Autonomy and relativism

Individual relativism may initially seem to do justice to the idea of our autonomy: our moral rules are set by ourselves. But this attractiveness of relativism disappears as soon as we realize that our beliefs are largely not up to us—that, as the saying goes, we catch them like we catch the flu. This seems especially true of our moral beliefs, most of which are inherited from our surrounding culture. Thus, what individual relativism gives to us in terms of autonomy is largely taken away by reflection on our beliefs.

Relativism and natural law

Individual relativism and natural law ethics have something in common: both agree that the grounds of your ethical obligations are found in you. The disagreement, of course, is in how they are found. The relativist says that they are found in your subjectivity, in your beliefs and values that differ from person to person, while the natural lawyer thinks they are found in your human form, which is exactly like the human form of everyone else.

(Whether Kantianism shares this feature depends on how we read the metaphysics of rationality, namely whether our rationality as a genuine part of our selves, or as an abstraction.)

I think this commonality has some importance: it captures the idea that idea that we are in some sense morally beholden to ourselves rather than to something alien, something about which we could ask “Why should I listen to it?”

But I think in the end natural law does a better job being a non-alienating ethics. For we have good reason to think that my moral beliefs and values are etiologically largely the product of society around me and accidental features in my life. If these beliefs and values are what grounds my moral obligations, then my obligations are by and large the product of society and accident. (Think of the common philosophical observation that we do not choose our beliefs, but catch them like one catches a cold.) If I had lived in a different society with different accidental influences, I would have had different obligations on relativism. The obligations are, thus, largely the result of external and accidental influence on my cognition.

On the other hand, on natural law, my obligations are grounded in my individual human form which is my central and essential metaphysical constituent. Granted, I did not create this form for myself. But neither is it an accidental result of external influence—it defines me.

I think that as a society we feel that the variability of our individual beliefs and values makes us more autonomous if relativism is true. But once we realistically realize that this variability is largely due to external influence, our intuitions should shift. Natural law provides a more real autonomy.

Of course, on a theistic version of natural law, my form comes from God. Yes, but on orthodox Aristotelianism (which I am not sure I completely endorse) it is not an alien imposition, since I have no existence apart from that form.

Autonomy and God

We have much in the way of autonomy rights against other people. Do we have autonomy rights against ourselves? I think so. There are ways of constraining our future selves that are contrary to our dignity.

Here is a thesis I find plausible:

1. We have no autonomy rights against God.

Of course, and importantly, God has reasons for action based on the value of our autonomy. But I think it’s still true that these reasons are not going to be conclusive in the way that they would be if we had autonomy rights. (They might be conclusive in some other way, say if God promised us autonomy in some area. I take it that a right to have a promise fulfilled is not an autonomy right, perhaps pace Kant.)

Claim (1) seems to be a thesis about God’s authority. It paints a picture of God as an authoritarian being with infinite normative power, and the picture is not so attractive to modern sensibilities.

But I think there is a different way of thinking and feeling about (1). We can, instead, think of (1) as consequence of the ways that

2. God is infinitely close to me—closer than I am to myself.

There are many ways in which I am “not that close to myself”. I am ignorant of much that goes on in me, even in my mind. I don’t love myself as much as I should. My future is murky and my past is fading. And, above all, I don’t have being in myself, but being by participation in another, God. God is closer to me than I am to myself. And a consequence of this closeness is that I have even less in the way of autonomy rights against God than I do against myself.

Related to (1) is an interesting hypothesis. Everyone agrees:

3. God has infinite power.

It intuitively sounds plausible that:

4. God has infinite normative power.

I am not sure what exactly (4) means, or how it is true. But doesn’t it sound right?

Paternalistically enhancing autonomy

Sometimes you are about to tell someone something, and they say: “I don’t want to hear about it.” Yet in some cases, the thing one wanted to tell them is actually rationally relevant to a decision they need to make, and without the information their decision will be less truly theirs.

Imagine, for instance, you have a friend who needs an organ transplant and is planning to travel to China to get the organ transplant. You start to tell them that you read that China engages (or at least recently engaged) in forced organ harvesting among executed prisoners, but they try to shut you up. Yet you keep on speaking. In doing so, you are being paternalistic, but your paternalism enables them to make a more truly informed, and hence autonomous, decision.

