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  • Problems With Non-Naturalistic Accounts of Non-Voluntariness
  • Christian Perring (bio)
Keywords

competency, autonomy, voluntariness, anorexia

The debate in philosophy of science in the twentieth century over the theory-laden-ness of observation showed both that there are many ways in which scientific observation depends on theory, and also highlighted some ways in which it is blind to theoretical assumptions. Debates in the philosophy of medicine have shown how concepts and theories of illness are value-laden, especially in psychiatry. Kious (2015) in his helpful and stimulating target article argues that the mainstream approach to autonomy depends on assumptions about value, and this conclusion is surely correct. However, his focus on the concept of non-voluntariness is problematic, as I argue, and we are better off not seeing it as laden with value.

Psychological autonomy is a much contested concept. It is clear that our abilities to reason and our abilities to control our own actions are varied. There are many ways in which rationality can fail and self-control can falter. Our knowledge of the world can be very patchy. We can be very good in dealing with some parts of our lives, but very bad at coping with other parts of our lives. Deciding when people are competent to run their own lives is very difficult, and the decisions to intervene paternalistically in other people’s lives can be made for many kinds of reasons. There can be competing criteria of competency, C1, C2, C3, and so on, in relation to making a decision D. Each of them gives necessary and sufficient conditions for competency to make the decision. Arguments for whether we should choose C1 over C2, for example, can be based on different considerations. I may prefer to have very high standards of competence for pragmatic reasons, and so I choose very demanding criteria, which mean that many more people are deemed incompetent to make a decision, because I favor a utilitarian theory and I believe that this will maximize happiness. Someone else may favor a much more relaxed criterion, C2, because they believe it is particularly bad to force people to do what they do not want to do, and people should be allowed to make their own mistakes, except in the most serious cases. So our choices of criteria, C1, C2 or one of the others, depends on our views of what is important in life.

However, the criteria of competency themselves need to refer to the psychological abilities and properties of the person themselves. In judging autonomy, we assess the person’s rationality and their ability to control themselves. This is one reason [End Page 17] why Kious’s claims about voluntariness seem wrong-headed. In this commentary, I spell out what I take Kious to be arguing and give reasons why it cannot be right and why his arguments are unconvincing.

Ultimately, I take Kious to be arguing that it is reasonable to use considerations of what is good for a person to decide whether to intervene in their lives when they are acting in self-destructive ways. However, he does not argue that we should force people who are competent to make a decision to do something else instead. Rather, he argues that it is reasonable to judge that people who are self-destructive are not acting autonomously, even though they can pass competency tests for rationality and their desires seem to be authentic. His claim is that a desire becomes non-voluntary when it is sufficiently self-destructive. This seems to make non-voluntariness a function not only of the properties of the person, but also of the judgments of other people, or possibly, simply being self-destructive makes a desire non-voluntary. However, there is no explanation for why an apparently psychological property of non-voluntariness should depend on either the judgments of others. So this needs further examination.

Given the central role of non-voluntariness in Kious’s paper, it is surprising that he is not clearer as to what he means by it. At first blush, it sounds like it means something to do with the will and that it applies to a person’s actions...

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