Joel Anderson

We endorse policymakers’ efforts to address the negative consequences of the attention economy’s technology but add that these approaches are often limited in their criticism of the systemic context of human attention. Starting from Buddhist philosophy, we advocate a broader approach: an ‘ecology of attending’ that centers on conceptualizing, designing, and using attention (1) in an embedded way and (2) focused on the alleviating of suffering. With ‘embedded’ we mean that attention is not a neutral, isolated mechanism but a meaning-engendering part of an ‘ecology’ of bodily, sociotechnical and moral frameworks. With ‘focused on the alleviation of suffering’ we mean that we explicitly move away from the (often implicit) conception of attention as a tool for gratifying desires. We analyze existing inquiries in these directions and urge them to be intensified and integrated. As to the design and function of our technological environment, we propose three questions for further research: How can technology help to acknowledge us as ‘ecological’ beings, rather than as self-sufficient individuals? How can technology help to raise awareness of our moral framework? And how can technology increase the conditions for ‘attending’ to the alleviation of suffering, by substituting our covert self-driven moral framework with an ecologically attending one? We believe in the urgency of transforming the inhumane attention economy sociotechnical system into a humane ecology of attending, and in our ability to contribute to it.

We endorse policymakers’ efforts to address the negative consequences of the attention economy’s technology but add that these approaches are often limited in their criticism of the systemic context of human attention. Starting from Buddhist philosophy, we advocate a broader approach: an ‘ecology of attending’ that centers on conceptualizing, designing, and using attention (1) in an embedded way and (2) focused on the alleviating of suffering. With ‘embedded’ we mean that attention is not a neutral, isolated mechanism but a meaning-engendering part of an ‘ecology’ of bodily, sociotechnical and moral frameworks. With ‘focused on the alleviation of suffering’ we mean that we explicitly move away from the (often implicit) conception of attention as a tool for gratifying desires. We analyze existing inquiries in these directions and urge them to be intensified and integrated. As to the design and function of our technological environment, we propose three questions for further research: How can technology help to acknowledge us as ‘ecological’ beings, rather than as self-sufficient individuals? How can technology help to raise awareness of our moral framework? And how can technology increase the conditions for ‘attending’ to the alleviation of suffering, by substituting our covert self-driven moral framework with an ecologically attending one? We believe in the urgency of transforming the inhumane attention economy sociotechnical system into a humane ecology of attending, and in our ability to contribute to it.

This book investigates behaviour change technologies (BCTs) from an ethical perspective, examining the broader societal and philosophical implications of these types of technologies. These technologies-ranging from fitness trackers and smart home systems to digital nudging and persuasive AI-are increasingly shaping our choices, habits, and lifestyles. This book moves beyond nudging and persuasion to explore a broader spectrum of ethical concerns, including autonomy, privacy, trust, responsibility, and social justice. Contributors from leading scholars do not merely critique BCTs but also offer constructive ethical frameworks and ethical analysis for their responsible design and implementation.

This essay examines the complex concerns surrounding AI integration in professional workplaces through the lens of Frankfurt School critical theory, particularly Axel Honneth's work on recognition. Moving beyond reductive narratives of technological progress or worker exploitation, I analyze how AI-mediated labour transforms professional identity and workplace relations. The analysis distinguishes between individual dimensions of alienation (loss of self-determination, domination, meaningless work, and destabilized achievement) and the essential social dimension that Honneth's recognition theory highlights. I argue that AI technologies risk introducing ‘second-order alienation’ by disrupting the interpersonal contexts that make work meaningful and recognition possible and impoverishing opportunities for genuine intersubjective recognition. However, following Honneth's rejection of technological determinism, I suggest that recognition-sensitive integration of AI could preserve and potentially enhance workplace sociality. The central challenge is maintaining workplaces as social spaces where mutual recognition remains possible despite technological mediation – a key consideration for sustaining social freedom in AI-transformed professional environments.

Against those who argue that Hegel despaired of providing a solution to the problem of poverty, I argue, on the basis of key dialectical transitions in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, that he held at least the following: (1) that the chronic poverty endemic to industrial capitalism can be overcome only through changes that must include a transformation in practices of consumption, (2) that this transformation must lead to more *sittlich* and self-conscious practices of consumption, and (3) that the institution best-suited to enable the development of these more *sittlich* and self-conscious practices of consumption is the *Korporation*.