It sounds strange to think of paternalism as supporting autonomy, but if we think of autonomy in a Kantian way as tied to genuine rationality, rather than in a shallow desire-fulfillment way, then we will realize that a person can (e.g., through deliberate ignorance) act against their own autonomy, and there may be room for a healthy paternalism in restoring them to autonomy against their own desires. This kind of thing should be rare (except in the case of literal parents!), but it is also the kind of thing friends need to do for friends at times.

Divine permission ethics

There are two ways of thinking about the ethics of consent.

On the first approach, there are complex prohibitions against non-consensual treatment in a number of areas of life, with details varying depending on the area of life (e.g., the prohibitions are even more severe in sexual ethics than in medicine). Thus, this is a picture where we start with a default permission, and layer prohibitions on top of it.

On the second, we start with a default autonomy-based prohibition on one person doing anything that affects another. That, of course, ends up prohibiting pretty much everything. But then we layer exceptions on that. The first is a blanket exception for when the affected person consents in the fullest way. And then we add lots and lots more exceptions, such as when the the effect is insignificant, when one has a special right to the action, etc.

The second approach is interesting. Most ethical systems start with a default of permission, and then have prohibitions on top of that. But the second system starts with a default of prohibitions, and then has permissions on top of that.

The second approach raises this question. Given that the default prohibition on other-affecting actions is grounded in autonomy, how could anything but the other’s consent override that prohibition? I think one direction this question points is towards something I’ve never heard explored: divine permission ethics. God’s permission seems our best candidate for what could override an autonomy-based prohibition. So we might get this picture of ethics. There is a default prohibition on all other-affecting actions, followed by two exceptions: when the affected person consents and when God permits.

I still prefer the first approach.

Sports injuries and the problem of evil

An argument from evil against the existence of God based on sports injuries would not, I think, be found very persuasive. Why not?

I take it that this is because of the retort: “The athletes freely undertook these risks.”

This free undertaking is not the whole of the explanation of why sports injuries are less troubling as examples of the problem of evil. Another part is the idea that there are significant goods at stake in sports, and real danger is a constitutive component of some of these goods. But that the risk is freely accepted is surely a major part of our lack of worry. We are much more worried about evils that befall those who did not freely undertake the relevant risks.

Note also that as a rule we do not—though there are notable exceptions—blame the athletes for freely undertaking the risks of sports injuries. We feel that, generally speaking, they are within their rights to undertake these risks for these potential benefits.

But if God exists, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He cares for our good more than we care for ourselves. And he has more rights over us than we have over ourselves. If this is correct, then just as we have the right (limited as it is) to accept certain serious risks, God has an even greater right to impose risks on us.

The observation that God would have more rights over us than do over ourselves by no means solves the problem of evil. But it helps.

The human as the end-setter

Perhaps the deepest question about human beings is about the source of our dignity. What feature of us is it that grounds our dignity, gives us a moral status beyond that of brute animals, provides us with a worth beyond market value, makes us into beings to be respected no matter the stakes?

I was thinking about the proposal (from the Kantian tradition, but rather simplified) that it is our ability to set ends of ourselves that is special about humans. But as far as I put it, the proposal is obviously inadequate. Suppose I take our Roomba and program it to choose a location in its vicinity at random and then try to find a path to that location using some path-finding algorithm. A natural way to describe the robot's functioning then is this: The robot set an end for itself and then searched for means appropriate to that end. So on the simple end-setting proposal, the robot should have dignity. But that's absurd: even if one day someone makes a robot with dignity, we're not nearly there yet, and yet what I've described is well within our current capabilities (granted, one might want to stick a Kinect on the Roomba to do it, since otherwise one would have to rely on dead-reckoning).

