Agency and Inner Freedom

Garnett, Michael

doi:10.1111/nous.12106

Cited by 21 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…This holds regardless of their phenomenal aspects; it simply follows from evaluative unification that irrational or immoral or self-destructive internal forces are blockages on the path to true freedom. From here it's then a short step (though not, strictly, a necessary one (Garnett 2017)) to the idea that these motivations are internal constraints and so external or alien to one's true self. This yields a view of the self as always fundamentally split between these alien forces, on the one hand, and the 'true' self of reason or virtue or flourishing, on the other (Berlin 1969).…”

Section: Evaluative Unification As a Political Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unity and Disunity in the Positive Tradition

Garnett¹

2021

Positive Freedom

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Positive freedom can be hard to pin down. Whereas negative freedom may be characterised as an absence of coercion or physical prevention, and republican freedom as an absence of interpersonal domination, positive freedom resists such pithy treatment. Moreover, this isn't due to a lack of possible elucidations, but to an overabundance of them. The term is widely taken to refer to a variety of seemingly distinct goods, including but not limited to actually exercisable options or capabilities (Crocker 1980;Gould 1988), collective self-determination

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Section: Evaluative Unification As a Political Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unity and Disunity in the Positive Tradition

Garnett¹

2021

Positive Freedom

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“…All such accounts posit a higher, unified self – the authentic self, the self that has a coherent narrative, or the self with integrated central values – that transcends the messy and contradictory empirical human being. These theories face fundamental problems with both in theory (Garnett, 2017) and in application to decision-making law (Burch, 2017); and, as Midgley observes, when they are mistaken for the whole of morality, they quickly become ‘incoherent’ (1991/2017: p. 104). In the current context, however, the particular danger of these theories is that they treat two morally different situations in an identical manner; and, although in one of these situations they are harmless, in the other they are misleading.…”

Section: The Substantive Reading Of ‘Best Interpretation’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Giving substance to ‘the best interpretation of will and preferences’

Skowron

2019

International Journal of Law and Psychiatry

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In General Comment No. 1, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities calls for ‘the best interpretation of will and preferences’ to replace best interests determinations in decision-making law, but it has given little guidance on the content of this new standard. As a result, ‘best interpretation’ is sometimes treated as synonymous with ‘true interpretation’. On this reading, ‘the best interpretation of will and preferences’ is just whatever interpretation most accurately represents the interpreted person's will and preferences.This article shows that the conflation of the word ‘best’ with the word ‘true’ must be avoided. Interpretative processes contribute to changes in the interpreted person, including changes in their will and preferences. There are both supportive and abusive forms of these contributions, but conflating ‘best interpretation’ with ‘true interpretation’ removes both from view. An alternative reading of ‘best interpretation’ should therefore be preferred: one that requires the process of interpretation to be responsive to both truth and the detailed substantive rights found in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

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“…More subtly, when a hermeneutical philosopher such as Taylor (1985a) argues that the capacity “to evaluate desires is bound up with our power of self-evaluation, which in turn is an essential feature of the mode of agency we recognize as human” (p. 16), and when the anthropologist Ahearn (2001) defines agency as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (p. 112; see also Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 970), they assume the understanding of agency as the power of the subject to act freely in self-conscious awareness, even though this power is mediated by a socioculturally underpinned horizon of evaluation. The more-recent attempt at “severing of the theory of freedom from the theory of agency” (Garnett, 2015, p. 1) is no better. This proposal, positioned as a critique of the political conception of positive liberty “to do .…”

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confidence: 99%

Agency as response: A Heideggerian account.

George

2016

The Humanistic Psychologist

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Martin Heidegger's writings juxtapose the master view of human agency with the view of agency as response. Instead of the willful, self-assertive subject of modern philosophy, who is the autonomous author of her capricious subjectivistic choices, the human is conceived by Heidegger as respondent to situations that open up before her. As that being bestowed with the originary freedom of the background understanding of beings as a whole in their interconnected significance, the human's free act has a direction, delimitation, and source that is not merely inner. However, response is not instinctive reaction. It is concerned, openended, and questioning engagement with the particularities of the situation rather than production of capricious acts of the will by autonomous subjects, who are unconnected spectators of the situation. Heidegger's proposal attempts to go beyond the humanism of the willful subject.

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Agency and Inner Freedom

Cited by 21 publications

References 33 publications

Unity and Disunity in the Positive Tradition

Unity and Disunity in the Positive Tradition

Giving substance to ‘the best interpretation of will and preferences’

Agency as response: A Heideggerian account.

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