Abstract
The aim of this paper is to suggest that a necessary condition of autonomy has not been sufficiently recognized in the literature: the capacity to critically reflect on one’s practical attitudes (desires, preferences, values, etc.) in the light of new experiences. It will be argued that most prominent accounts of autonomy—ahistorical as well as history-sensitive—have either altogether failed to recognize this condition or at least failed to give an explicit account of it.
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Notes
Mele 2005. However, autonomy and moral responsibility may not always go hand in hand. In this paper, discussion will be restricted to autonomy, setting moral responsibility aside.
While ‘practical attitude’ is employed here as a cover term for all those attitudes with respect to which a person can be said to be autonomous, the focus of the paper will be on one particular kind of such attitudes, namely values. Following Mele values may be defined in the following way: “S at least thinly values X at a time if and only if at that time S both has a positive motivational attitude toward X and believes X to be good”, Mele 1995.
Gerald Dworkin supplements his account with the externalist criterion of “procedural independence” according to which a desire is possessed autonomously only if it is not acquired by “manipulation, deception, the withholding of relevant information, and so on”, Dworkin 1976. However, this criterion has rightly been criticized by James Taylor as being ad hoc, Taylor 2005, 5. Moreover, as Alfred Mele points out, the criterion is not unambiguously externalist, Mele 1995, 148.
A necessary condition of an agent’s authentically possessing a value is that this value is not acquired by “compulsion*” (i.e. compulsion not arranged by the agent herself). A sufficient condition for “compulsion*” would consist in (i) the bypassing of the agent’s capacities for control over her mental life and (ii) the person’s practical inability to shed the value in question; cf. Mele 1995, 165 ff.
A different way how to supplement hierarchical accounts of autonomy has been suggested by Friedman (1986). She argues that “[h]ighest principles must be assessed for their fit and appropriateness in light of what guides and motivates a person at the lower level.” (Friedman 1986, 33). Motivations, as Friedman conceives them, encompass “one’s desires, longings, urges, fears, anxieties, and so forth” (ibid., 30–1). In this paper, however, it will be focused on new experiences as touchstones for one’s values, i.e. a condition for autonomy that Friedman does not consider.—As mentioned before, following Mele the present discussion will be restricted to the problem of autonomy with respect to values, neglecting other practical attitudes such as desires, motives, preferences and the like. It seems plausible, however, that the substance of the present proposal equally holds for other practical attitudes.
Compare Susan Wolf’s example of JoJo for a similar point; cf. Wolf 2007. Wolf stresses that a person’s possession of reflective capacities and satisfaction of the historical conditions do not suffice for autonomy. According to Wolf, autonomy requires that the person is sane, where sanity is “the minimally sufficient ability cognitively and normatively to recognize and appreciate the world for what it is.” (ibid., 154). In a footnote she adds: “Strictly speaking, perception and sound reasoning may not be enough to ensure the ability to achieve an accurate conception of what one is doing and especially to achieve a reasonable normative assessment of one’s own situation. Sensitivity and exposure to certain realms of experience may also be necessary for these goals.” However, Wolf does not develop this point any further.
Thus, the newness of experiences is an entirely epistemic quality; it does not require ontological indeterminism. (There’ll be more about both the concept of experience and what makes for new experiences in Section 5 below).
Remember that it is not the case that Old Pat reflects in light of his new experiences and then reaffirms his old values. The way the example is set up, he does not reflect at all in light of his new experiences because he doesn’t consider them as relevant input for critical reflection.
To this it has been objected that Mele deals with the problem of entrenched attitudes, too, and in so doing acknowledges the importance of new experiences for the ability to revise one’s values; cf. e.g. Mele 1993. There, Mele discusses the example of Alex who cannot give up his autonomously formed desire for hard work even after he becomes a father and wants to change his working habits; cf. ibid. 275. However, we do not claim that Mele overlooked the problem of entrenched values, but only that he does not recognize the importance of ERCR for overcoming encrusted values. In describing the case as he does, Mele might be seen as implicitly attributing ERCR to Alex in that he suggests that Alex wants to change his values in the light of the new experience he makes with his children. Our claim is that this aspect of autonomy is never made explicit.