Perhaps, though, my end-setting Roomba wouldn't have enough of a variety of ends. After all, all its ends are of the same logical form: arrive at such and such a location. Maybe the end-setting theory needs the dignified beings to be able to choose between a wider variety of ends. Very well. There is a wide variety of states of the world that can be described with the Roomba's sensors, and we can add more sensors. We could program the Roomba to choose at random a state of the world that can be described in terms of actual and counterfactual sensor values and then try to achieve that end with the help of some simple or complex currently available algorithm. Now, maybe even the variety of ends that can be described using sensors isn't enough for dignity. But now the story is starting to get ad hoc, as we embark on the hopeless task of quantifying the variety of ends needed for dignity.

And surely that's not the issue. The problem is, rather, with whole idea that a being gets dignity just by being capable of choosing at random between goals. Surely dignity wouldn't just require choice of goals, but rational choice of goals. But what is this rationality in the choice of goals? Well, there could be something like an avoidance of conflicts between goals. However, that surely doesn't do much to dignify a being. If the Roomba chose a set of goals at random, discarding those sets that involved some sort of practical conflict (the Roomba--with some hardware upgrade, perhaps--could simulate pursuing the set of goals and see if the set is jointly achievable in practice), that would be cleverer, but wouldn't be dignified.

And I doubt that even more substantive constraints would make the random end-setting be a dignity-conferring property. For there is nothing dignified about choosing randomly between options. There might be dignity in a being that engaged in random end-setting subject to moral constraints, but the dignity wouldn't be grounded in the end-setting as such, but the being's subjection of its procedures to moral constraints.

The randomness is a part of the problem. But of course replacing randomness with determinism makes no difference. We could specify some deterministic procedure for the Roomba to make its choice--maybe it sorts the descriptions of possible ends alphabetically and always chooses the third one on the list--but that would be nothing special.

If end-setting is to confer dignity, the being needs to set its ends not just subject to rational constraints, but actually for reasons. Thus there must be reasons prior to the ends, reasons-to-choose and not just constraints-on-choice. However, positive reasons embody ends. And so in a being whose end-setting makes it be dignified, this end-setting is governed by prior ends, the ends embodied in the reasons the being is responsive to in its end-setting. On pain of vicious regress, such a being must be responsive to ends that it did not choose. Moreover, for this to be dignity-producing, surely the responsiveness needs to to these ends as such. But "an end not chosen by us" is basically just the good. So these beings must be responsive to the good as such.

At this point, however, it becomes less and less clear that the choice of ends is doing all that much work in our story about dignity, once we have responsiveness to the good as such in view. For this responsiveness now seems a better story about what confers dignity. (Though perhaps still not an adequate one.)

Objection: No current robot would be capable of grasping ends as such and hence cannot adopt ends as such.

Response: Sure, but can a two-year-old? A two-year-old can adopt ends, but does it cognize the ends as ends?

Freedom and theodicy

Invoking free will has always been a major part of theodicy. If God has good reason to give us the possibility to act badly, that provides us with at least a defense against the problem of evil. But to make this defense into something more like a theodicy is hard. After all, God can give us such pure characters that even though we can act badly, we are unlikely to do so.

I want to propose that we go beyond the mere alternate-possibilities part of free will in giving theodicies. The main advantage of this is that the theodicy may be capable of accomplishing more. But there is also a very nice bonus: our theodicy may then be able to appeal to compatibilists, who are (sadly, I think) a large majority of philosophers.

I think we should reflect on the ways in which one can limit a person's freedom through manipulation of the perfectly ordinary sort. Suppose Jane is much more attractive, powerful, knowledgeable and intelligent than Bob, but Jane wants Bob to freely do something. She may even want this for Bob's own sake. Nonetheless, in order not to limit Bob's freedom too much, she needs to limit the resources she uses. Even if she leaves Bob the possibility of acting otherwise, there is the ever-present danger that she is manipulating him in a way that limits his freedom.

I think the issue of manipulation is particularly pressing if what Jane wants Bob to do is to love her back. To make use of vastly greater attractiveness, power, knowledge and intelligence in order to secure the reciprocation of love is to risk being a super-stalker, someone who uses her knowledge of the secret springs of Bob's motivations in order to subtly manipulate him to love her back. Jane needs to limit what she does. She may need to make herself less attractive to Bob in order not to swamp his freedom. She may need to give him a lot of time away from herself. She might have reason not to make it be clear to him that she is doing so much for him that he cannot but love her back. These limitations are particularly plausible in the case where the love Jane seeks to have reciprocated is something like friendship or, especially, romantic love. And Scripture also presents God's love for his people as akin to marital love, in addition to being akin to parental love (presumably, God's love has no perfect analogue among human loves).

