restraint, 146.
25. In this respect, these committees are somewhat like the demon in a Frankfurt case. Unlike this demon, however, we are to imagine that these committees routinely intervene in one's decision making. See Harry Frankfurt, "Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829-39.
26. These authors might protest that they meant to show only that we shouldn't outsource self-government to the EC. But then their thought experiments would tell us nothing about the intrinsic value of being a decider. At most, they would show that there is intrinsic value in having one's deepest commitments guide or shape one's life.
27. To be clear, the PC offers you one illusion-that of control over your own life.
28. This is redolent of the standard compatibilist claim that the freedom to act in accordance with one's desires is the only kind of freedom worth having.
29. Perhaps a difference is that, looking back, Sean can take credit for his achievements in a way that the baseball player cannot (this was suggested to me by an anonymous editor at Ethics). This idea, I believe, is best cashed out in terms of Sean's responsibility for his achievements-a point I address in Sec. III.B.
30. See Derek Parfit, "Reasons and Motivation," Supplement to the Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society 71 (1997): 99-130.
31. See Aurel Kolnai, "Deliberation Is of Ends," in Varieties of Practical Reasoning, ed. E. Millgram (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 259-78;
32. David Wiggins, "Deliberation and Practical Reason," in his Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 215-38.
33. I suspect that, in arguing against government by this committee, one will have to appeal to the kinds of considerations already explored in our discussion of the meaningfulness objection and the living objection.
34. This thought might well explain the popularity of agent-control conceptions of autonomy (see Sec. I).
35. Here one might appeal to Robert Paul Wolff's distinction between being responsible and taking responsibility, arguing that those who outsource self-government are no longer doing the latter. This is an interesting thought, but it is not clear that by making oneself a better reasoner by empowering the PC, one would cease taking responsibility for one's actions. Indeed, the opposite may be the case. See Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism.