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This essay tackles head on the argument that sees an inherent paradox in theautonomy of thewill as the ground for the authority of the fundamental practical norms. It points out that only on reductive understandings of theautonomy of thewill can this idea be qualified as paradoxical, thereby yielding outcomes that either contradict their premises or presentautonomy under a false guise. With that done, itwill proceed to offer a conception (...) of theautonomy of thewill which is not vulnerable to the paradox, and which may therefore be equipped to rest the fundamental practical norms on solid ground. Throughout this discussion, Iwill rely on constitutivism about practical reasons to specifically defend the twofold conclusion that (a) the paradox ofautonomy can be avoided and that, relatedly, (b) ifautonomy is properly conceptualised, it is fully equipped and well positioned to ground the authority of the fundamental practical norms. (shrink)

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Kant takes the idea ofautonomy of thewill to be his distinctive contribution to moral philosophy. However, this idea is more nuanced and complicated than one might think. In this chapter, I sketch the rough outlines of Kant’s idea ofautonomy of thewill while also highlighting contentious exegetical issues that give rise to various possible interpretations. I tentatively defend four basic claims. First,autonomy primarily features in Kant’s account of moral agency, as the (...) condition of the possibility of moral obligation. Second,autonomy amounts to a metaphysical property as well as a normative principle and a psychological capacity. Third, although there is legitimate scholarly disagreement about whether or notautonomy involves self-legislation of the moral law, there is good reason to believe it underwrites an ‘inside-out’ (as opposed to ‘outside-in’) conception of the relationship between thewill and moral requirements. Fourth, persons have dignity because theirautonomy makes them members in the set of beings over whom the categorical imperative requires us to universalise our maxims, not becauseautonomy is an independently important property. (shrink)

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It is a commonplace that ‘autonomy’ has several different senses in contemporary moral and political discussion. The term’s original meaning was political: a right assumed by states to administer their own affairs. It was not until the nineteenth century that ‘autonomy’ came (in English) to refer also to the conduct of individuals, and even then there were, as now, different meanings.1 Odd as it may seem from our perspective, one that was in play from the beginning was Kant’s (...) notion of “autonomy of thewill,”2 as Kant defined it, “the property of thewill by which it is a law to itself independently of any property of the objects of volition” (4:440).3That’s a mouthful, to say the least. And interpreting.. (shrink)

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The central theoretical issue of Wegner's book is: Why do we have the illusion of consciouswill? I suggest that learning requires belief in theautonomy of action. You should believe in freedom of thewill because if you have it you're right, and if you don't have it you couldn't have done otherwise anyway. —Sam Buss (Lecture at University of California, San Diego, 2000).

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The themes ofwill and willing form a central but so far largely overlooked level of discourse in Hartmann’s Gregorius. At the heart of this discourse is the opposition between human and divinewill, which is negotiated in terms of the tension between controllability and uncontrollability. To this end, Hartmann’s legendary romance takes recourse to a narrative pattern characteristic of, among others, the Latin legend of St. Brendan. Structuring the text and plot of Gregorius, it serves to present (...) the protagonist’s voyages on the water as a surrender to thewill of God. When the protagonist decides to leave the monastery island, however, the pattern is conspicuously deviated from. It is through this deviation that the second instance of incest emerges as a personally attributable result of the protagonist’s attitude toward his creaturelywill – which requires correction – rather than as guilt in the moral-theological sense. In Hartmann, a quasi-mystical theology of thewill is molded into a narrative. In clear contrast to its French source, his adaptation thus reflects on the limits of human self-determination and controllability from an immanent perspective, the relationship to the world, as well as a transcendental perspective, the relationship to God. The prologue and Gregorius’s tablet suggest that Hartmann’s legend also deals with uncontrollability on a meta-level, as it ponders the problem of how the transcendent can be represented through narrative. (shrink)

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Beauchamp and Childress have performed a great service by strengthening the principle of respect for the patient'sautonomy against the paternalism that dominated medicine until at least the 1970s. Nevertheless, we think that the concept ofautonomy should be elaborated further. We suggest such an elaboration built on recent developments within the neurosciences and the freewill debate. The reason for this suggestion is at least twofold: First, Beauchamp and Childress neglect some important elements ofautonomy. (...) Second, neuroscience itself needs a conceptual apparatus to deal with the neural basis ofautonomy for diagnostic purposes. This desideratum is actually increasing because modern therapy options can considerably influence the neural basis ofautonomy itself.Sabine MNeuroScienceAndNorms: Ethical and Legal Aspects of Norms in Neuroimaging at Bonn University Hospital, Germany. Her main research interests are in neuroethics. She is coauthor of three German books about neuroethics and bioethics.Henrik Walter, M.D., Ph.D., is Full Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Bonn, Germany, and vice-director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Clinic of Bonn. He is author of Neurophilosophy of FreeWill and editor of the book From Neuroethics to Neurolaw?. His research fields are biological psychiatry, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, neurophilosophy, and neuroethics. (shrink)

