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‘A Life of Our Own’: Why Authenticity is More Than a Condition for Autonomy

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Notes

  1. See Mary Jean Walker and Catriona Mackenzie, “Neurotechnologies, relational autonomy, and authenticity,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2020), 98-119.

  2. See Jonathan Pugh, Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

  3. Marina Oshana, “Personal Autonomy and Society,” Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1998), 81-102, p. 83. See Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 1 (1971), 5-20; Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  4. Przemysław Zawadzki, “The Ethics of Memory Modification: Personal Narratives, Relational Selves and Autonomy,” Neuroethics, Vol. 16, No. 6 (2023), 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-022-09512-z, p. 6. See Catriona Mackenzie and Mary Jean Walker, “Neurotechnologies, personal identity, and the ethics of authenticity,” in Jens Clausen and Neil Levy, ed., Handbook of neuroethics (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 2015), 373-393; Cristian Iftode, Alexandra Zorilă, Constantin Vică, Emilian Mihailov, “Experimental and relational authenticity: how neurotechnologies impact narrative identities,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2022), 1-18, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09825-7; Muriel Leuenberger, “Memory modification and authenticity: a narrative approach,” Neuroethics, Vol. 15, No. 10 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-022-09489-9.

  5. Mackenzie and Walker, op. cit., p. 390.

  6. They finally acknowledge that the heart of the matter is whether such interventions make it possible or not “for a person to reengage in the process of reconstructing or repairing an integrated narrative identity” (ibid.). See Françoise Baylis, “‘I am who I am’: on the perceived threats to personal identity from deep brain stimulation,” Neuroethics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2013), 513-526.

  7. Walker and Mackenzie (2020), op. cit., pp. 105-106.

  8. This is why the discussions pertaining to both the phenomenon of adaptive preferences and conscious character planning are focused on autonomy issues, rather than on authenticity. See, for instance, Ben Colburn, “Autonomy and Adaptive Preferences,” Utilitas, Vol. 23, (2011), 52-71.

  9. See Baylis, op. cit.; Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  10. See Bernard Williams, “From sincerity to authenticity,” in Truth and truthfulness: An essay in genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 172-205.

  11. See Rebecca J. Schlegel, Patricia N. Holte, Joe Maffly-Kipp, Devin Guthrie, and Joshua A. Hicks, “Authenticity as a Pathway to Coherence, Purpose, and Significance,” in Kevin Tobia, ed., Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 169-181.

  12. See Plato, “Republic,” in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 971-1223. See also Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  13. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. Tiziano Dorandi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Princeton Classics ed., 2018).

  14. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch, second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

  15. Frederick Neuhouser, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Origins of Autonomy,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 54, No. 5 (2011), 478-493, p. 479.

  16. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, German-English, ed. Jens Timmermann, trans. Mary Gregor, rev. J. Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  17. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 505. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, third ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 257-259.

  18. See John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism and On Liberty, ed. Mary Warnock, second ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).

  19. Pugh, op. cit., p. 6.

  20. See Oshana, op. cit., p. 97.

  21. See Holger Baumann, “Reconsidering Relational Autonomy. Personal Autonomy for Socially Embedded and Temporally Extended Selves,” Analyse & Kritik, No. 30 (2008), 445-468, pp. 447-448.

  22. See ibid., p. 452.

  23. See John Christman, “Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism, and the Social Constitution of Selves,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 117, No. 1 (2004), 143-164.

  24. “Oshana’s view insists that to be autonomous, she must, as an individual, maintain the ability to ‘pursue goals different from those who have influence and authority’.” (ibid., pp. 150-151)

  25. See Taylor’s discussion of authenticity in terms of shared horizons of meaning, in Charles Taylor, The ethics of authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Here, we regard “authentic identification” either as a possible wholehearted embrace of a relation of obedience, or as the feeling of being yourself, which entails not feeling some sort of inner split or inner fracture anymore, precisely after surrendering your own will to the spiritual father, or after being accepted in a patriarchal family’s bosom, etc.