So if God wants the best kind of reciprocation of his love, perhaps he can be subtle, but not too subtle. He can make use of his knowledge of our motivations and beliefs, but not too much such knowledge. He can give us gifts, but not overload us with gifts. He may need to hide himself from us for a time. Yes, the Holy Spirit can work in the heart all the time, but the work needs to be done in a way that builds on nature if God is to achieve the best kind of reciprocation of his love.

I think there are elements of theodicy here. And a nice bonus is that they don't rely on incompatibilism.

The Incarnation is also an important element here—I am remembering Kierkegaard...

A dialog on rhetoric, autonomy and original sin

L: Rhetorical persuasion does not track truth in the way that good arguments do. The best way for us to collectively come to truth is well-reasoned arguments presented in a dry and rigorous way, avoiding rhetorical flourishes. Rhetoric makes weaker arguments appear stronger than they are and a practice of giving rhetorically powerful arguments can make stronger arguments appear weaker.

R: Rhetoric appeals to emotions and emotions are truth-tracking, albeit their reliability, except in the really virtuous individual, may not be high. So I don't believe that rhetorical persuasion does not track truth. But I will grant it for our conversation, L. Still, you're forgetting something crucial. People have an irrational bias against carefully listening to arguments that question their own basic assumptions. Rhetoric and other forms of indirect argumentation sneak in under the radar of one's biases and make it possible to convince people of truths that otherwise they would be immune to.

L: Let's have the conversation about the emotions on another day. I suspect that even if emotions are truth-tracking, in practice they are sufficiently unreliable except in the very virtuous, and it is not the very virtuous that you are talking of convincing. I find your argument ethically objectionable. You are placing yourself intellectually over other people, taking them to have stupid biases, sneaking under their guard and riding roughshod over their autonomy.

R: That was rhetoric, not just argument!

L: Mea culpa. But you see the argumentative point, no?

R: I do, and I agree it is a real worry. But given that there is no other way of persuading not very rational humans, what else can we do?

L: But there are other ways of persuading them. We could use threats or brainwashing.

R: But that would be wrong!

L: This is precisely the point at issue. Threats or brainwashing would violate autonomy. You seemed to grant that rhetorical argument does so as well. So it should be wrong to convince by rhetorical argument just as much as by threats or brainwashing.

R: But it's good for someone to be persuaded of the truth when they have biases that keep them from truth.

L: I don't dispute that. But aren't you then just paternalistically saying that it's alright to violate people's autonomy for their own good?

R: I guess so. Maybe autonomy isn't an absolute value, always to be respected.

L: So what objection do you have to convincing people of the truth by threat or brainwashing?

R: Such convincing—granting for the sake of argument that it produces real belief—would violate autonomy too greatly. I am not saying that every encroachment on autonomy is justified, but only that the mild encroachment involved in couching one's good arguments in a rhetorically effective form is.

L: I could pursue the question whether you shouldn't by the same token say that for a great enough good you can encroach on autonomy greatly. But let me try a different line of thought. Wouldn't you agree that it would be a unfortunate thing to use means other than the strength of argument to convince someone of a falsehood?

R: Yes, though only because it is unfortunate to be convinced of a falsehood. In other words, it is no more unfortunate than being convinced of a falsehood by means of strong but ultimately unsound or misleading arguments.

L: I'll grant you that. But being convinced by means of argument tracks truth, though imperfectly. Being convinced rhetorically does not.

R: It does when I am convincing someone of a truth!

L: Do you always try to convince people of truths?

R: I see what you mean. I do always try to convince people of what I at the time take to be the truth—except in cases where I am straightforwardly and perhaps wrongfully deceitful, sinner that I am—but I have in the past been wrong, and there have been some times when what I tried to convince others of has been false.

L: Don't you think that some of the things you are now trying to convince others of will fall in the same boat, though of course you can't point out which they are, on pain of self-contradiction?

