Laura Valentini’s novel theory, the Agency-Respect View, says that we have a fundamental moral duty to honor other people’s convictions, at least pro tanto and under certain conditions. I raise doubts that such a duty exists indeed and that informative conditions have been specified. The questions that Valentini faces here have a parallel in Kant’s moral philosophy, viz. the question of why one has a duty to value the other’s humanity and the question of how to specify the (...) maxim of one’s action. Additionally, I discuss the concept of a social convention and Valentini’s use of it. (shrink)

Despite advances in theory, often driven by feminist ethicists, research ethics struggles in practice to adequately account for and respond to the agency and autonomy of people considered vulnerable in the research context. We argue that shifts within feminist research ethics scholarship to better characterise and respond to autonomy and agency can be bolstered by further grounding in discourses from the social sciences, in work that confirms the complex nature of human agency in contexts of structural and (...) other sources of vulnerability. We discuss some of the core concepts and critiques emerging from the literature on women and children's agency in under‐resourced settings, highlighting calls to move from individualistic to relational models of agency, and to recognise the ambiguous, value‐laden, and heterogeneous nature of the concept. We then draw out what these conceptual shifts might mean for research ethics obligations and guidance, illustrating our analysis using a case vignette based on research ethics work conducted in South Africa. We conclude that if research practices are to be supportive of agency, it will be crucial to scrutinise the moral judgements which underpin accounts of agency, derive more situated definitions of and responses to agency, and enable people and participants to influence these based on their own experiences and self‐perceptions. (shrink)

Individuals are owed equal respect. But on the basis of what property of individuals are they owed such respect? A popular Kantian answer —rational agency — appears less plausible in light of the growing psychological evidence that human choice is subject to a wide array of biases (framing, laziness, etc.); human beings are neither equal in rational agency nor especially robust rational agents. Defenders of this Kantian answer thus need a non-ideal theory of equal respect (...) for rational agency, one that takes seriously our characteristic deficiencies of practical rationality without junking the notion that rational agency entitles us to equal respect. This article defends an understanding of respect for rational agency wherein the object of such respect is individuals’ aspiration to rationally govern their lives. This understanding of respect for rational agency retains the core notion of respect as a kind of deference, directs respect at persons, has suitably egalitarian implications, and does not require us to deny the aforementioned psychological evidence regarding the infirmities of human rationality. (shrink)

Algorithmic systems and predictive analytics play an increasingly important role in various aspects of modern life. Scholarship on the moral ramifications of such systems is in its early stages, and much of it focuses on bias and harm. This paper argues that in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems it is essential to understand the relation between algorithms, autonomy, and agency. We draw on several recent cases in criminal sentencing and K–12 teacher evaluation to outline four key ways (...) in which issues of agency, autonomy, and respect for persons can conflict with algorithmic decision-making. Three of these involve failures to treat individual agents with the respect they deserve. The fourth involves distancing oneself from a morally suspect action by attributing one’s decision to take that action to an algorithm, thereby laundering one’s agency. (shrink)

According to a Kantian conception truthfulness is characterised as a requirement of respect for the agency of another. In lying we manipulate the other’s rational capacities to achieve ends we know or fear they may not share. This is paradigmatically a failure of respect. In this paper we argue that the importance of truthfulness also lies in significant part in the ways in which it supports our agential need to make sense of the world, other people, and (...) ourselves. Since sense-making is something we do together, and that we can support or undermine, it generates norms of interaction that constitute a further, distinct, mode of recognition and respect for another’s agency. But the requirements of truthfulness and support for sense-making sometimes conflict. Through a series of cases, we analyze why and when a rigid insistence on truthfulness is disrespectful of the other and undermining of their agency. (shrink)

[A] man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being…. And it is here … that you may find ways to touch him.—A. R. Luria1.

Legal coercion seems morally problematic because it is susceptible to the Hegelian objection that it fails to respect individuals in a way that is ‘due to them as men’. But in what sense does legal coercion fail to do so? And what are the grounds for this requirement to respect? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions. It argues that legal coercion fails to respect individuals as reason-responsive agents; and individuals ought to be respected as (...) such in virtue of the fact that they are human beings. Thus it is in this sense that legal coercion fails to treat individuals with the kind of respect ‘due to them as men’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSerene Khader and Rosa Terlazzo have each recently proposed theories of adaptive preferences which purport to both respect persons’ agency and provide an effective political tool. While Khader and Terlazzo thus share a similar goal, they take fundamentally different paths in its pursuit: Khader offers a perfectionist account of APs and Terlazzo an autonomy-based theory. In this paper, I argue first that if it is to adequately respect persons’ agency, a theory of APs should in some (...) way include autonomy considerations. If it is to provide an effective political tool, however, our theory should not be entirely autonomy-based, but include a condition addressing a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing. The suggestion is thus that it is worth considering the possibility of a ‘mixed,’ rather than exclusively perfectionist or exclusively autonomy-based, theory of APs. I outline two such theories. The first, I argue, does quite well with respect to the political efficacy aim of AP theoriz... (shrink)