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Descartes has long been recognized as occupying a pivotal position in Western philosophy. At the very center of Descartes's innovation are his intimately related conceptions of mind and knowledge. These twin notions ground the main problems that have continued to exercise philosophers to this day. Indeed, his elaboration of these notions establishes for his successors the agenda of problems to be addressed and the vocabulary with which to address them--so much so that Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz, despite their very significant (...) disagreements, have much more in common with each other than with their medieval predecesors. This dissertation delineates the transition Descartes effects from a prevalent medieval conception of understanding to a modern conception of it. Through the examination of the discontinuities--and the continuities--between Descartes's account of the understanding and that of high scholasticismwill emerge a characterization of two ways in which the understanding is autonomous in Descartes's view. These two sorts ofautonomy shed light on the origin of a set of related concerns that give modern philosophy its coherence, setting it apart from medieval philosophy as a distinct tradition. A first sort ofautonomy--the independence of the understanding from the senses--creates the modern problem of skepticism with regard to the external world, and is a necessary precondition for modern discussions of the scope and limit of human knowledge; a second sort ofautonomy, concerning the ontological status of the mind, provides the background against which modern discussions of the mind/body problem take shape. (shrink)

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There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe. Emergence in Mind presents new essays by a distinguished group of philosophers investigating whether mental properties can be said to 'emerge' from the physical processes in the universe. Such emergence requires mental properties to be different from physical properties, and much of the discussion relates to what the consequences of such a difference might be in areas such as freedom of thewill, (...) and the possibility of scientific explanations of non-physical (for example, social) phenomena. The volume also extends the debate about emergence by considering the independence of chemical properties from physical properties, and investigating what would need to be the case for there to be groups that could be said to exercise rationality. (shrink)

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This essay* takes two notions ofautonomy and two notions of explanation and argues that colours occur in explanations that fall under all of them. The claim that colours can be used to explain anything at all may seem to some people an outrage. But their pessimism is unjustified and the orthodox dispositional view which may seem to support it, I shall argue, itself has difficulties. In broad terms, Section 2 shows that there exist good straight scientific laws of (...) colour, constituting what one might call a phenomenal science. Section 3 offers a larger view of what we are doing when we attribute colours to things, a view which makes it a case of holistic explanation, similar in many ways to psychological explanation. Section 2 emphasizes the model of scientific explanation, and Section 3 the holistic model found in rational explanation; but itwill emerge that colour explanation in different ways fits both models, as it also does the two principal notions ofautonomy that the first section identifies. (shrink)

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This book argues for the explanatoryautonomy of the biological sciences. It does so by showing that scientific explanations in the biological sciences cannot be reduced to explanations in the fundamental sciences such as physics and chemistry and by demonstrating that biological explanations are advanced by models rather than laws of nature. To maintain the explanatoryautonomy of the biological sciences, the author argues against explanatory reductionism and shows that explanation in the biological sciences can be achieved without (...) reduction. Then, he demonstrates that the biological sciences do not have laws of nature. Instead of laws, he suggests that biological models usually do the explanatory work. To understand how a biological model can explain phenomena in the world, the author proposes an inferential account of model explanation. The basic idea of this account is that, for a model to be explanatory, it must answer two kinds of questions: counterfactual-dependence questions that concern the model itself and hypothetical questions that concern the relationship between the model and its target system. The reason a biological model can answer these two kinds of questions is due to the fact that a model is a structure, and the holistic relationship between the model and its target warrants the hypothetical inference from the model to its target and thus helps to answer the second kind of question. The ExplanatoryAutonomy of the Biological Scienceswill be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of biology and metaphysics. (shrink)

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Due to the domain characteristics of business ethics, a contractarian theory for business ethicswill need to be essentially different from the contract model as it is applied to other domains. Much of the current criticism of contractarian business ethics (CBE) can be traced back toautonomy, one of its three boundary conditions. After explaining whyautonomy is so important, this article considers the notion carefully vis à vis the contracting partners in the contractarian approaches in business (...) ethics.Autonomy is too demanding a condition for the realm of CBE. But a less stringent version of the contract may be possible, a version which uses the contract as a heuristic device, which merely requires moral responsibility. Furthermore, it is argued that views of (human) agency and the moral subject should be made explicit in such a theory. (shrink)

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In his book “Schiller as Philosopher”, Frederick Beiser laments that “contemporary Kant scholars have been intent on ignoring him. If they know anything at all about Schiller, it is only as the author of an epigram satirizing Kant”. Therefore, Beiser calls us “to consider Schiller as a philosopher, to reconstruct and appraise the arguments of his philosophical writings” (Beiser, 2005, p. vii). In this paper, I shall argue that it is Schiller's conception of freedom of thewill as “heautonomy” (...) that stands behind his critique and modification of Kant's ethics. However, the systematic significance of Schiller's theory of freedom is not obvious. Its argumentative structure must first be reconstructed—as Beiser has demanded—because it is concealed by an esthetic discourse. A reconstruction of Schiller's theory of freedom shows that he contrasts his concept of heautonomy as individual self‐determination with the Kantian concept of anautonomy or autocracy of reason by the universal moral law. Schiller's own philosophical contribution to the debate on freedom after Kant must therefore not be understood as a mere esthetic balancing and softening of Kant's ethical rigorism. Rather, it shows serious transformations of Kant's approach, which justifies understanding it as a critical step beyond Kant's theory of theautonomy of reason. (shrink)

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Iwill argue that theautonomy of a particular act of a particular person depends on the pattern of behavior in which it is embedded. I call this conditionalautonomy. A person's act is conditionally autonomous or not, relative to other acts at other times. Consider an example of a person crossing the street. On the one hand, this act might not be done for its own sake, but may fit into some ongoing long-term behavioral pattern that (...) is personally beneficial to the person crossing the street—such as regularly buying groceries in the supermarket . On the other hand, crossing the street might be done simply for its own sake. If such an act were considered to be autonomous, regardless of its temporal context, itsautonomy would be unconditional. However, Iwill argue that whereas conditionalautonomy is a highly useful social concept, indeed a necessary concept, for any human society, unconditionalautonomy is a useless concept that actually impedes our efforts to understand and explain human behavior. (shrink)