R: Yes. So?

L: Well, then, when you strive to convince someone by rhetorical means of a falsehood, you are more of a spreader of error than when you try to do so by means of dry arguments.

R: Because dry arguments are less effective?

L: No, because reasoning with dry arguments is more truth conducive. Thus, when you try to convince someone of a falsehood by means of a dry argument, it is more likely that you will fail for truth-related reasons—that they will see the falsehood of one of your premises or the invalidity of one of your inferences. Thus, unsound arguments will be more likely to fail to convince than sound arguments will be. But rhetoric can as easily convince of falsehood as of truth.

R: I know many people who will dispute the truth conduciveness of dry argument, but I am not one of them—I think our practices cannot be explained except by thinking there is such conduciveness there. But I could also say that rhetorical argument is truth conducive in a similar way. The truth when attractively shown forth is more appealing than a rhetorically dressed up falsehood.

L: Maybe. But we had agreed to take for granted in our discussion that rhetorical persuasion is not truth tracking.

R: Sorry. It's easy to forget yourself when you've granted a falsehood for the sake of discussion. Where were we?

L: I said that reasoning with dry arguments is more truth conducive, and hence runs less of a risk of persuading people of error.

R: Is it always wrong to take risks?

L: No. But the social practice of rhetorical presentation of arguments—or, worse, of rhetorical non-argumentative persuasion—is less likely to lead to society figuring out the truth on controversial questions.

R: Are you saying that we should engage in those intellectual practices which, when practiced by all, are more likely to lead to truth?

L: I am not sure I want to commit myself to this in all cases, but in this one, yes.

R: I actually think one can question your claim about social doxastic utility. Rhetorical persuasion leads to a greater number of changes of mind. A society that engages in practices of rhetorical persuasion is likely to have more in the way of individual belief change, as dry arguments do not in fact convince. But a society with more individual belief change might actually be more effective at coming to the truth, since embodying different points of view in the same person at different times can lead to a better understanding of the positions and ultimately a better rational decision between them. We could probably come up with some interesting computation social epistemology models here.

L: You really think this?

R: No. But it seems no less likely to be correct than your claim that dry argument is a better social practice truth-wise.

L: Still, maybe there is a wager to be run here. Should you engage in persuasive practices here that (a) by your own admission negatively impact the autonomy of your interlocutors and (b) are no more likely than not to lead to a better social epistemic state?

R: So we're back to autonomy?

L: Yes.

R: But as I said I see autonomy not as an absolute value. If I see that a person is seriously harming herself through her false beliefs, do I not have a responsibility to help her out—the Golden Rule and all that!—even if I need to get around her irrational defenses by rhetorical means?

L: But how do you know that you're not the irrational one, about to infect an unwary interlocutor?

R: Are you afraid of being infected by me?

L: I am not unwary. Seriously, aren't you taking a big risk in using rhetorical means of persuasion, in that such means make you potentially responsible for convincing someone, in a way that side-steps some of her autonomy, of a falsehood? If by argument you persuade someone, then she at least has more of a responsibility here. But if you change someone's mind by rhetoric—much as (but to as smaller degree) when by threat or brainwashing—the responsibility for the error rests on you.

R: That is a scary prospect.

L: Indeed.

R: But sometimes one must do what is scary. Sometimes love of neighbor requires one to take on responsibilities, to take risks, to help one's neighbor out of an intellectual pit. Taking the risks can be rational and praiseworthy. And sometimes one can be rationally certain, too.

L: I am not sure about the certainty thing. But it seems that your position is now limited. That it is permissible to use rhetorical persuasion when sufficiently important goods of one's neighbor are at stake that the risk of error is small relative to these.

R: That may be right. Thus, it may be right to teach virtue or the Gospel by means that include rhetorical aspects, but it might be problematic to rhetorically propagate those aspects of science or philosophy that are not appropriately connected to virtue or the Gospel. Though even there I am not sure. For those things that aren't connected to virtue or the Gospel don't matter much, and error about them is not a great harm, so the risks may still be doable. But you have inclined me to think that one may need a special reason to engage in rhetoric.