Although Western biomedical ethics emphasizes respect for autonomy, the medical decision-making of Muslim patients interacting with Western healthcare systems is more likely to be motivated by relational ethical and religious commitments that reflect the ideals of equity, reciprocity, and justice. Based on an in-depth cross-cultural comparison of Islamic and Western systems of biomedical ethics and an assessment of conceptual alignments and differences, we argue that, when working with Muslim patients, an ethics of respect extends to facilitating decision-making grounded (...) in the patient’s justice-related customs, beliefs, and obligations. We offer an overview of the philosophical contestations of autonomy-enhancing practices from the Islamic tradition of biomedical ethics, and examples that demonstrate a recommended shift of emphasis from an autonomy-centered to a justice-focused approach to culturally competent agency-promotion. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this paper, I argue for a conditional parity thesis: if we are agents with respect to our intentions, we are agents with respect to our beliefs. In the final section, I motivate a categorical version of the parity thesis: we are agents with respect to belief and intention. My aim in this paper is to show that there is no unique challenge facing epistemic agency that is not also facing agency with respect to (...) intention. My thesis is ambitious on two fronts. First, the parity thesis is a substantive thesis about the nature of belief and intention. I argue that there is a structural parity of belief and intention; the status of whether they are agential stands and falls together. Second, the parity thesis illuminates the nature of agency. It constrains what counts as a satisfactory account of agency: either we must accept agency of both belief and intention, or we must reject both. In the final section, I argue that we have prima facie reason to accept agency of belief and intention. Finally, I diagnose why there has been such resistance to epistemic agency. Epistemic agency is problematic, but its problems are problems with agency, not problems with epistemic agency. (shrink)

The recent debates about the nature of social freedom, understood in a broadly negative way, have generated three main views of the topic: these represent freedom respectively as non-limitation, non-interference and non-domination. The participants in these debates often go different ways, however, because they address different topics under common names, not because they hold different intuitions on common topics. Social freedom is sometimes understood as option-freedom, sometimes as agency-freedom and the different directions taken by the theories can often be (...) explained by their addressing freedom in one sense, then in another. The non-limitation approach focuses primarily on option-freedom, the non-domination approach on agencyfreedom, whereas the representation of freedom as non-interference seems to spring from a failure to resolve the focus decisively on one target or another. (shrink)

When and why do socially constructed norms—including the laws of the land, norms of etiquette, and informal customs—generate moral obligations? I argue that the answer lies in the duty to respect others, specifically to give them what I call “agency respect.” This is the kind of respect that people are owed in light of how they exercise their agency. My central thesis is this: To the extent that (i) existing norms are underpinned by people’s commitments (...) as agents and (ii) they do not conflict with morality, they place moral demands on us on agency-respect grounds. This view of the moral force of socially constructed norms, I suggest, is superior to views that deny the moral force of such norms, and it elegantly explains certain instances of wrongdoing that would otherwise remain unaccounted for. (shrink)

The use of the category of influence in the history of ideas has been criticized by Skinner for its failure to provide explanatory links between the ideas and theorists it purports to connect and by Condren for its failure to respect the agency of thinkers. Bevir and Collingwood support the notion of influence and argue that it does accommodate the agency of thinkers. The arguments of Condren and Skinner point to significant issues and problems in the practice (...) of the history of ideas but it is argued that these points do not count decisively against employing the notion of influence. The defence of influence by Collingwood and Bevir is seen to need qualification in the light of post-structuralist arguments that challenge the monopoly of meaning that is claimed for authors of texts in the history of ideas. The article concludes by urging that the category of influence is compatible with a nuanced account of agency. (shrink)

