Fay Niker

Government lockdowns, school closures, mass unemployment, health and wealth inequality. Political Philosophy in a Pandemic asks us, where do we go from here? What are the ethics of our response to a radically changed, even more unequal society, and how do we seize the moment for enduring change? Addressing the moral and political implications of pandemic response from states and societies worldwide, the 20 essays collected here cover the most pressing debates relating to the biggest public health crisis in the last century. Discussing the pandemic in five key parts covering social welfare, economic justice, democratic relations, speech and misinformation, and the relationship between justice and crisis, this book reflects the fruitful combination of political theory and philosophy in laying the theoretical and practical foundations for justice in the long-term.

This chapter examines what role new behaviour-modification policies – commonly known as “nudges” – might play in cultivating virtues. At first sight, they would appear to be ruled out as a candidate means; but, by offering a more nuanced analysis, the chapter argues that some nudges have virtue-cultivating properties. It distinguishes between two kinds of nudges – 'automatic-behavioural' and 'discernment-developing' – and shows that what divides them is the ability of the latter, which the former lacks, to play an ecological-educative role in developing the virtue of practical reason, which is required for the other virtues too. It thus provides an answer to the question of whether virtue-cultivating nudges are possible, while remaining neutral on whether virtue cultivation is, or under what conditions it could be, a legitimate aim of liberal-democratic states.

Advances in psychology and neuroscience have elucidated the social aspects of human agency, leading to a broad shift in our thinking about fundamental concepts such as autonomy and responsibility. Here, we address a critical aspect of this inquiry by investigating how people consider the socio-relational nature of their own agency, particularly the influence of others on their perceived control over their decisions and actions. Specifically, in a series of studies using contrastive vignettes, we examine public attitudes about when external influences on everyday decisions are perceived as " undue " – that is, as undermining the control conditions for these decisions to be considered autonomous – vs. when they are perceived as appropriate and even supportive of autonomous decision-making. We found that the influence of preauthorized agents – individuals and institutions with whom we share a worldview – was judged to be less undue than non-preauthorized agents, even after controlling for the familiarity of the agent. These effects persisted irrespective of the extent to which respondents identified as communitarian or individualistic, and were consistent across two distinct scenarios. We also found that external influences that were rational were perceived as less undue than those that were arational. Our study opens new avenues of inquiry into the " folk conception " of autonomy, and we discuss the implications of our findings for the ethics of public policies designed to influence decisions and for information sharing in social networks.

The concept of paternalism is intricately tied to the concept of autonomy. It is commonly assumed that when paternalistic interventions are wrong, they are wrong because they impede individuals’ autonomy. Our aim in this paper is to show that the recent shift towards conceiving of autonomy relationally highlights a separate conceptual space for a nonpaternalistic kind of interpersonal intervention termed maternalism. We argue that maternalism makes a twofold contribution to the debate over the ethics of interpersonal action and decision-making. Descriptively, it captures common experiences that, while not unusual in everyday life, are largely absent from the present discussion. Normatively, it describes a type of intervention with justification conditions distinct from the standard framework of paternalism. We explicate these contributions by describing six key differences between maternalism and paternalism, and conclude by anticipating and responding to potential objections.

Trust has generally been understood as an intentional mental phenomenon that one party has towards another party with respect to some object of value for the truster. In the landmark work of Annette Baier, this trust is described as a three-place predicate: A entrusts B with the care of C, such that B has discretionary powers in caring for C. In this paper we propose that, within the context of thick interpersonal relationships, trust manifests in a different way: as a property of the relationship itself. We argue that this conceptualization has important implications for the debate over the ethics of interpersonal interventions. In particular, when trust is understood in this way, actions that would otherwise be deemed morally troubling may be permissible, or even morally desirable, on account of their role in strengthening trusting relationships.

In this commentary on an article by Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (AJOB 16:5-15, 2016), we discuss how external influences on decisions affect personal autonomy. Specifically, we introduce the idea of “pre-authorization” as an evaluative stance by which an individual gives a certain agent preferential access to influencing her decision-making processes. Influences arising from pre-authorized agents may then be seen as promoting, rather than infringing upon, autonomy. While the idea that an external influence can be autonomy-promoting may be inconsistent with individualistic conceptions of autonomy, it aligns well with more relational conceptions that recognize the social milieu in which decisions are made. We suggest that pre-authorization provides a framework for thinking about how relational accounts of autonomy might work mechanistically.

Given the ubiquity and centrality of social and relational influences to the human experience, our conception of self-governance must adequately account for these external influences. The inclusion of socio-historical, externalist considerations into more traditional internalist accounts of autonomy has been an important feature of the debate over personal autonomy in recent years. But the relevant socio-temporal dynamics of autonomy are not only historical in nature. There are also important, and under-examined, future-oriented questions about how we retain autonomy while incorporating new values into the existing set that guides our interaction with the world. In this paper, we examine these questions from two complementary perspectives: philosophy and neuroscience. After contextualizing the philosophical debate, we show the importance to theories of autonomous agency of the capacity to appropriately adapt our values and beliefs, in light of relevant experiences and evidence, to changing circumstances. We present a plausible philosophical account of this process, which we claim is generally applicable to theories about the nature of autonomy, both internalist and externalist alike. We then evaluate this account by providing a model for how the incorporation of values might occur in the brain; one that is inspired by recent theoretical and empirical advances in our understanding of the neural processes by which our beliefs are updated by new information. Finally, we synthesize these two perspectives and discuss how the neurobiology might inform the philosophical discussion.