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Autonomous decision-making over therapy options is not reducible to the refusal of unwanted medical intervention. This is a myth that has been imported from questionable assumptions in political economy, and is of little benefit to medical practice and the sometimes agonizing decisions which have to be taken by patients and their relatives. An individual's right to therapy abatement can be protected from abuse only in the context of a full understanding of autonomous choice; not merely the right to refuse, but (...) the opportunity to receive assistance and consider alternatives. Limits are also required on the role of the surrogate in the refusal of therapy. Policies endorsing therapy abatement and exercise of the right to forego life-sustaining therapy should carry cast iron guarantees that theywill not be disadvantageous to the poor and undereducated members of society. It should also be noted that fears of unlimited life-prolongation have been greatly exaggerated. In an atmosphere of governmental indifference to the plight of the sick, with the notion of welfare tuned to market forces, there is a danger that self-determination can have a restricted meaning; the option of death in the context of an underfunded health service. This may not be the time to campaign for the right to refuse therapy, but rather the time to campaign for improvements to existing therapy. (shrink)

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Nietzsche's controversialwill to power thesis is convincingly rehabilitated in this compelling book. Tsarina Doyle presents a fresh interpretation of his account of nature and value, which sees him defy the dominant conception of nature in the Enlightenment and overturn Hume's distinction between facts and values. Doyle argues that Nietzsche challenges Hume indirectly through critical engagement with Kant's idealism, and that in so doing and despite some wrong turns, he establishes the possibility of objective value in response to nihilism (...) and the causal efficacy of consciousness as a necessary condition of humanautonomy. Her bookwill be important for scholars of Nietzsche's metaphysics, and of the history of philosophy and science more generally. (shrink)

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Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate theirautonomy. In this paper, I argue that it would in fact do so.

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This article draws on the suggestion that modern technology is “autonomous” in that our social control mechanisms are unable to control technology and instead merely adapt society to integrate new technologies. In this article, I suggest that common law judges tend systematically to support the integration of novel technologies into society. For example, courts sometimes require parties seeking compensation for serious injuries to submit to medical technologies to which the parties object for genuine reasons of fear or moral objection. Where (...) a novel technology alters the environment in some way, courts sometimes legitimize that alteration by refusing to recognize harm and instead characterizing avoidance of the technology as self-imposed harm. The examples selected in this article were chosen to support the hypothesis in one way or another, and future workwill aim to look for counter examples and to conduct a more complete assessment of the hypothesis. (shrink)

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What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous--and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment (...) engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law-unto-itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also examines the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond. (shrink)

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This article contends that the environmental release of genetically engineered (GE) animals with heritable traits that are patentedwill present a challenge to the efforts of nations and indigenous peoples to engage in self‐determination. The environmental release of such animals has been proposed on the grounds that they could function as public health tools or as solutions to the problem of agricultural insect pests. This article brings into focus two political‐economic‐legal problems that would arise with the environmental release of (...) such organisms. To address those challenges, it is proposed that nations considering the environmental release of GE animals must take into account the underlying circumstances and policy failures that motivate arguments for the use of the modified animals. Moreover, countries must recognize that the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights place on them an obligation to ensure that GE animals with patented heritable traits are not released without the substantive consent of the nations or indigenous peoples that could be affected. (shrink)

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There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe. Emergence in Mind presents new essays by a distinguished group of philosophers investigating whether mental properties can be said to 'emerge' from the physical processes in the universe. Such emergence requires mental properties to be different from physical properties, and much of the discussion relates to what the consequences of such a difference might be in areas such as freedom of thewill, (...) and the possibility of scientific explanations of non-physical (for example, social) phenomena. The volume also extends the debate about emergence by considering the independence of chemical properties from physical properties, and investigating what would need to be the case for there to be groups that could be said to exercise rationality. (shrink)

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There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe. Emergence in Mind presents new essays by a distinguished group of philosophers investigating whether mental properties can be said to 'emerge' from the physical processes in the universe. Such emergence requires mental properties to be different from physical properties, and much of the discussion relates to what the consequences of such a difference might be in areas such as freedom of thewill, (...) and the possibility of scientific explanations of non-physical (for example, social) phenomena. The volume also extends the debate about emergence by considering the independence of chemical properties from physical properties, and investigating what would need to be the case for there to be groups that could be said to exercise rationality. (shrink)

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This collection of original papers from distinguished legal theorists offers a challenging assessment of the nature and viability of legal positivism, a branch of legal theory which continues to dominate contemporary legal theoretical debates. To what extent is the law adequately described as autonomous? Should law claimautonomy? These and other questions are addressed by the authors in this carefully edited collection, and itwill be of interest to all lawyers and scholars interested in legal philosophy and legal (...) theory. (shrink)

