Abstract
How might empirical research enrich our understanding of the nature of autonomy? This chapter sets out two main insights gleaned from our interdisciplinary work into this question. The first concerns critical reflection, a fundamental internalist condition for autonomy, and its relation to how a person's beliefs and values relate to reality. We set out a philosophical account of evidence-responsive critical reflection and suggest a neurobiological framework for it. The second insight is the introduction of a novel, internalist dimension of a classic externalist condition for autonomy—namely, how a person’s decision making is influenced by external factors and actors—which we call pre-authorization. In both cases, our analysis puts pressure on the idea that we can draw any clear distinction between internalist and externalist conditions for personal autonomy. This theoretical analysis is then applied to situations in which infringement of autonomy is a concern, such as nudging and persuasive technologies, to draw out its practical implications.
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Notes
- 1.
This is distinct from the metaphysical question asking whether neuroscientific experiments have shown that free will is an illusion. For those who understand “autonomy” as within the family of metaphysical freedom terms (e.g., Mele, 1995, 2012), this metaphysical question is the same as asking whether neuroscience has shown that there are no autonomous human beings. There has been a lively debate over this issue (see Lavazza, 2016). Yet, it is more common to make a distinction between personal autonomy and freedom, and we take this route. Freedom concerns the ability to act (and on some conceptions, “having sufficient resources and power to make one’s desires effective”); whereas autonomy concerns “the independence and authenticity of the desires (values, emotions, etc.) that move one to act in the first place” (Christman, 2015).
- 2.
In our earliest studies of the relationship between the cognitive sciences and the concept of autonomy (Felsen & Reiner, 2011), we found that this philosophically defined hierarchical schema broadly aligns with our understanding of the fundamental neurobiology of the brain—in particular with executive control theory in which the prefrontal cortex exerts a top-down influence over other brain regions (Miller & Cohen, 2001).
- 3.
- 4.
Similar views can be found, more implicitly, in earlier accounts of autonomy. One example is Richard Arneson’s view, demonstrated by his claim that, “To live an autonomous life an agent must decide on a plan of life through critical reflection and in the process of carrying it out, remain disposed to subject the plan to critical review if […] unanticipated evidence indicates the need for such review” (Arneson, 1994).
- 5.
There is a strand of autonomy theory which defines autonomous decision-making in terms of reasons-responsiveness. Without endorsing this theory, here we simply point out that evidence-responsiveness might plausibly be understood as a specific way of responding to reasons, namely responding to reasons-to-review or reasons-to-revise a pro-attitude that one currently holds (Niker et al., 2018b).
- 6.
This maintenance may include engaging in evidence-responsive critical reflection in order to update the stringencies of the filters when appropriate, so that they don’t become “encrusted” in the way discussed in Section “Critical Reflection and Evidence-Responsiveness”.
- 7.
Despite the initial equation of nudges with a form of paternalism, it is now well-established that nudging is a type of influence that can be used in service of different ends. While we may be motivated to nudge for paternalistic reasons, we might also use nudges for the purpose of promoting justice, utility, commercial profit, or so on.
- 8.
Neurobiologically, this could be represented as shifting the starting point of the drift–diffusion process closer to one of the bounds (Felsen & Reiner, 2015). Often, as with encrusted values, bounds are set by internal biases. By changing the relative distances to bounds, nudges can be seen to counteract such internal biases in ways that are (more) consistent with the agent’s pro-attitudes.
- 9.
We do recognize, though, that most of the worries about nudges to reason are diminished in the case of Momentum (vis-à-vis public policy nudges to reason) by the fact that a person has intentionally granted permission to the app to influence her decision-making in this way.
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Niker, F., Felsen, G., Nagel, S.K., Reiner, P.B. (2021). Autonomy, Evidence-Responsiveness, and the Ethics of Influence. In: Blitz, M.J., Bublitz, J.C. (eds) The Law and Ethics of Freedom of Thought, Volume 1. Palgrave Studies in Law, Neuroscience, and Human Behavior. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84494-3_6
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