Punishment is a grave intrusion into individual liberty, yet in most liberal criminal justice systems, including England and Wales, those punished are rarely directly engaged in determining their sentence. Consequently, the offender’s agency in respect of sentence—i.e. the offender’s capacity to play an active part in the sentencing process—is limited. Drawing on existing theories of punishment, the article argues that there may be justifications and scope for allowing offenders to exercise agency in a state-centred sentencing process, even (...) though this scope is inevitably limited. It aims to develop a conceptual account of an ‘agentic’ sentencing system, arguing this should be based on the paradigm of a dialogue between the judge and offender. To preserve the state’s fundamental role in sentencing, constraints should be placed on the exercise of agency. The proposed model embodies a conception of sentencing as a decision-making process to be done _with_ offenders, rather than _to_ offenders. Nonetheless, while some objections can be rebutted, others demonstrate the gap between the theoretical ideal of respecting the offender’s agency at sentencing and how an agentic sentencing system might function in practice. (shrink)

This paper examines Laura Valentini’s attempt to explain political obligations through her account of social norms, her ‘Agency-Respect View’ (ARV). A great strength of ARV is preserving the ‘content-independence’ of political obligations. However, ARV does not mesh well with the moral phenomenology of political obligations. ARV is able to generate moral requirements that are strikingly weak. Accounting for the far stronger moral force of requirements to obey the law requires appealing to law-independent considerations. Valentini’s account of these factors (...) suggests greater explanatory force of an alternative view she dismisses, to which she refers as the ‘deflationary view.’ In addition, among alternative theories that Valentini rejects is one based on the principle of fair play. I respond to Valentini’s criticisms, thereby demonstrating the continuing applicability of fair play. (shrink)

A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacent theory, which (...) traces the difference to a particular kind of ambiguity in the prejacent. This theory has been criticized as linguistically unviable. Indeed, I level a few novel complaints against AIP myself in the present paper. But AIP has a kernel of genuine insight which allows us to explain the contrast—that the distinction between agentive and non-agentive ought sentences owes in part to the way natural language encodes information about agency. I develop this idea into a novel account that, like AIP, traces the contrast to an ambiguity in the complement of the modal. However, according to the view I propose, the Coercion View, a linguistically-motivated coercion operation produces the necessary grammatical conditions for agentive ought, which in turn allow a kind of variadic function operator in the style of to produce the semantic effect we see on display in agentive readings of ought. Having explained the mechanism by which we get this structure, I show that it corroborates some of the central intuitions underwriting agentive ought. I submit that the Coercion View offers an explanation of agentive ought to take at least as seriously as any of its competitors. (shrink)

This book argues for adopting a new account of the circumstances of justice ("the habilitation framework") for philosophical theories of basic justice. It proposes a concept of basic health as a metric for such theories, and healthy agency as a target for them. It does not, however, propose a specific distributive rule or set of distributive principles. Nor does it propose a specific type of theory to pursue (e.g., utilitarian, contractarian, etc.). The book is thus meant to be largely (...) theory-independent respect to standard normative theories. (shrink)

In recent years, as the enterprise of speculative metaphysics has attained a newfound measure of respectability, incompatibilist philosophers who are inclined to think that freedom of action is not only possible, but actual, have re-emerged to take on the formidable task of providing a satisfactory indeterministic account of the connections among an agent's freedom to do otherwise, her reasons, and her control over her act. In this paper, I want to examine three of these proposals, all of which give novel (...) twists to familiar themes. I will argue that despite the considerable ingenuity these philosophers evince, their attempts do not succeed. A common criticism of these theories will be that they fail to give a satisfactory account of what I term "agent-control," a certain feature of actions whose presence I take to be a central requirement for any workable model of responsible agency. I believe that the general notion I try to capture under this label is implicit in much of the voluminous discussion of the problem of free will (especially in compatibilist criticisms of libertarianism), although I am unaware of any explicit formulations of it in just the way I have in mind. Simply put, agent-control is that feature of the process of agency that accounts for how a particular piece of behavior is connected to, or an 'outflowing of, the agent, i.e., that which allows us properly to assert that the action was controlled by the agent. (shrink)

We find that agency problems are embedded in firm's excess and abnormal equity investments that are mainly dictated by controlling shareholder's motives and ethical choices manifested in ownership and board structure. The excess equity investment is gauged with respect to industry average. The abnormal equity investment is specifically referred to the number of nominal investment companies that are fully controlled by the controlling owners while subject to little governance. Our empirical evidences of 345 Taiwanese non-financial listed firms show (...) that firm's excess and abnormal equity investments are negatively correlated with controlling shareholder's cash flow rights while are positively correlated with the control-cash flow deviation, and board affiliation. The results are supportive of the positive incentive hypothesis and the negative entrenchment hypothesis put forth by La Porta et al. and Claessen et al.. The negative relation between equity investment and firm's value further supports the agency postulation that corporate excess and abnormal equity investments represent a leeway for controlling shareholder to exploit wealth of minority shareholders. This study potentially contributes to the literature of business ethics by portraying an empirically testable linkage from controlling owner's ethical choices to his actions and therefore firm's value. (shrink)