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Research onautonomy exhibits a constellation of variegated perspectives, from the problem of the crude deprivation of it to the study of the distinction between personal and moralautonomy, and from the problem of the role of a “self as narrator”, who classifies its own actions as autonomous or not, to the importance of the political side and, finally, to the need of defending and enhancing humanautonomy. My precise concern in this articlewill be the (...) examination of the role of the human cognitive processes that give rise to the most important ways of tracking the external world and human behavior in their relationship to some central aspects of humanautonomy, also to the aim of clarifying the link betweenautonomy and the ownership of our own destinies. Iwill also focus on the preservation of humanautonomy as an important component of human dignity, seeing it as strictly associated with knowledge and, even more significantly, with the constant production of new and pertinent knowledge of various kinds. Iwill also describe the important _paradox of autonomy_, which resorts to the fact that, on one side, cognitions (from science to morality, from common knowledge to philosophy, etc.) are necessary to be able to perform autonomous actions and decisions because we need believe in rules that justify and identify our choices, but, on the other side, these same rules can become (for example, as a result of contrasting with other internalized and approved moral rules or knowledge contents) oppressive norms that diminishautonomy and can thus, paradoxically, defeat agents’ autonomous capacity “to take ownership”. (shrink)

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Currently, the most influential accounts of personalautonomy, at least in the English-speaking world, focus on providing conditions under which agents can be said to exercise self-control. Two distinct accounts of personalautonomy have emerged in this tradition: firstly, hierarchical models grounded in the work of Harry Frankfurt; and secondly, systems division models most famously articulated by Gary Watson. In this paper, Iwill show the inadequacies of both of these models by exploring the problematic views of (...) the self and self-control underlying each model. Iwill suggest that the problems faced by these models stem from the fact that they endorse a problematic fragmentation of the self. (shrink)

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One of the ethical issues that has been raised recently regarding emerging neurotherapies is that peoplewill be coerced explicitly or implicitly in the workplace or in schools to take cognitive enhancing drugs. This article builds on this discussion by showing how the law may pressure people to adopt emerging neurotherapies. It focuses on a range of private law doctrines that, unlike the criminal law, do not come up very often in neuroethical discussions. Three doctrines—the doctrine of mitigation, the (...) standard of care in negligence, and child custody determinations in family law—are addressed to show how the law may pressure people to consent to treatment by offering a choice between accepting medical treatment and suffering a legal disadvantage. The doctrines considered in this article apply indirect pressure to submit to treatment, unlike court-ordered medical treatment, which applies direct pressure and is not addressed here. The outcome of this discussion is to show that there is a greater range of social pressures that may encourage the uptake of novel neurotherapies than one might initially think. Once treatments that were developed and offered with therapeutic benefits in mind become available, their existence gives rise to unintended legal consequences. This certainly does not mean we should cease developing new therapies that may be of tremendous benefit to patients, but it does raise some questions for physicians and for legal policy-makers. How should physicians, who are required by medical ethical principles to obtain valid consent to treatment, react to a patient’s reluctant consent that is driven by legal pressure? From the legal policy perspective, are our legal doctrines satisfactory or should they be changed because, for example, they unduly promote the collective interest over individual freedom to reject medical treatment or because they channel us toward economically efficient treatments to the detriment of more costly but potentially superior approaches of dealing with behavioural problems? (shrink)

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Much disease and disability is the result of lifestyle behaviours. For example, the contribution of imprudence in the form of smoking, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, and drug and alcohol abuse to ill-health is now well established. More importantly, some of the greatest challenges facing humanity as a whole – climate change, terrorism, global poverty, depletion of resources, abuse of children, overpopulation – are the result of human behaviour. In this chapter, wewill explore the possibility of using advances in (...) the cognitive sciences to develop strategies to intentionally manipulate human motivation and behaviour. While our arguments apply also to improving prudential motivation and behaviour in relation to health, wewill focus on the more controversial instance: the deliberate targeted use of biomedicine to improve moral motivation and behaviour. We do this because the challenge of improving human morality is arguably the most important issue facing humankind (Persson and Savulescu, forthcoming). Wewill ask whether using the knowledge from the biological and cognitive sciences to influence motivation and behaviour erodesautonomy and, if so, whether this makes it wrong. (shrink)

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This essay* takes two notions ofautonomy and two notions of explanation and argues that colours occur in explanations that fall under all of them. The claim that colours can be used to explain anything at all may seem to some people an outrage. But their pessimism is unjustified and the orthodox dispositional view which may seem to support it, I shall argue, itself has difficulties. In broad terms, Section 2 shows that there exist good straight scientific laws of (...) colour, constituting what one might call a phenomenal science. Section 3 offers a larger view of what we are doing when we attribute colours to things, a view which makes it a case of holistic explanation, similar in many ways to psychological explanation. Section 2 emphasizes the model of scientific explanation, and Section 3 the holistic model found in rational explanation; but itwill emerge that colour explanation in different ways fits both models, as it also does the two principal notions ofautonomy that the first section identifies. (shrink)

