Abstract
In Autonomous Agents, I argued that among the obstacles to autonomous action are facts of certain kinds about an agent’s beliefs. For example, someone who is deceived into investing her savings in a way that results in her losing the entire investment to the person who deceived her may correctly be said to make that investment nonautonomously. But not everyone has agreed. In this article, I return to doxastic aspects of individual autonomy and argue more fully for the thesis that facts of a certain kind about an agent’s beliefs can render some of an agent’s actions nonautonomous.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
McKenna backs away from this claim about free (or “freely willed”) action in his recent book (2012, p. 13).
- 3.
I am not denying that there are necessary epistemic conditions for being a morally responsible agent that are not necessary conditions for being a free agent. For discussion, see Mele 2010, pp. 108–9.
- 4.
Readers will, of course, distinguish Dan’s saying what he does about the party from his ruining the surprise. For example, they will notice that even if it is assumed that he intentionally says what he does about the party, he does not intentionally ruin the surprise. Incidentally, in the paragraph that precedes Aristotle’s assertion that “the voluntary would seem to be that of which the moving principle is in the agent himself, he being aware of the particular circumstances of the action” (Nicomachean Ethics 1111a22–24), he mentions an agent who “did not know” that what he reported “was a secret” (1111a9–10). I take it that he would say that, owing to his ignorance of this circumstance, this agent did not voluntarily reveal a secret. If it is true that he did not voluntarily reveal a secret, then if we freely do only what we voluntarily do, he did not freely reveal a secret.
- 5.
Suzy Killmister takes the approach Weimer recommends on the informational front (2013, p. 517 n. 4).
- 6.
On some complications about belief replacement, see Mele 2006, pp. 177–78.
- 7.
I am not claiming that one has to be responsible for attitudes if one is to be responsible for behavior in which the attitudes issue. On this topic, see Mele 1995, pp. 221–230.
- 8.
I wrote this paper for a 2012 conference at the Centre for Advanced Study in Bioethics, University of Münster. I made some small changes while hiding out during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Mele, A.R. (2022). Autonomy and Beliefs. In: Childress, J.F., Quante, M. (eds) Thick (Concepts of) Autonomy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 146. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80991-1_6
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