Constitutivists believe that we can derive universally and unconditionally authoritative norms from the conditions of agency. Thus if c is a condition of agency, then you ought to live in conformity with c no matter what your particular ends, projects, or station. Much has been said about the validity of the inference, but that’s not my topic here. I want to assume it is valid and talk about what I take to be the highest ambition of constitutivism: the (...) prospect of grounding moral requirements in the conditions of agency. If this can be done, then we can show that everyone is bound by the demands of morality, and we can do so without the customary entanglements—queer normative entities, an implausibly powerful moral sense, or divine lawgivers. (shrink)

The relation between narratives and agency can be sometimes considered as mutually constitutive. There are cases in which telling a story expresses higher degrees of agency, and respectively, agency is shaped as a narrative that expresses the agent’s reasons. From henceforth, I will contend that a narrative theory, beyond the personal identity problem, can also enlighten how the agent attains giving reasons for the action by making sense of sequences of events. In order to explain how (...) class='Hi'>agency is constituted from understanding and control, we must assume a primitive competence for narratives. Agency supposes an ordering that cannot be reduced to temporality, but expresses a certain sense of accomplishment that can be narratively constituted. In this context, I will examine Welleman’s theory of emotions as an ordering framework of the events in structures of means-ends. A possible objection to his explanation of the agential narratives is that emotions themselves need to be understood as narrative processes. I suggest then that an enactivist approach would be a way of explaining the narrative constitution of agency. One virtue of this approach is that it harmonizes the biological and cultural components of the agency from the most basic layers to the ordinary folk-psychological narratives. (shrink)

In this essay we aim to present some considerations regarding a minimal but concrete notion of agency and goal-directed behavior that are useful for characterizing biological systems at different scales. These considerations are a particular perspective, bringing together concepts from dynamical systems, combinatorial problem-solving, and connectionist learning with an emphasis on the relationship between parts and wholes. This perspective affords some ways to think about agents that are concrete and quantifiable, and relevant to some important biological issues. Instead of (...) advocating for a strict definition of minimally agential characteristics, we focus on how (even for a modest notion of agency) the agency of a system can be more than the sum of the agency of its parts. We quantify this in terms of the problem-solving competency of a system with respect to resolution of the frustrations between its parts. This requires goal-directed behavior in the sense of delayed gratification, i.e., taking dynamical trajectories that forego short-term gains (or sustain short-term stress or frustration) in favor of long-term gains. In order for this competency to belong to the system (rather than to its parts or given by its construction or design), it can involve distributed systemic knowledge that is acquired through experience, i.e., changes in the organization of the relationships among its parts (without presupposing a system-level reward function for such changes). This conception of agency helps us think about the ways in which cells, organisms, and perhaps other biological scales, can be agential (i.e., more agential than their parts) in a quantifiable sense, without denying that the behavior of the whole depends on the behaviors of the parts in their current organization. (shrink)

The sense of agency is a central aspect of human self-consciousness and refers to the experience of oneself as the agent of one’s own actions. Several different cognitive theories on the sense of agency have been proposed implying divergent empirical approaches and results, especially with respect to neural correlates. A multifactorial and multilevel model of the sense of agency may provide the most constructive framework for integrating divergent theories and findings, meeting the complex nature of this (...) intriguing phenomenon. (shrink)

Many political philosophers argue that interference (or vulnerability to interference) threatens a person’s agency. And they cast political freedom in opposition to interpersonal threats to agency, as non-interference (or non-subjection). I argue that this approach relies on an inapt model of agency, crucial aspects of which emerge from our relationships with other people. Such relationships involve complex patterns of vulnerability and subjection, essential to our constitution as particular kinds of agents: as owners of property, as members of (...) families, and as participants in a market for labor. We should construct a conception of freedom that targets the structures of our interpersonal relations, and the kinds of agents these relations make us. Such a conception respects the interpersonal foundations of human agency. It also allows us to draw morally significant connections between diverse species of unfreedom—between, for instance, localized domination and structural oppression. (shrink)