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Rosenberg has recently argued that explanations supplied by (what he calls) functional biology are mere promissory notes for macromolecular adaptive explanations. Rosenberg's arguments currently constitute one of the most substantial challenges to theautonomy, irreducibility, and indispensability of the explanations supplied by functional biology. My responses to Rosenberg's argumentswill generate a novel account of theautonomy of functional biology. This accountwill turn on the relations between counterfactuals, scientific explanations, and natural laws. Crucially, in their (...) treatment of the laws' relation to counterfactuals, Rosenberg's arguments beg the question against theautonomy of functional biology. This relation is considerably more subtle than is suggested by familiar slogans such as Laws support counterfactuals; accidents don't. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:482 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY with Diderot, in 1773, did not generate any excitement on either side: Diderot found the philosopher far less interesting than the patroness; Hemsterhuis, for his part, thought Diderot in person a disappointment, after reading his works. I wish I could say that I found Hemsterhuis an exciting thinker, as he is presented in Moenkemeyer 's useful and informed study. I cannot. On the other hand, (...) this quiet philosopher from Holland stood at one of the great crossroads in the history of European thought. In his struggle against the Atheism he saw emerging from the French Enlightenment, in his stress on essences, known and unknown, as opposed to the atheistic concept of matter, in his doctrine of total personality rather than faculty psychology, in his idea of perfectibilityand the Golden Age that he likened to the afterlife--in these he had found a way out of the sterile impass confronting the disciples of Diderot and d'Holbach. In short, this is a figure of undeniable consequence historically, and he has been too long ignored by American students of philosophy. We should be grateful both to the author and to the publisher for making him known to us in this monograph, the first comprehensive study of Hemsterhuis ever published in English. WALTER E. REX University of California, Berkeley TheAutonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals." By Robert Paul Wolff. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Pp. x + 228. $12.50) TheAutonomy of Reason reflects Wolff's determination to get out of Kant's system what is good and to get out of Kant's system for good. It thus burns with the conflicting passions of a devoted student who has learned much from a reserved teacher but who now finds it imperative to break with him for precisely the reasons that attracted him initially. This explains why much of the book reads like a declaration of independence yet is based on a sympathetic, even immanent, critique of Kant addressed to Wolff himself. Although he is addressing himself, others may share andwill certainly benefit from Wolff's two decades of intense study of Kant. Without question Wolff has written a provocative and important book. Contrary to its title, however, it is not really about theautonomy of reason; and contrary to its subtitle, it is only partly a commentary on Kant's Groundwork. It serves, rather, as a propaedeutic to Wolff's own moral and political views. I believe this at least accounts for some of the puzzling features of the book: its highly personal nature, its style of philosophical commentary, and its devastating introduction. Wolff does not see his task as one of either historical exegesis or philosophical criticism. In the place of both Whiff proposes a "philosophical reconstruction" of the text. This is both desirable and necessary, he says, because "of all the great philosophers, there is none so rich in insights and so plagued by inconsistency as Kant" (p. 4). The resulting reconstructionwill be worthwhile provided that affirmative answers can be given to two questions: "Does the interpretation developed here illuminate the text, so that at least some of what Kant says is clearer and more plausible in the light of it; and, more important still, does the interpretation result in an argument whose independent philosophical merit justifies the effort spent grappling with Kant?" (p. 5). A third question suggests itself: would Kant recognize himself as the author of the reconstructed text? This question one must answer in the negative, for the Groundwork that emerges, although certainly Kantian, does not accurately reflect Kantianism. To the extent that this is a criticism, it is so only because the book advertises itself as a commentary. In short, Wolff's book is similar to Strawson's Bounds of Sense in that the value of both lies in salvaging something of worth from the sunken hulk of Kantianism. Wolff's Introduction is particularly revealing, for it consists of a sustained attack on several BOOK REVIEWS 483 of Kant's central metaphysical claims, an attack which, if successful, undermines much of his ethics. As an introduction to a commentary, it prejudices the... (shrink)

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As a form of functional diversity, spinal cord injury expressed by tetraplegia is one of the most serious events that can impact people, affecting their family and socioeconomic life. The type of care relationship established in these caseswill be essential for preservingautonomy. The objective of this study was to understand how care relationships influence theautonomy of people with tetraplegia and the dynamics that trigger practices ofautonomy violation, maintenance and promotion. This research is (...) inspired by problematization as a methodology using the Arch of Maguerez as an analytical approach strategy that enables an engagement between empirical and theoretical data. Some models of care relationships identified in this study either promote or violateautonomy: the protectionist model, based on the biomedical interpretation model of disability and the bodily impediments caused by spinal cord injury; the participatory model, involving the patient's interest in adapting to their new condition of family and community life, seeking to understand the practical aspects of daily life; the sharing model, in which the complicity and understanding of new forms of bodily expression allow the caregiver to be almost an extension of the tetraplegic person's body; the delegate model, which occurs in relationships with professional caregivers; and the emancipatory model, which seeks to empower the patient, highlight potentialities, and encourageautonomy. The key components of these conceptual care models guided the elaboration of hypotheses for intervention with the objective of maintaining and promoting theautonomy of people with tetraplegia through supported care. (shrink)