It is therefore no objection to the current proposal that authors such as Mele might incorporate something like ERCR into their accounts. The point is that they haven’t as yet done so. Just as Mele and others have pointed out that an internalist conception of autonomy is incomplete and has to be supplemented by a historical condition, it is suggested here that even the resulting historical conception is incomplete and must be supplemented by ERCR.
That autonomy requires the general “ability to recognize reasons” is argued by Paul Benson (Benson 1991, 398); the point here is that, more specifically, autonomy also requires the ability to recognize new experiences as reason to critically reflect on one’s values.
The basic distinction here is between internalist and externalist theories of autonomy, where the latter make S’s autonomy at t depend on conditions external to the agent’s mental makeup at t. Historical accounts require external conditions and thus count as externalist in this sense. The account proposed here accepts a historical condition on autonomy and adds a further external condition (ERCR); one could say that it is doubly externalist.
This is not to say that experience is epistemologically fundamental in the sense that all epistemic justification, and hence all knowledge, derives from experience. The claim here is just the minimally empiricist one that all informational content about the world ultimately derives from experience.
We presuppose here that in general, those parts of our picture of the world that are based on first-hand experience tend to be at least roughly adequate.
Note that Mele’s conception of critical reflection, too, even though it is part of an externalist account of autonomy, is internalist in the second sense in that its employment depends only on the agent’s capacities and attitudes at a given time; cf. e.g. Mele 2006, 167.
Against this view it may be argued that experiences as such are not external to the person’s psychological makeup at a given time. Again, this is true in one sense and false in another. To be sure, a person’s experiences are part of her mental life and in this sense “internal.” But remember that “experience” is a “double-barrelled word.” In particular, “new” experiences in the sense defined here are constituted by the unexpected intrusion of a contingent reality into the person’s mental life. Now it must be admitted that the criterion for “newness” of experience and information suggested here can be given a purely internalist interpretation as well since it concerns only the unexpectedness of the experience or information relative to the expectations of the person in question. But this would ignore that it is only when understood as information about, or experience of, a reality external to the person’s psychology, narrowly construed, that new experiences and information can enable the person to question longstanding values and attitudes. The point is that the world itself, as opposed to the person’s value-laden picture of it, can afford us with opportunities to reassess our own values. ERCR is the capacity to take advantage of these opportunities.
It is no objection against this proposal that sometimes, experiences, too, may be manipulated. First, as a matter of fact, most experiences aren’t. Second, shielding a person from new experiences requires much more than manipulating that person’s values and belief, namely controlling here environment completely. Finally, as will be explained in the next section, if a given environment does not provide new experiences (whether because it has been manipulated or for other reasons), this may decrease a person’s autonomy in the achievement-sense, but not in the capacity sense.
As a matter of fact, Mele in one place does mention experience as a factor in a person’s regaining her autonomy after manipulation; Mele 1995, 175, fn. 30. However, experience does not play a systematic role in his account of autonomy.
Note that this does not mean that “city experiences” are considered to have a better quality and are therefore more suited to challenge Andreas old values. The point is simply that some environments provide new experiences at a higher rate than others.
For a similar idea, cf. Hurka 1987. In contrast to Hurka, we do not want to claim that autonomy increases with the number ob rejected alternatives. As a matter of fact, many new experiences will also present new alternatives. What matters for us, however, is the opportunity to reconsider one’s values in the light of new experiences.
In later publications, Rawls distinguishes between narrow and wide reflective equilibria, depending on the range of beliefs and theories considered in the reflective process (e.g. Rawls 1974, 2001; cf. Daniels 2003). Only a wide reflective equilibrium, one that takes into account all relevant facts and all relevant moral considerations, can secure the normative adequacy of the principles arrived at. Nothing Rawls says excludes the possibility that new experiences may trigger a process of reflection. But again , as far as we can see Rawls does not acknowledge the point made here that some new experiences must trigger reflection if the resulting equilibrium is to be adequate.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Andreas Maier, Hannes Ole Matthiessen, Alfred Mele and Michael Quante as well as two anonymous referees for this journal for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Blöser, C., Schöpf, A. & Willaschek, M. Autonomy, Experience, and Reflection. On a Neglected Aspect of Personal Autonomy. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 13, 239–253 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9205-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9205-3