The rise of physicalism and naturalism, the development of cognitive science, and the explosion and popularization of knowledge about animal behavior has brought us to see that most of the properties that were once thought to distinguish humans from other animals are shared with other animals. Many people now see properties that are morally relevant to how it is permissible to treat animals, such as sentience, as widely distributed. Agency, however, is one area in which the retreat from human (...) uniqueness is halting. In this essay I suggest that we should feel the same pressure to bring together accounts of human and animal agency that we feel with respect to sentience and other such characteristics. I go on to diagnose the resistance, and briefly sketch how things might look if we were to see agency as continuous. (shrink)

In 1992, Law and Philosophy published an account of the paradigm case of intended action; one which gestured at, and did not pursue, an explanation of the requirement that a person be an agent in respect of her behaviour before that behaviour can constitute intended action. This paper completes that account by supplying an analysis of agency. The paper falls into three parts. It begins by casting doubt upon the possibility of specifying a causal account along the lines (...) once envisaged by Davidson. An alternative approach is adopted: one that involves modifications to Frankfurt's depiction of action as behaviour under the agent's guidance, including a rejection of the view held by many writers that action requires intentional movement. Doubts about conventional wisdoms are also raised in the conclusion, which considers why philosophers and lawyers should be interested in the issue of agency at all. (shrink)

We are responsible for some things but not for others. In this thesis, I investigate what it takes for an entity to be responsible for something. This question has two components: agents and actions. I argue for a permissive view about agents. Entities such as groups or artificially intelligent systems may be agents in the sense required for responsibility. With respect to actions, I argue for a causal view. The relation in virtue of which agents are responsible for actions (...) is a causal one. I claim that responsibility requires causation and I develop a causal account of agency. This account is particularly apt for addressing the relationship between agency and moral responsibility and sheds light on the causal foundations of moral responsibility. (shrink)

The demands of respect for persons when conducting clinical research are often reduced to respect for autonomy. In this paper, I re-examine the concept of respect for persons in light of important intuitions from our ordinary language usage of respect. I propose that there are many ways to respect persons as persons and that the core elements of respect for persons are: appreciating what is valuable or important about a person, recognizing the constraints or (...) demands that such a valuation places on one's own conduct, and acting in a way that expresses that recognition. On this account, in addition to autonomous agency, respect demands attention to important subjective experiences, persons' existence as part of communities, and considerations of comportment. This account has important implications for the conduct of clinical research with persons who are autonomous as well as with those who are not. Its implications, however, are different for these two populations, particularly with regard to concerns about well-being. (shrink)

The recent distinction between sense of agency and sense of body-ownership has attracted considerable empirical and theoretical interest. The respective contributions of central motor signals and peripheral afferent signals to these two varieties of body experience remain unknown. In the present review, we consider the methodological problems encountered in the empirical study of agency and body-ownership, and we then present a series of experiments that study the interplay between motor and sensory information. In particular, we focus on how (...) multisensory signals interact with body representations to generate the sense of body-ownership, and how the sense of agency modulates the sense of body-ownership. Finally, we consider the respective roles of efferent and afferent signals for the experience of one’s own body and actions, in relation to self-recognition and the recognition of other people’s actions. We suggest that the coherent experience of the body depends on the integration of efferent information with afferent information in action contexts. Overall, whereas afferent signals provide the distinctive content of one’s own body experience, efferent signals seem to structure the experience of one’s own body in an integrative and coherent way. (shrink)

How can we understand human agency, and what does it mean to educate character? In this essay Klas Roth develops a Kantian notion, one that suggests we render ourselves efficacious and autonomous in education and elsewhere. This requires, among other things, that we are successful in bringing about the intended result through our actions and the means used, and that we act in accordance with and are motivated by the Categorical Imperative. It also requires that we are or strive (...) to become virtuous and that we engage in moral reflection, and, furthermore, that actions are done for the sake of duty, that is, out of respect for the moral law. We accomplish such aims by developing our predispositions, namely the technical, the pragmatic, and the moral predisposition in a society. The extent to which we achieve this, Roth contends, demonstrates what we are prepared to make of ourselves. (shrink)

In this essay, I describe and explain the standard accounts of agency, natural agency, artificial agency, and moral agency, as well as articulate what are widely taken to be the criteria for moral agency, supporting the contention that this is the standard account with citations from such widely used and respected professional resources as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I then flesh out the implications of (...) some of these well-settled theories with respect to the prerequisites that an ICT must satisfy in order to count as a moral agent accountable for its behavior. I argue that each of the various elements of the necessary conditions for moral agency presupposes consciousness, i.e., the capacity for inner subjective experience like that of pain or, as Nagel puts it, the possession of an internal something-of-which-it is-is-to-be-like. I ultimately conclude that the issue of whether artificial moral agency is possible depends on the issue of whether it is possible for ICTs to be conscious. (shrink)