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While the Is-Ought Gap has recently been a topic of growing interest, most contributions are firmly fixed on logical, often quite technical accounts of theautonomy thesis. This book defends two complementaryautonomy theses-a modal and ground-based thesis-that provide a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the nature of normativity. Theautonomy thesis is often motivated by claims about the nature of the normative domain and its categorical difference from the non-normative domain. This book develops two novel (...) interpretations of theautonomy thesis, one based on the notion of grounding and the other based on a notion of logical-semantic entailment, developed within a framework of truthmaker semantics. Together these accounts capture best the informal idea that we cannot 'get' something normative from the non-normative. The proposal is based on an analysis of what it means to say that certain propositional content parts are relevant to the instantiation of entailment and grounding relations. Moreover, the book relates theautonomy debate to other important metaethical debates, and it offers a more explicit account of the theoretical commitments of an autonomist position. Finally, it develops simple and elegant formal equivalents of the proposedautonomy theses which facilitate the evaluation of structurally complex proposed counterexamples, which have impeded a substantiveautonomy debate. TheAutonomy of Normativitywill appeal to researchers and graduate students working in metaethics, metaphysics, and philosophical logic"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the WillDavid A. Wisner‘Tis not Wit merely, but a Temper, which must form a Well-Bred Man. In the same manner, ‘tis not a Head merely, but a Heart and a Resolution which must compleate the real Philosopher. 1In order to possess the world of culture we must incessantly reconquer it by historical recollection. But recollection does not mean merely the act of reproduction. It is (...) a new intellectual synthesis—a constructive act.... History is not knowledge of external facts or events; it is a form... an organon of our self-knowledge, an indispensable instrument for building up our human universe. 2Ernst Cassirer is probably best known to historians of ideas for his work on the problem of knowledge, which began with a neo-Kantian historical analysis of epistemological questions and culminated in the philosophy of symbolic forms. As he himself always admitted, even in his last public writings, this focus on epistemology was the foundation of his philosophical interests. Yet by the last two decades of his life he had in true Socratic fashion endowed his investigations with heightened emphasis. “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry,” he wrote in the opening lines of An Essay on Man, “appears to be generally acknowledged.” 3 Cassirer perceived, however, [End Page 145] that the need for such an effort to be made had reached monumentally critical proportions: the early twentieth century had engendered grave historical and philosophical crises which threatened to reverse the progress of modern thought. Paradoxically, modern philosophy had many tools for attaining “knowledge of human nature” and yet stood farther from its goal than ever before. What Cassirer called “anthropological philosophy,” concerned as it was “with the whole destiny of man,” still required special consideration, in both its theoretical and its historical dimensions. 4 It was essentially to these twin domains that Cassirer would devote himself in his later years.The transformation of Cassirer’s philosophical perspectives thus had two facets. In order to outline his program Cassirer had first to consider a broader range of human activities than thought alone, from which he concluded that human culture consisted of a hierarchy of symbolic forms beginning with myth and culminating in science. However, he also felt compelled to elucidate the historical process by which these symbolic forms could progressively manifest themselves, and more specifically the individual human effort which was required for true self-knowledge. This he did principally in his historical works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and with particularly profound results: from a historian of knowledge Cassirer became a historian of thewill; from an epistemologist he became an ethical thinker; from an academic he became an exemplar of self-conscious moral action, a paragon of humanautonomy and freedom. Indeed, in this endeavor he proved to be more thoroughly and fundamentally a Kantian than ever his theory of knowledge would reveal.I would go so far as to suggest that Cassirer’s history of thewill was an integral part of his mature constructive philosophy. On the surface this history can be restated in the following terms. First, Cassirer insists on a fundamental opposition between the rationalism and intellectualism of ancient Greek philosophy and the voluntarism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, both of which represent in Cassirer’s view manifestations of a struggle in Western thought continuing well into the twentieth century. Second, he suggests that the historical task of Western philosophy since the first mature articulation of Latin Christian theology by Saint Augustine has been to liberate the individual humanwill from any and all forms of subservience. Such views are most forcefully expressed in The Myth of the State, Cassirer’s last book, but they actually constitute an essential and coherent element in all of Cassirer’s later work on the history of ideas and culture. Indeed, Cassirer’s history of thewill provides us with a particularly keen and nuanced account of this essential Western legacy, while at the same time reading into it in Kantian manner a moral for the life of the individual human being. [End Page 146]In making such claims I am situating myself among... (shrink)

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The subject matter of the essay is theautonomy of art, whichwill be analysed from a Jungian perspective. What Jung had in mind with his notion of the independence of the artistic process is its freedom from the conscious mind of an artist, rather than its independence from the current social, political or cultural conditions. Art, according to Jung, is autonomous if it comes from deeper levels of the human psyche, and that is unconsciousness. To test the (...) validity of Jung’s "autonomous complex", Iwill be checking the empirical reality of artistic creation, by providing professional artists’ accounts of the creative process. Also, Iwill challenge the categorically laid and the deeply rooted idea of a close link between artistic talent and mental illness, trying to see if the artistic process can be independent of an artist’s psychological state. In Jung’s view, art happens instead of and not because of potential illness of an artist. Additionally, I am going to contrast his view with Freud’s, for whom an artwork is a sublimation of sexual drive or a product of neurosis. This idea was not acceptable to Jung, as he believed in the existence of not only sexual but also art complex. Finally, Iwill try to argue that Jung’s view is more accurate in the depiction of artistic process than Freud’s and that his emphasis on theautonomy in art, although radical, deserves more attention from scholars in philosophy and psychology of art. (shrink)