  26. See Mackenzie and Walker, “Neurotechnologies, personal identity, and the ethics of authenticity”.

  27. See Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976). See also John Zizioulas, “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood,” in Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 206-249.

  28. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 68.

  29. See Erik Parens, “Authenticity and Ambivalence: Towards Understanding the Enhancement Debate,” The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2005), 34-41, p. 35.

  30. Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005), p. 83. See Heidegger, Being and Time. See also Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self. Sometimes, the need for expressing one’s very own way of being may even prevail over the ideal of self-governance, or at least remove the latter from under the umbrella of rational governance, as in scenarios we shall later discuss, when being momentarily ‘out of control’ is deemed to shed some light on a person’s authentic being, even if the person concerned does not necessarily approve on reflection the particular personality trait or way of conduct that is shown during those moments.

  31. See Neil Levy, “Enhancing authenticity,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2011), 308-318.

  32. See Cristian Iftode, “Assessing enhancement technologies: Authenticity as a social virtue and experiment,” The New Bioethics, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2019), 24-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/20502877.2019.1565472

  33. To be authentic means “being true to my own originality” (Taylor, The ethics of authenticity, p. 29), but it is this striving for self-expression that gives my own self “a definitive shape” (Taylor, The Sources of the Self, p. 375). So in this process of self-discovery, we are actually giving ourselves the final touch, so to speak.

  34. There still seems to be a fundamental difference to essentialist views insofar as for Sartre, what we come back to and may discover again is something originally chosen and not something innate and given. But how can we properly speak of an original choice that is without any given basis and thus “absurd”, following Sartre’s own acknowledgment (see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993), p. 479)? Something has to make us choose this way rather than that way, even if “the motive, the act, and the end are all constituted in a single upsurge” (ibid., p. 438).

  35. See Parens, op. cit., p. 38.

  36. See Charles Larmore, The Practices of the Self, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  37. See Walker and Mackenzie, “Neurotechnologies, relational autonomy, and authenticity”.

  38. See Alessandro Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1998).

  39. For the first alternative, see Somogy Varga, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 108-121. For the second, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).

  40. See, for instance, Alice H. Eagly, “Achieving relational authenticity in leadership: Does gender matter?,” The Leadership Quarterly, Vol. 16 (2005), 459-474; Sanneke de Haan, “The Need for Relational Authenticity in Psychiatry,” Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2020), 349-351; Natalie Fletcher, “Ethical Selves: A Sketch for a Theory of Relational Authenticity,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2013), 83-96; Shaun Gallagher, Ben Morgan, Naomi Rokotnitz, “Relational authenticity,” in Gregg Caruso and Owen Flanagan, eds., Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, morals, and purpose in the age of neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 126-145; Emilian Mihailov, Alexandra Zorilă, Cristian Iftode, “Taking relational authenticity seriously: Neurotechnologies, narrative identity, and co-authorship of the self,” AJOB Neuroscience, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2021), 35-37; Iftode et. al. (2022), “Experimental and relational authenticity”.

  41. Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 90-91.

  42. Gallagher, Morgan, and Rokotniz, op. cit., p. 127.

  43. See Shaun Gallagher, “Deep brain stimulation, self and relational autonomy,” Neuroethics, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2018; print 2021), 31-43.

  44. See Williams, op. cit., pp. 191-205.

  45. See Taylor, The Sources of the Self, p. 15.

  46. See Baylis, op. cit., p. 128.

  47. In the sense of a non-self-deluded, transparent, independent relationship to her past: an authentic person would, e.g., recognize that she has betrayed her ideals at some moment in the past. See Muriel Leuenberger, “In defense of narrative authenticity: Response to the discussion of Pugh et al. and Nyholm and O’Neill,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2020), 656–667, and “Memory modification and authenticity: a narrative approach” (2022).

  48. Formal in the case of procedural approaches, since these accounts try to remain content-neutral and committed to no specific values, as opposed to substantive ones. At the same time, substantive accounts cannot go too far with their commitments because they need to avoid metaphysical problems and avoid reducing autonomous life to a single way of being into the world. For a clarifying discussion, see Michael Garnett, “Ghostwritten Lives: Autonomy, Deference, and Self-Authorship”, Ethics, Vol. 133, No. 2 (2023), 189-215.