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) (...) that agency is a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

In this paper the authors take up James Marshall's work on the individual and autonomy. Their suggestion is that although the liberal notion of the autonomous individual might give us a standard of reference for the freedom of persons, the liberal tradition also circumscribes that freedom by prescribing it both as an attribute of persons and as a necessity for persons to exercise, in the form of choice, even though the range of choice is in fact limited. Starting from an (...) account of James Marshall and Colin Lankshear's respective work on the nature of the individual, and using Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau‐Ponty and others, they reintegrate the individual into society as it were, and finally, search for means of escape from the determinism of ‘governmentality’. Drawing on notions such as ‘technologies of the self’, hysteria and excess, integration of body and mind, individual and environment, subject and object, they describe the difficult, hesitant work of bringing existing parameters of thought and behaviour into consciousness. Some consequences for the relations of teachers and students within the school context are suggested. (shrink)

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that (...) from the agent's subjective perspective, morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations. (shrink)

Fictional truth, or truth in fiction/pretense, has been the object of extended scrutiny among philosophers and logicians in recent decades. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to its inferential relationships with time and with certain deliberate and contingent human activities, namely, the creation of fictional works. The aim of the paper is to contribute to filling the gap. Toward this goal, a formal framework is outlined that is consistent with a variety of conceptions of fictional truth and based upon (...) a specific formal treatment of time and agency, that of so-called stit logics. Moreover, a complete axiomatic theory of fiction-making TFM is defined, where fiction-making is understood as the exercise of agency and choice in time over what is fictionally true. The language \ of TFM is an extension of the language of propositional logic, with the addition of temporal and modal operators. A distinctive feature of \ with respect to other modal languages is a variety of operators having to do with fictional truth, including a ‘fictionality’ operator \ . Some applications of TFM are outlined, and some interesting linguistic and inferential phenomena, which are not so easily dealt with in other frameworks, are accounted for. (shrink)

Respecting the autonomy of agents grounds various obligations to others such as non-interference, deference to her authority over self-regarding decisions, limitations on paternalism, and so on. According to a broadly liberal moral sensibility, respecting others in this way implies accepting the valuesValue they autonomously hold even if they are judged problematic, immoral, self-destructive, or otherwise non-ideal. In discussions of such respect, it is generally assumed that persons expressing that respect have no direct bearing on whether the subject of (...) that respect is herself autonomous. However, in many situations, persons interact in a way that helps establish or re-establish the autonomy of one or both of these agents themselves.For example, the would-be paternalist may be a therapist whose professional obligationObligations is to facilitate the process of re-establishing autonomy for vulnerable victims of traumaTrauma. In such scenarios, the usual lines between hardPaternalismhard and softPaternalismsoft paternalism, as well as the standard liberal rejection of the former, do not apply. Still, it would be wrong for the aid workerAid workers to simply impose her views of a decent life on the struggling person. How, then, do we reformulate restrictions on paternalism and other such normative strictures grounded in respect forAutonomyrespect for autonomy in scenarios where the relationshipRelationships between client and aid workerAid workers is itself a crucial part of the process that results in the self-governingSelf-governing agency of the client?This paper explores these issues and argues that such scenarios indicate that conceptions of autonomy must view the self as diachronic as well as socially constituted but also must be sensitive to the ways that autonomy can sometimes be established only with others’ help. In particular, the obligationObligations to remain relatively neutralNeutral toward the content of others’ values in showing respect forPersonsrespect for their autonomy must be reformulated to take into account the way interpersonal dynamics themselves help establish the autonomy with which persons hold the values that they hold. These observations are applied to certain cases of aid and care where such questions are central. (shrink)