L: Conditionally, of course, on our assumption that rhetoric is not truth-conducive in itself.

R: Ah, yes, I almost forgot that.

Hormonal contraception and informed consent

In a 2000 article in the Archives of Family Medicine, Larimore argued that because the extremely high effectiveness rate of hormonal contraception is much higher than what one would expect on the basis of its often not very high rate of ovulation suppression, there is very good reason to think a significant portion of the high effectiveness rate is due to preventing implantation of the early embryo. But many women believe that the early embryo is a human being, and hence would take this effect to be a morally unacceptable abortion (and I expect there are additional women who do not take the effect to be utterly morally unacceptable, but for whom such an effect is nonetheless a significant reason against the use of the contraceptive method). Since patient autonomy requires that the patient be informed of those aspects of treatment that are salient given the patient's values and moral beliefs, the physician's duty in the case of such women is to inform the women of the risks of prevention of implantation. Because a physician may not know whether a particular woman consider this factor relevant, Larimore suggests that a physician can say something like: "Most of the time, the pill acts by preventing an egg from forming. This prevents pregnancy. However, women on the pill can still sometimes get pregnant. Some doctors think that the pill may cause the loss of some of these pregnancies very early in the pregnancy, before you would even know you were pregnant. Would knowing more about this possibility be important to you in your decision about whether to use the pill?"

Even bracketing the question whether contraception and abortion are morally permissible, Larimore is right about what is required what the current consensus on patient autonomy and informed consent. I've had a look at the titles and often abstracts of the 55 papers listed as citing Larimore's, and surprisingly none of them appears to be an argument to the contrary (though maybe some contain such an argument in their body). One interesting recent study of women in Western and Eastern Europe found that only 2% can correctly identify all the mechanisms of oral contraceptives and the IUD (for which the postfertilization effect is probably even greater), but that 73% said that their healthcare provider should inform them about effects that occur after fertilization even when these effects are before implantation. So not only is the information salient to many women, it is information that many women want.

It seems to me that pro-choice physicians should be impressed by the need to obtain informed consent for such postfertilization effects insofar as a significant part of the reasoning for the pro-choice position involves considerations of women's autonomy.

A puzzle about freedom and the law

I am no legal or political theorist, but here is a fun little puzzle, not unlikely old hat to everybody who knows anything about these things.

Suppose you want to gamble (as far as I know a morally permissible activity within due limits—if you disagree, substitute something else, like scratching one's back in public), and I (say, as a legislator) enact a law prohibiting you from gambling, without any good reason behind it except a gut feeling that gambling is a bit icky. It seems plausible that I have acted wrongly. I should not prohibit you from an activity because I have a gut feeling that it is a bit icky. But why have I acted wrongly?

An obvious thing to say is that I have take away some of your autonomy or freedom. But what autonomy or freedom have I taken away? (I will use the terms somewhat interchangeably, but the issues may be subtly different in the two cases.) Intuitively, I have taken away your freedom to choose whether to gamble or not, or else the freedom to choose to gamble. But not quite. For you can still gamble even if gambling is illegal. So it seems that what I've taken away is your freedom to choose whether to legally gamble or not, or else the freedom to gamble legally.

Indeed, you no longer have these freedoms, since it is now impossible for you to gamble legally (assuming you have no ability to legalize gambling). So you've lost a freedom. But you've also gained a freedom. For now you are free to choose whether to gamble illegally or not, and free to choose to gamble illegally. You've lost your autonomy vis-à-vis the decision whether to gamble legally, but you've gained autonomy vis-à-vis the decision whether to gamble illegally. You lose one and you gain one. So it seems that you are not the loser in respect of autonomy, and hence you can't complain.

But, perhaps, you will say that now if you gamble, you are liable to be punished by law, or at least by your conscience (if you think you should obey the law). Yes—now you have a new freedom, to choose to gamble and be punished or not to do either. You've lost the freedom to gamble without punishment, and have gained the freedom to gamble and be punished.