  49. Baumann, op. cit., p. 458. See also Pugh, op. cit., p. 248.

  50. See Harry G. Frankfurt, “Identification and wholeheartedness,” in The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159-176.

  51. This is the view defended in Pugh, Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics.

  52. See Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993). According to Ferrara, the novel “highlights the potential for repression inherent in an autonomous moral conscience not complemented… by authenticity” (Modernity and Authenticity, p. 102). This is why Rousseau’s text becomes defining of an all-modern tension between an ethic of autonomy and an ethic of authenticity.

  53. See Garnett, op. cit, p. 197.

  54. In Garnett’s scenario, the Deferential Wife is a case of internalized oppression in the sense that (1) she would choose this way of life no matter what the options presented are, and (2) the oppression might not (or even must not) have anything to do with her husband’s behavior and values. It is true that the wife could reconstruct her identity, given the proper context, in a way that increases her autonomy. But framing this case solely in terms of an autonomy issue and neglecting that it also involves the value of authenticity makes us miss a crucial point: simply forcing the wife to become more autonomous, or even taking the husband out of the picture, will not solve the problem. Moreover, as Khader argues using the example of an autonomy-focused intervention in India, this type of approach is often doomed to fail. See Serene Khader, “Beyond Autonomy Fetishism: Affiliation with Autonomy in Women’s Empowerment”, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2016), 125-139.

  55. See Insoo Hyun, “Authentic Values and Individual Autonomy,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2001), 195-208, p. 203.

  56. Iftode, “Assessing enhancement technologies”, p. 7 (online version).

  57. Baumann, op. cit., p. 451.

  58. See Baumann, op. cit., p. 455. See also Andrea C. Westlund, “Rethinking Relational Autonomy,” Hypatia, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2009), 26-49.

  59. See Westlund, op. cit., p. 27.

  60. See ibid., p. 33.

  61. Ibid., p. 29.

  62. Ibid., p. 28.

  63. Ibid.

  64. See Felicitas Kraemer, “Me, Myself and My Brain Implant: Deep Brain Stimulation Raises Questions of Personal Authenticity and Alienation,” Neuroethics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2013), 483-497.

  65. Ibid., p. 488.

  66. See Rebecca A. Crouch, “Letting the deaf be deaf: Reconsidering the use of cochlear implants in prelingually deaf children,” Hastings Center Report, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1997), 14-21; Bonnie Poitras Tucker, “Deaf culture, cochlear implants, and elective disability,” Hastings Center Report, Vol. 28, No. 4 (1998), 6-14; Robert Sparrow, “Defending deaf culture: The case of cochlear implants,” Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2005), 135-152.

  67. See Tucker, op. cit., p. 6.

  68. See Sparrow, op. cit., p. 137.

  69. Ibid., p. 138.

  70. See Tony Hope, Jacinta Tan, Anne Stewart, and Ray Fitzpatrick, “Anorexia nervosa and the language of authenticity,” Hastings Center Report, Vol. 41, No. 6 (2011), 19-29.

  71. See Leuenberger, “In defense of narrative authenticity”. See also Sven Nyholm and Elizabeth O’Neill, “Deep brain stimulation, continuity over time, and the true self,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Vol. 25, No. 4, (2016), 647-658.

  72. Leuenberger (2020), op. cit., pp. 657-658.

  73. See Cristina Voinea, Constantin Vică, Emilian Mihailov, Julian Savulescu, “The Internet as Cognitive Enhancement,” Science and Engineering Ethics, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2020), 2345-2362.

  74. See Mikhail Valdman, “Outsourcing Self-Government,” Ethics, Vol. 120, No. 4 (2010), 761-790. See also Roger Crisp, Mill on Utilitarianism (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 61.