The patient preference predictor is a computer-based algorithm devised to predict the medical treatment that decisionally incapacitated patients would have preferred. The target paper argues against various criticisms to the effect that the use of a PPP is inconsistent with proper respect for patient autonomy.1 In this commentary, I aim to add some clarifications to the complex relationship between autonomy and the PPP. First, I highlight one way in which the decision of a surrogate designated by the patient realises (...) respect for patient autonomy in a way that PPP cannot realise by introducing the idea of shared agency. Second, I show how the attempt to predict someone’s hypothetical choice can be disrespectful to her autonomy. Following the treatment decision of a surrogate designated by the patient counts as a way of respecting the patient’s own autonomy. Designating someone as one’s surrogate is a case of entrusting her with the task of making important life decisions on one’s behalf. To entrust someone with a certain matter is to assign her the responsibility for that matter based on the trust that she will take a good care of it. When a patient entrusts a surrogate decision-maker, what is the matter that she is trusted to take a good care of? In many contexts, the surrogate is r egarded as an epistemic proxy, one who is likely to know the patient’s preferences the best. It is often thought that the point of practising surrogate decision making is to respect the patient’s autonomy by following what the patient most likely would have preferred. Using a PPP in the decision-making process has the same goal of making a more accurate prediction of the patient’s treatment preference. However, at least in some cases, designating the patient’s intimates or ones she loves and cares …. (shrink)

Agency is the human capacity to freely choose one’s thoughts, motivations and actions without undue internal or external influences; it is distinguished from decisional capacity. Four well-known conditions that can deeply affect agency are depression, demoralization, existential distress, and family dysfunction. The study reviews how they may diminish agency in persons whose circumstances may lead them to consider or request euthanasia or assisted suicide. Since agency has been a relatively neglected dimension of autonomous choice at the (...) end of life, it is argued that to respect the autonomy of individuals, it is essential to establish their agency. (shrink)

The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians has since its inception, affirmed the agency of women in their theological reflection and praxis. In doing so, they have called on their male colleagues to stand in solidarity with them in forging alternative masculinities that renew culture, curb gender-based violence and mitigate HIV infection. This essay argues that there are three assumptions that form the basis of the work of the Circle theologians. Firstly, that women seek to be in egalitarian relationships (...) with men that bring dignity and respect. Secondly, women assert their agency to achieve this goal and in so doing bring healing and wholeness to both groups who are transformed through this process. Thirdly, women assert their agency in solidarity with other women as they build alternative egalitarian communities. Yet, the recent phenomenon of the #Blessed community of young women who seek out ‘blessers’, older men who engage them in transactional sex, in order to fund opulent lifestyles contradicts these assumptions. Their agency embraces non-liberative ideology and practice and chooses not to unseat the dominant ideologies of hetero- and econo-patriarchy. Contribution: The essay concludes that a lack of sustained economic analysis and engaged theological reflection on sexual ethics means the Circle is ill-equipped to respond to the challenge posed by the #Blessed community of young women. (shrink)

Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights collects thirteen new essays that analyze how human agency relates to poverty and human rights respectively as well as how agency mediates issues concerning poverty and social and economic human rights. No other collection of philosophical papers focuses on the diverse ways poverty impacts the agency of the poor, the reasons why poverty alleviation schemes should also promote the agency of beneficiaries, and the fitness of the human rights regime to (...) secure both economic development and free agency. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 considers the diverse meanings of poverty both from the standpoint of the poor and from that of the relatively well-off. Part 2 examines morally appropriate responses to poverty on the part of persons who are better-off and powerful institutions. Part 3 identifies economic development strategies that secure the agency of the beneficiaries. Part 4 addresses the constraints poverty imposes on agency in the context of biomedical research, migration for work, and trafficking in persons. (shrink)

Philosophical and sociological approaches in technology have increasingly shifted toward describing AI (artificial intelligence) systems as ‘(moral) agents,’ while also attributing ‘agency’ to them. It is only in this way – so their principal argument goes – that the effects of technological components in a complex human-computer interaction can be understood sufficiently in phenomenological-descriptive and ethical-normative respects. By contrast, this article aims to demonstrate that an explanatory model only achieves a descriptively and normatively satisfactory result if the concepts of (...) ‘(moral) agent’ and ‘(moral) agency’ are exclusively related to human agents. Initially, the division between symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, the black box character of (deep) machine learning, and the complex relationship network in the provision and application of machine learning are outlined. Next, the ontological and action-theoretical basic assumptions of an ‘agency’ attribution regarding both the current teleology-naturalism debate and the explanatory model of actor network theory are examined. On this basis, the technical-philosophical approaches of Luciano Floridi, Deborah G. Johnson, and Peter-Paul Verbeek will all be critically discussed. Despite their different approaches, they tend to fully integrate computational behavior into their concept of ‘(moral) agency.’ By contrast, this essay recommends distinguishing conceptually between the different entities, causalities, and relationships in a human-computer interaction, arguing that this is the only way to do justice to both human responsibility and the moral significance and causality of computational behavior. (shrink)