Perhaps, though, the problem is that without a sufficiently good reason (and "feels a bit icky" is not a good reason), I have no right to deprive you of a freedom even if you get a new freedom in exchange. When we talk of autonomy, we should not be consequentialists who simply try to maximize the sum total of human autonomy. Just as it is wrong to kill one innocent person while saving another, so, too, it is wrong for me without sufficient reason to deprive you of one freedom even while giving you another. But while there is much to this lesson, I am not sure this is the right lesson to draw from the story. For consider the opposite case. Suppose that gambling is illegal. I now completely legalize it. By doing so, I take away the autonomy of your choice whether to engage in illegal gambling. So I've taken away one of your freedoms, and given you another in exchange. It looks now like legalizing and illegalizing have the same kind of effect on total freedom—each takes one freedom away and gives another. If I say that it is wrong with insufficient reason to take away a freedom even if I give you another, then in a situation where gambling is illegal and nobody has any good considerations for or against gambling, I should keep it illegal. But I am not sure that's right. Should one keep a restrictive law that has no rational justification? That doesn't seem right.

So it doesn't seem that considerations of autonomy are the right way to think about what goes wrong when one makes an activity illegal without sufficient reason. Is there a better way? I think so. To make something illegal is for the state to exercise a certain authority. To make something legal is for the state to cease to exercise a certain authority. As long as the state holds people to a rule, the state is exercising authority in respect of that rule. To release people from that rule is not to exercise an authority, but to cease to exercise that authority. Hence there is an asymmetry in making something legal versus making it illegal: to make something legal is for the state to cease to act in a certain way, while to make something illegal is for the state to begin to act in a certain way. If so, then we would expect an asymmetry in justification—actions in general require stronger justification than non-actions—and hence it is easier to justify the state's making something previously illegal be legal than the other way around. Of course this asymmetry is an anti-consequentialist one—it is an asymmetry similar to that between contraception and abstinence, or between killing and not preventing death.

Consensual killing

In an earlier post this week, I argued that if one accepts the Interest Thesis (IT) that what makes a killing of an innocent person wrong is that it goes against the victim's interests, one needs to hold that it is never in the interests of a person to be killed. Hence, if IT holds, the justification of euthanasia in terms of the interests of the patient/victim fails. I ended the post by mentioning an account on which a person's consent is what makes it acceptable to kill the person, without settling the question whether that would be a good account. I will now try to settle this in the negative.

Why would x's consent make it permissible to kill x? Consent (and I use the term to mean "valid consent", consent satisfying whatever kinds of freedom and knowledge conditions are needed) is tied to autonomy. Generally speaking, when consent makes it permissible to do something which is impermissible without the consent, that is because doing the action without the consent is a violation of the person's integrity. Is killing a person without her consent a violation of the person's integrity? That claim seems to have a lot of plausibility.

But why does non-consensual killing violate a person's integrity? Here, we have to be careful. It won't do to say that such killing makes it impossible for the person to fulfill her life's autonomous projects. For it might be that the person's life is in such a miserable state that she has no projects that are interrupted by the death. She may want death, but still not consent to death. It need not even be an autonomous project of hers to continue living, just a morally driven determination not to consent to death.

Perhaps we want to say that non-consensual killing violates a person's autonomy because death is always a very serious harm and we should not intentionally impose very serious harms on innocent people without their permission. But I think we can simplify this principle to just say: "We should not intentionally impose very serious harms on innocent people", and then all intentional killing of the innocent is forbidden. Moreover, even if we don't go for this simplification, if we think death is a very serious harm, then we are apt to think that someone requesting death is irrational or constrained by circumstances, both of which endanger the validity of the consent. At this point it will be really implausible that it is the lack of consent that makes murder be wrong—for the serious badness of death is entering into the story.

Or maybe, in line with the element of formalism in Kantian ethics, we will say that the reason it is wrong to kill someone without her consent is that it is wrong to significantly change a person's life without her consent.

