Autonomy - trawling for feedback

Download autonomy_and_addiction.pdf

This is just an entirely shameless attempt to get feedback on the paper above. It defends a view of autonomy as requiring exercise of the capacity to extend our will across time. Agents are autonomy-impaired to the extent they are unable to carry out plans, for whatever reason. The test case is addiction: I argue that some addicts experience constant oscillations of preferences, such that when they consume their choice expresses their all-things-considered preferences. Nevertheless, these agents are autonomy-impaired, and other accounts can't capture the precise nature of the impairment. Hope someone is willing to read it.

Comments

[Rob]

It may be of interest to note that in the first two sections of the Second Treatise of his "Genealogy of Morality" (1887) -- "'Guilt,' 'Bad Conscience,' and Related Matters" -- Nietzsche articulates essentially the same thing as Professor Levy's inter-related concepts of the self (as composed of dynamically interactive "subpersonal mechanisms") and of autonomy (as consisting in "the exercise of the capacity for extended agency").