We investigated how motor agency in the voluntary control of body movement influences body awareness. In the Rubber Hand Illusion , synchronous tactile stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant’s hand leads to a feeling of the rubber hand being incorporated in the participant’s own body. One quantifiable behavioural correlate of the illusion is an induced shift in the perceived location of the participant’s hand towards the rubber hand. Previous studies showed that the induced changes in body awareness (...) are local and fragmented: the proprioceptive drift is largely restricted to the stimulated finger. In the present study, we investigated whether active and passive movements, rather than tactile stimulation, would lead to similarly fragmented body awareness. Participants watched a projected image of their hand under three conditions: active finger movement, passive finger movement, and tactile stimulation. Visual feedback was either synchronous or asynchronous with respect to stimulation of the hand. A significant overall RHI, defined as greater drifts following synchronous than asynchronous stimulation, was found in all cases. However, the distribution of the RHI across stimulated and non-stimulated fingers depended on the kind of stimulation. Localised proprioceptive drifts, specific to the stimulated finger, were found for tactile and passive stimulation. Conversely, during active movement of a single digit, the proprioceptive drifts were not localised to that digit, but were spread across the whole hand. Whereas a purely proprioceptive sense of body-ownership is local and fragmented, the motor sense of agency integrates distinct body-parts into a coherent, unified awareness of the body. (shrink)

This theoretical paper takes an agency-theoretic approach to questions of corporate social responsibility (CSR). A comparison of various extant frameworks focusses on how CSR agency emerges in complex multi-agent and multi-sector stakeholder networks. The discussion considers the respective capabilities and relevance of these frameworks – culminating in an integrative CSR practice model. A short literature review of the evolution of CSR since the 1950’s provides the backdrop for understanding multi-agent cross-sectoral stakeholder coalitions as a strategic determinant of today’s (...) organizational behavior. The paper turns to Werhane’s coupling of moral imagination and systems thinking and forging stakeholder coalitions in problem contexts that were traditionally deemed intractable by for-profit organizations. However, it identifies the problem that the systems approach treats macro-agents (organizations, stakeholders) as given (“black-boxed”) and shies away from more radically re-imagining the possibilities of reassembling agency from the bottom up. Actor Network Theory (ANT) provides such a method, which strictly commits to treating organizational behavior as a product of technological, human and environmental micro-processes. ANT, however, is lacking a genuine moral deliberative stance in designing complex CSR coalitions. In an attempt to capitalize on the respective strengths of these frameworks (Systems thinking and ANT) the paper tends to a recent iterative series of “situational transactive” models that are rooted in the US pragmatist tradition and seek to capture intelligent planning processes in complex problematic contexts. The contribution proposes a new CSR practice model, which assigns specific roles to the theoretical contributions of ANT, system thinking and pragmatism in complex deliberation processes. This model can be industry-tested in a future study. (shrink)

In everyday conversations, professional codes, policy debates, and academic literature, the concept of respect is referred to frequently. Bioethical arguments in recent decades equate the idea of respect for persons with individuals who are capable of autonomous decision-making, with the focus being explicitly on ‘autonomy,’ ‘capacity,’ or ‘capability.’ In much of bioethics literature, respect for persons is replaced by respect for autonomy. Though the unconditional respect for persons and their autonomy (irrespective of actual decision-making capacity) (...) is established in Kantian bioethics, current argument and debates often revolve around a thin concept of autonomy, focusing on capacity and capability: persons are owed respect because they are ‘rational beings’ or with a focus on ‘agency’ and ‘decision-making abilities.’ However, these aspects alone are insufficient while engaging the concept of respect for persons, particularly in healthcare settings. This paper sets out to explore if the concept of respect for persons—as opposed to a thin concept of autonomy—could help us engage better in healthcare practices. We shall probe the practical value of the experiential aspect of respect—understood as the recognition of persons as respect-worthy through certain dispositions and deliberative acts—by reflecting on instances in clinical practice that tend to be dismissed as negligible or even unavoidable in a stressful environment such as a busy hospital. We shall argue that these instances are far from trivial but carry moral significance and express an unacceptable—disrespectful—attitude that can compromise the moral habitus in hospital settings. In our conclusion, we call for practicing recognition respect in the health professional–patient encounter by focussing on manners, attitudes, and behaviors. Furthermore, we call for continuous medical ethics education programs to address the moral significance of disrespectful behaviors and their manifestations in particular socio-cultural contexts. (shrink)