But this change principle is inapplicable and/or false. First of all, it's not clear that terminating a life counts as "changing a life". Moreover, if it counts, then so does beginning a life. But a couple does not need consent from their future child to conceive that child. Second, there are many significant life changes that it is permissible to impose on a person. It would not be impermissible for me to offer you a billion dollars, if I had it and if I had no morally obligatory alternatives for my largesse. But the offer would significantly change your life, and it would do so without your consent. For either you would accept the offer, in which case your life would significantly change (assuming you're not already very rich), or you would reject the offer, in which case your life would also significantly change, for instance because for the rest of your life you would from time to time be reflecting on your decision and wondering if it was the best one. Nor would I need to ask a person her permission before offering her a life-changing argument. Granted, she would have to consent to the change of life, but if the argument were powerful, her life would be forced to change: either she would have to act in accordance with the argument or else she would have to become the sort of person to whom arguments do not matter. Examples like this can be multiplied.

Fantasies and autonomy

Sometimes we fantasize about specific others behaving a certain way with regard to us. Sexual fantasies are one species of the genus I am interested in, but the genus is wider than that. There can, for instance, be fantasies about the recognition of our excellences, about others doing something humiliating, about climbing Mount Everest with one's best friend, etc.

To fantasize about a situation is more than just to think about the possibility of it. As in the case of hoping, there is a positive attitude towards the situation, though unlike in the case of hope, there need be no expectation. The positive attitude by itself shows that fantasizing about a bad situation (e.g., about one's being cruel to someone or one's engaging in an illicit flirtation) is wrong—for, surely, our attitudes should be appropriate to their object, and the attitude towards something bad should negative. In such a case, we have what Aquinas calls the sin of "morose delectation". Moreover, beyond a positive attitude, there is a first-person involvement in a fantasy--one reacts emotionally to it in somewhat the way one would were it real.

What I said so far shouldn't be controversial, though in the past I've had trouble getting some students to accept that morality governs the life of the mind.

But I want to note a different kind of badness in fantasies involving the behavior of specific others, even when the situation fantasized about is not actually a bad one. This kind of badness occurs when the fantasy does not respect others as autonomous persons. The fantasizer is, after all, in charge of the situation. She is like film director, telling this actor to do this that actor to say that. But unlike a real film director who does this in cooperation with actors who have read the script and agreed to act according to it, the typical fantasizer is arranging the persons in her mind without any cooperation, all on her own. And herein lies both the attraction and the danger of the fantasy. The fantasizer in creating the fantasy is in a sense more powerful than God in creating the world. For while God cannot make a person freely do something (this is true by the relevant definition of "freely"), the fantasizer can. It can, for instance, be a part of the fantasy that some persons freely fawn on her. This attitude of being in charge of others can be a way of using them.

I want to qualify this a little. There is a certain respecting of autonomy if the behavior of the fantasy's characters is constrained by the real-life behavior or commitments of the persons. If I have had a number of delightful conversations with George, there perhaps is nothing wrong in fantasizing about another, since in doing so I am constrained by George's actual character, and thus he is to some extent autonomous even as found in my mind. If I do this well, I might even find myself rebuked by fantasy-George in the course of the fantasized conversation. Likewise, if someone has undertaken a morally licit commitment to do something with me, it does not seem problematic to look forward vividly to that activity. Again, the actual person has had a moment of autonomy in the creation of the fantasy.

But the more the fantasizer is in charge in arranging the behavior of the characters in the fantasy for her own gratification, the more problematic this fantasizing is, as it is a failure to respect the fact that others are independent persons, not subordinate to her pleasure.

On obvious objection is that I am confusing fiction and reality. The student who fantasizes about me saying that his shoddy paper, which he whipped off during the half hour before it was due, was the best I have ever read is not actually making me do anything. This is true, I respond. But he is in an important way using me for his own gratification. His fantasy gets its life from my reality. That I am not actually physically affected by the fantasy does not mean that I am not used—certainly, the voyeur's victim is used by the voyeur even if the victim does not find out.

It is true that when sane people fantasize, they can typically distinguish fact from fiction. But at the same time, what gives pleasure in the fantasy is a deliberate mental relaxing of the distinction, a willing suspension of disbelief. To treat the characters that inhabit one's fantasy as pawns to be moved in accordance with one's desires for one's gratification is seriously problematic, and it develops a disrespectful habit of the mental treatment of others. Even if one is right that this habit will not overflow into controlling behavior—and how can one be sure of that?—the mental attitudes are themselves morally bad.