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This article critically re-examines the application of the principle of patientautonomy within bioethics. In complex societies such as those found in North America and Europe health care professionals are increasingly confronted by patients from diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. This affects the relationship between clinicians and patients to the extent that patients' deliberations upon the proposed courses of treatment can, in various ways and to varying extents, be influenced by their ethnic, cultural, and religious commitments. The principle (...) of patientautonomy is the main normative constraint imposed upon medical treatment. Bioethicists typically appeal to the principle of patientautonomy as a means for generally attempting to resolve conflict between patients and clinicians. In recent years a number of bioethicists have responded to the condition of multiculturalism by arguing that theautonomy principle provides the basis for a common moral discourse capable of regulating the relationship between clinicians and patients in those situations where patients' beliefs and commitments do or may contradict the ethos of biomedicine. This article challenges that claim. I argue that the precise manner in which theautonomy principle is philosophically formulated within such accounts prohibits bioethicists' deployment ofautonomy as a core ideal for a common moral discourse within multicultural societies. The formulation ofautonomy underlying such accounts cannot be extended to simply assimilate individuals' most fundamental religious and cultural commitments and affiliations per se. I challenge the assumption that respecting prospective patients' fundamental religious and cultural commitments is necessarily always compatible with respecting theirautonomy. I argue that the character of some peoples' relationship with their cultural or religious community acts to significantly constrain the possibilities for acting autonomously. The implication is clear. Theautonomy principle may be presently invalidly applied in certain circumstances because the conditions for the exercise ofautonomy have not been fully or even adequately satisfied. This is a controversial claim. The precise terms of my argument, while addressing the specific application of theautonomy principle within bioethics,will resonate beyond this sphere and raises questions for attempts to establish a common moral discourse upon the ideal of personalautonomy within multicultural societies generally. (shrink)

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Today, data and intervening digital media provide critical lines of communication with our social and business connections. Even those we know personallywill typically connect to us via digital means. As a consequence, data and the digital space add a third dimension to the individual: we are now mind, body and digitality. This essay considers how digitality affects outcomes for the individual by exploring the mechanisms of digital influence. By using Peirce’s theory of semiosis to explain the process of (...) digital translation, this essay demonstrates how digitality influences the development of the individual, undermines personalautonomy and changes the nature of legal personhood thereby providing points for future legal intervention. (shrink)

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This article addresses the issue of the disciplinary status of Educational Studies, which both in the theoretical discourse and in the practice of this area is far from unambiguous. The issue is relevant not only for theoretical reasons but also for practical and social ones. This is because the status of Educational Studies, by having a decisive impact on the very understanding and nature of studies in education, at least in part may impact changes in educational practice. Two main models (...) of Educational Studies can be differentiated, with additional variation within these models. Among the terms most commonly used in discussion of the disciplinary status of Educational Studies, frequent mention is made of theautonomy that exists in various versions and of interdisciplinarity. This article proposes a new way of understanding this status, which I call theautonomy of Educational Studies as a second-level discipline, which includes aspects of both of the previously mentioned models, yet also adds certain modifications. In the course of my argumentation, Iwill conduct a comparative analysis of both traditions, and subsequently justify the proposed thesis, and finally briefly indicate potential problems which may be generated by this model. (shrink)

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Beneficence and respect forautonomy are two of the most fundamental moral duties in general and in bioethics in particular. Beyond the usual questions of how to resolve conflicts between these duties in particular cases, there are more general questions about the possible forms of the interactions between them. Only recognition of the full spectrum of possible interactionswill ensure optimal moral deliberation when duties potentially conflict. This paper has two simultaneous objectives. The first is to suggest a (...) typological scheme of all possible modes of interaction; thesewill be classified under the “discrete,” “semi-discrete,” and “non-discrete” categories, according to whether the meaning and/or forms of expression of each duty are treated as independent from or rather as constrained by the other. The second objective is to show that all logical possibilities of interaction indeed have real expressions in medical ethics, to provide clear illustrations of each, and in particular to stress those that have usually escaped recognition. (shrink)

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Definition of the problem. Voluntary active euthanasia is, in certain circumstances, morally permissible and should be permitted by law. Autonomous persons may have a fundamental interest in experiencing ”death in dignity” in accordance with their own preferences. This interest is protected by the concept of human dignity assumed by German law. Some prerequisites being met, the moral and legalautonomy right to determine the time and manner of one’s own death includes a right to secure active euthanasia from a (...) willing physician, and a physician’s acceding to the patient’s request be may morally the right thing to do. Arguments and conclusion: Most arguments against the justifiability of voluntary active euthanasia unveil their weakness when scrutinized. However, insofar as legalized voluntary active euthanasia would be subject to intolerable abuse, our policy options are dilemmatic, and the concept of human dignity as it has been taken for granted in German legal discourse, is questioned. There is no option other than seeking safety in legal procedures for every single case. (shrink)

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The paper is about Kant’s moral psychology, a complex analysis and philosophical reflection on the tension of humanwill as arbitrium sensitivum in acting consistently as ratio essendi. It explores the tension of fallibility of the humanwill. In Kant’s notion of practical freedom he points to the dynamics of thewill—Wille and Willkur—and how it creates tension between choice and culpability. This occurs specifically in the Willkur’s function as the arbiter. I explore the impact of Willkur’s (...) arbitration in self-determination, especially the important call of obedience to the Wille. I conclude with an emphasis on the challenge for Kantianwill to operate towards unity which enables the agent to be authentically autonomous. (shrink)

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According to Gawande, Lazaroff “chose badly.” Gawande suggests that physicians may be permitted to intervene in choices of this kind. What makes the temptation to intervene paternalistically in this and similar cases especially strong is that the patient’s choice contradicts his professed values. Paternalism appears less problematic in such cases because, in contradicting his values, the patient seems to sidestep his ownautonomy. This chapter addresses the dangers of overextending this interpretation. I argue that it is not so easy (...) to judge when a person is not genuinely exercisingautonomy, and that choosing contrary to one’s own values does not necessarily amount to sidestepping one’sautonomy. The key insight is to recognize the importance of the attitude of caring as an integral part of some expressions ofautonomy. Thiswill allow us to develop an alternative picture of minimalautonomy, according to which it is possible to choose against one’s values while genuinely exercisingautonomy. For practical purposes, in medicine and elsewhere, this means that, in cases like Lazaroff’s, those tempted toward paternalism must exercise particular caution before they deem a choice to be disen- gaged fromautonomy: even if a choice contradicts the person’s own values, it might be rooted in caring, and then, despite initial appearances to the contrary, it may still command the highest level of protection against paternalism. (shrink)

