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Autonomy and false beliefs

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Abstract

The majority of current attention on the question of autonomy has focused on the internal reflection of the agent. The quality of an agent’s reflection on her potential action (or motivating desire or value) is taken to determine whether or not that action is autonomous. In this paper, I argue that there is something missing in most of these contemporary accounts of autonomy. By focusing overwhelmingly on the way in which the agent reflects, such accounts overlook the importance of what the agent is reflecting upon. Whichever of these current formulations of autonomy we accept, reflection could be undertaken in full accordance with the conditions set, and yet the action fail to be autonomous. This will occur, I argue, if the agent is mistaken about the object of her reflection. More precisely, if she has a particular kind of false belief about the action she is contemplating undertaking, then no amount of reflection can render that action autonomous. This suggests the need for externalist conditions to be incorporated into an account of autonomy.

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Notes

  1. While this paper focuses on actions, the debates around autonomy extend to the conditions for autonomous values, desires, intentions and preferences. Though I will not be extending my conclusions here to cover these potential sites of autonomy, I am optimistic the general framework presented can be modified to accommodate these broader concerns. Whether such a framework can also be extended to considerations of more ‘global’ senses of autonomy is beyond the scope of this paper.

  2. This is in contrast to the attention granted in medical ethics, via the notion of informed consent. See, e.g., (Savulescu and Momeyer 1997).

  3. Stoljar’s (2000) normatively substantive account of autonomy also includes quite considerable attention to false beliefs. However, her concern is with beliefs that are oppressive, over and above being false. Furthermore, the falsity enters her account through the norms that guide decision-making, rather than through the object of reflection. As such, her focus is slightly different to mine. I consider the relationship between Stoljar’s views and my own in Sect. 3.

  4. There is one disanalogy between the two hypotheticals that is worth mentioning. In the King George scenario, unlike in the case of Tal, George is deliberately misled in a way that makes him a conduit for others’ intentions. It may be supposed that this somehow renders George less autonomous than he would be were he to be labouring under identical misinformation that was not the result of human actions. As will become clear below, my theory does not make space for the source of the misinformation to affect the degree to which the agent’s autonomy is reduced. This may appear counter-intuitive. However, I suspect that the source of this intuition may have less to do with autonomy, and more to do with moral responsibility. Moral responsibility may push our intuitions on autonomy from two directions. First, when an individual is manipulated there is another agent who is morally responsible for her lack of autonomy. The graveness of the wrong of undermining another’s autonomy makes clear the harm befalling the manipulated individual, a harm that we may be less inclined to recognise in the non-manipulated but equally misled individual. It may simply be easier to identify a harm when we can identify the cause of that harm. This does not mean, however, that the deliberately harmed individual is any more harmed than the unintentionally harmed individual. Second, it is natural to assume that the manipulated individual is less morally responsible for what follows from her actions than the non-manipulated individual. This is particularly so if we feel that the non-manipulated individual is in some way culpable for the misinformation that guides her action. On my theory, the culpably misinformed individual is no more autonomous at the point of action than the manipulated individual, since all that matters is the way in which the false belief affects the decision-making process. However, this is compatible with the culpably misinformed agent retaining moral responsibility for her non-autonomous actions. Of course, this line of argument assumes that autonomy and moral responsibility can come apart, which is a position I cannot defend here. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for raising this issue.

  5. Meyers (2005) has recently put forward a view that might seem to conflict with this scenario. Meyers describes a mountaineering accident in which she suffered multiple broken bones, and after which her body ‘took control’ and facilitated her descent down the mountain. Meyers argues that this was not an instance of non-autonomy, but rather an instance of autonomy skills exhibited by the self-as-embodied. I see the view I develop here as compatible with this claim. Not all automatic action need be considered non-autonomous, as I explain below. As will become clear, Meyers’ actions in fact reflect just the competencies that I claim are necessary for autonomous action.

  6. Some philosophers describe hypnosis or addiction in these terms. I doubt whether this is in fact an accurate description of such experiences (see, e.g., Levy 2006), but little hinges on the matter here.

  7. Some exceptions to these conditions will be considered in Sect. 3 (b) below.

  8. More will be said to qualify this condition later, since as it stands it potentially has the unfortunate effect of requiring something approaching omniscience in order for action to be autonomous.

  9. This description of the reflection competencies is kept deliberately loose here, since my goal is to show that however the details of reflection are construed, autonomous action requires comprehension as well. If successful, this would mean that for any current account of autonomous action, there is an additional condition that has yet to be acknowledged.

  10. I focus here on the first condition, since this will be sufficient to show that McKenna is mistaken in his conclusions about false beliefs. The relevance of the second condition, that the agent comprehends what necessarily follows from an action, will be drawn out in Sect. 3.

  11. This is distinctly different from a situation in which I know that A leads to ~B but I do it anyway, in the absence of an expectation that it will bring about B. Such action may be called irrational (or perverse, or weak-willed), but it is not my concern here. On the account I put forward such action could be considered autonomous, provided it meets the necessary conditions.

  12. Thanks to Al Mele for helping to clarify some of the following issues.

  13. It is crucial here that the agent actually understands that cyanide contains properties that are poisonous, and usually kill people. In the absence of this understanding, the second version collapses back into the first, becoming a situation of not comprehending what is in the glass.

  14. I leave aside the related problem of being mistaken about what one actually values. My concern is with the way in which accounts of autonomy have tended to overlook the importance of external criteria. Since false beliefs about one’s own motivation are already a consideration for internalist accounts, I will not discuss them further here.

  15. I do in fact hold that they are highly plausible. On my account, autonomy requires the accessibility of a range of competencies. These competencies appear vulnerable to certain self-regarding attitudes, such as self-distrust, in just the way Govier notes. I take it, however, that the link between self-regarding attitudes and the autonomy competencies is an empirical rather than conceptual one, and thus proving the connection would require psychological evidence.

  16. This is deliberately different from cases where believing something makes it the case, as in William James’ (2010) willing to believe.

  17. A good analogy for this is the voting age restrictions most states employ. The right to vote is taken to be contingent on a certain level of rationality, autonomy and social understanding. No one would suggest, however, that there is a meaningful shift in these competencies at the moment the individual turns 18.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the audience at Victoria University of Wellington, Al Mele, and an anonymous reviewer of this journal for very helpful comments.

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Correspondence to Suzy Killmister.

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Killmister, S. Autonomy and false beliefs. Philos Stud 164, 513–531 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9864-0

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