  75. See Valdman, op. cit., p. 770.

  76. See ibid., p. 772.

  77. A person might be fully aware of what her deepest commitments are at this moment in time, but it is quite possible that the future choices she will make alter the commitments presently held. Moreover, the PC framework not only neglects the probability of personal change over time, but it actually prevents it.

  78. See Pugh, op. cit., p. 243.

  79. Ibid., p. 242.

  80. This alternative can also be linked to the existing literature on hard choices (see for instance Ruth Chang, “Hard Choices,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2017), 1-21). Hard choices are choices where there is no answer which one is better for me. On a practical level both are good options but the choice is about what kind of person I want to be. It seems that such a PC could not help with those choices which are exactly the kind of choices most relevant for authenticity (either that we should discover what kind of person we want to be or create ourselves by making a free choice).

  81. Marya Schechtman, “Self-Expression and Self-Control,” Ratio, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2004), 409-427, p. 413.

  82. Ibid., p. 419. The underlying assumption here is that the value of authenticity cannot be disconnected from the idea of flourishing and living a meaningful existence.

  83. This way of thinking runs contrary to Pugh’s approach as well, who acknowledges that “on a rationalist account, autonomy does require rational reflection in a way that other accounts do not, even if such reflection can be unconscious or dispositionally produced” (Pugh, op. cit., p. 201). It is hard to grasp what an unconscious rational reflection could mean.

  84. See Emma Turley, Nigel King, Surya Monro, “‘You want to be swept up in it all’: Illuminating the erotic in BDSM,” Psychology & Sexuality, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2018), 148-160.

  85. See Walker and Mackenzie, op. cit., pp. 105-106.

  86. See Alexandre Erler, “Does memory modification threaten our authenticity?,” Neuroethics, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2011), 235-249; Leuenberger, “In defense of narrative authenticity”; Iftode et al. (2022), “Experimental and relational authenticity”.

  87. See Laura W. Ekstrom, “A Coherence Theory of Autonomy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 53, No. 3 (1993), 599-616; Pugh, Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics.

  88. See Jonathan Pugh, Hannah Maslen, Julian Savulescu, “Deep brain stimulation, authenticity and value,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2017), 640-657; Sven Nyholm and Elizabeth O’Neill, “Deep brain stimulation, authenticity and value: Further reflections,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2017), 658-670.

  89. Leuenberger (2020), op. cit., p. 657; Nyholm and O’Neill, “Deep brain stimulation, authenticity and value”, pp. 664-665.

  90. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness. One could object that always acting in accordance with Sartre’s ‘original choice’ would entail a stronger coherence and no ambivalence. But in the unfinished manuscript Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre insists on the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ reflection, clearly stating that “the decision of pure reflection… renounces the attempt at a synthetic unification of the self by the self, which leads necessarily to realizing this unification outside itself and to sacrificing lived consciousness” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 478-479). In other words, a person is making an authentic decision precisely when she is projecting herself towards the future, not worrying anymore whether her present decision is ultimately coherent with her past choices, or with the beliefs that guided those choices.

  91. See Williams, op. cit.

  92. Leuenberger (2020), op. cit. p. 660.

  93. Ibid., p. 665.

  94. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 49. See also Donald Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality (1982),” in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 169-187.

  95. Davidson, op. cit., pp. 186-187.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Cristina Voinea, Anda Zahiu, Emilian Mihailov and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministery of Education and Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0521, within PNCDI III, as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation, project number P500PH_202889. The authors have no other interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, Research Center in Applied Ethics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Cristian Iftode, Alexandra Zorilă & Constantin Vică

  2. Center for Ethics, University of Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Muriel Leuenberger

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  1. Cristian Iftode
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  2. Alexandra Zorilă
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  3. Constantin Vică
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  4. Muriel Leuenberger
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Correspondence to Cristian Iftode.

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The Romanian Ministery of Education and Research and the Swiss National Science Foundation have nothing to gain or lose financially through publication of this manuscript. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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Iftode, C., Zorilă, A., Vică, C. et al. ‘A Life of Our Own’: Why Authenticity is More Than a Condition for Autonomy. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09967-0

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