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It has been argued - most prominently in Harry Frankfurt's recent work - that the normative authority of personal commitments derives not from their intrinsic worth but from the way in which one'swill is invested in what one cares about. In this essay, I argue that even if this approach is construed broadly and supplemented in various ways, its intrasubjective character leaves it ill-prepared to explain the normative grip of commitments in cases of purported self-betrayal. As an alternative, (...) I sketch a view that focuses on intersubjective constraints of intelligibility built into social practices and on the pragmatics of how those norms are contested in an ongoing fashion. (shrink)

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We propose a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship between social emancipation and alternative technology development. Key is the “functionalautonomy” of the collective of users and developers of the technology vis-a-vis state and capital. We draw on previous empirical work about three hacker projects to substantiate the claim that the functionalautonomy of hackers rests on three “pillars ofautonomy”: technical skill, shared values, and collective memory. These three pillars sustain theautonomy of a community (...) of hackers so that it may successfully resist recuperation attempts by capital. We make this claim in contradistinction to looser constellations of users, citizen scientists, DIY hobbyists, etc., where the functionalautonomy tends to be much weaker. Hence, in the latter case, we should expect the actors to be recuperated in short time. The emancipatory promises that they make in regard to their practices, and are often mirrored in the academic literature about user innovation, citizen science, etc.,will then turn sour. From this observation, we develop a second-order reflection on the role of the scholar studying purportedly emancipatory technology projects. As against the popular “follow-the-actors” approach, we defend the continued need for scholarly critique. We do so with the caveat that critique must in part be conducted as self-critique. (shrink)

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Walter applies the methodology of neurophilosophy to one of philosophy's centralchallenges, the notion of freewill. Neurophilosophical conclusions are based on, and consistentwith, scientific knowledge about the brain and its functioning.

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In this paper, I want to give an interpretation of Harry Frankfurt’s complex theory of thewill with respect to the issue of “autonomy and necessity”. My central claim is that Frankfurt’s employment of the concept of thewill is equivocal. He actually uses three distinct conceptions of thewill without ever distinguishing them from one another. I shall introduce and justify such a clarifying tripartite distinction. Although my discussionwill be limited to Frankfurt’s view (...) of thewill, this distinction and the points made about its components can easily be generalized. In my opinion, then, such a tripartite distinction must form an essential part of any rich theory of thewill.Both the first and the second conception of thewill can readily be understood within the scope of the debate between compatibilism and incompatibilism. The third conception, however, transcends the framework of this classical opposition because theautonomy of this third kind ofwill positively requires necessity.Autonomy is not only compatible with necessity : according to the third conception, the former also intrinsically involves the latter. Although this conception of thewill is somewhat unfamiliar and non-standard in the debate, I shall try to show that it captures an important fact about our volitional nature — a deep fact which is often overlooked or neglected. (shrink)

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In his post-Tractatus work on natural language use, Wittgenstein defended the notion of what he dubbed theautonomy of grammar. According to this thought, grammar - or semantics, in a more recent idiom - is essentially autonomous from metaphysical considerations, and is not answerable to the nature of things. The argument has several related incarnations in Wittgenstein?s post-Tractatus writings, and has given rise to a number of important insights, both critical and constructive. In this paper Iwill argue (...) for a potential connection between Wittgenstein?sautonomy argument and some more recent internalist arguments for theautonomy of semantics. My main motivation for establishing this connection comes from the fact that the later Wittgenstein?s comments on grammar and meaning stand in opposition to some of the core assumptions of semantic externalism. nema. (shrink)

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Sometimes neuroscientists discover distinct realizations for a single psychological property. In considering such cases, some philosophers have maintained that scientistswill abandon the single multiply realized psychological property in favor of one or more uniquely realized psychological properties. In this paper, we build on the Dimensioned theory of realization and a companion theory of multiple realization to argue that this is not the case. Whether scientists postulate unique realizations or multiple realizations is not determined by the neuroscience alone, but (...) by the psychological theory under examination. Thus, one might say that, in the splitting or non-splitting of properties, psychology enjoys a kind ofautonomy from neuroscience. (shrink)

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Significant criticisms have been raised regarding the ethical and psychological basis of living wills. Various solutions to address these criticisms have been advanced, such as the use of surrogate decision makers alone or data science‐driven algorithms. These proposals share a fundamental weakness: they focus on resolving the problems of living wills, and, in the process, lose sight of the underlying ethical principle of advance care planning,autonomy. By suggesting that the same sweeping solutions, without opportunities for choice, be applied (...) to all, individual patients are treated as population‐level groups—as a theoretical patient who represents a population, not the specific patient crafting his or her individualized future care plans. Instead, advance care planning can be improved through a multimodal approach that both mitigates cognitive biases and allows for customization of the decision‐making process by allowing for the incorporation of a variety of methods of advance care planning. (shrink)

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