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control. While this push back is important, current societal debates on the ethics of persuasive technologies are informed by a particular understanding of attention, rarely posited explicitly yet assumed as the default. They share the same concept of attention, namely an individualistic and descriptive concept of attention that is a cognitive process, an expendable resource, something that one should control individually. We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, turning to Buddhist ethics to formulate a critique of persuasive technology from a genuinely ethical perspective. Buddhist ethics points at our attention’s inescapable ethical and ontological embeddedness. Attention as practice requires “the right effort” to distinguish desirable and undesirable states, the “right concentration” to stop the flow we are caught in, and the “right mindfulness” to fortify the ability to attend to the present situation and keep in mind a general sense of life’s direction. We offer input for further philosophical inquiry on attention as practice and attention ecology. We put forward comfort/effort and individualism/collectivism as two remaining central tensions in need of further research.

This chapter attempts to “re-boot” the discussion of Harry Frankfurt’s approach to autonomy, in the service of a new diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of his satisfaction-based ontology of the will. Criticisms of Frankfurt’s work have tended to focus on a lack of normative foundations, often missing Frankfurt’s aim of shifting discussions of autonomy towards a focus on avoiding passivity in how one cares about what one cares about, while still acknowledging the central role of volitional necessity and, especially, self-satisfaction in autonomous agency. Although this approach provides Frankfurt with interesting ways of deflecting criticisms that are ethical in character, the lack of attention to the hermeneutic and linguistic dimensions of our inner life, leaves his approach with insufficient grounds for identifying the passivity of those who are unable or unwilling to engage in genuine self-interpretation.

The 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) provides a landmark articulation of the universality of human rights. It affirms in strong terms that all human beings have a claim to full inclusion and equal participation in society, something denied to many because of disability. The CRPD is an ambitious document with far-reaching and fundamental implications. This interdisciplinary collection of essays takes up pressing philosophical, legal, and practical issues raised by the CRPD and the ongoing process of its implementation. Combining clear legal and philosophical overviews with ground-breaking conceptual analyses, the collection aims to advance the academic debate about human rights and disability and to serve as a useful resource for policymakers, ethicists, disability activists, jurists, and all those interested in the human rights of persons with disabilities. With contributions by Jackie Leach Scully, Marcus Düwell, Jenny Goldschmidt, Sigrid Graumann, Caroline Harnacke, Jan Vorstenbosch, Esther van Weele, Joel Anderson, Jos Philips.

Like being able to drive a car, being autonomous is a socially attributed, claimed, and contested status. Normative debates about criteria for autonomy (and what autonomy entitles one to) are best understood, not as debates about what autonomy, at core, really is, but rather as debates about the relative merits of various possible packages of thresholds, entitlements, regulations, values, and institutions. Within different “regimes” of autonomy, different criteria for (degrees of) autonomy become authoritative. Neoliberal, solidaristic, and perfectionist regimes entail conflicting understandings of what gets you autonomy and what autonomy gets you—for example, in relation to policies regarding physician-assisted suicide or financial support for senior citizens. In light of this, justifying a particular understanding of autonomy is inseparable from the task of arguing for the context-specific merits of a regime of autonomy as a whole and in relation to other ethical and political commitments.

Although vulnerability often diminishes a person's autonomy, this is not true in all senses. The realization of autonomy, understood as an ideal of personal agency, is entwined with various forms of vulnerability. This essay sketches a conception of autonomy as comprising deliberative, executive, self-interpretive, and critical autonomy-competencies developed and exercised within social practices. Drawing on theories of recognition, it then discusses two senses in which vulnerability to others contributes constitutively to autonomy: first, because autonomous agency is dependent on the normative pragmatics of mutual recognition; second, because participation in autonomy-promoting social practices is contingent on co-participants' attribution of competence to one another. The essay concludes by considering the question of the appropriateness of social and political arrangements that facilitate richer forms of autonomy but that also generate concomitantly higher levels of vulnerability.

This dissertation develops an approach to personal autonomy, understood as the capacity to lead one's life in a way that is one's own. Through a critical engagement with the work of Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas, I argue that there are four intersubjective aspects of autonomy. ;First, since critical reflection on one's desires, commitments, values, etc. involves accessing them interpretively, it is subject to hermeneutic constraints of public intelligibility. To understand one's commitments as worthwhile thus requires the capacity to employ shared meanings. ;Second, because critical reflection is open to error, the capacity to be self-guiding must include the reflexive capacity to correct one's critical reflection as well. If this is not to generate a regress, critical reflection must be understood as pointing beyond the confines of the reflecting agent. I argue for a nonfoundationalist, contextualist, discursive conception of the capacity for self-correction, in terms of intersubjective procedures of justification and the capacity to participate in them. ;Third, the reasons for being personally autonomous should be understood primarily in terms of the pragmatic presuppositions of social interaction. Specifically, it is partly constitutive of social cooperation that agents assume that others could, if called upon, give accounts for their actions. ;Fourth, being autonomous is inseparable from the "ongoingly accomplished" social recognition of one's ability to provide warrants for one's choices. Outside of any pragmatic social context, there is no metaphysical, transcontextual property in virtue of which agents are autonomous. ;I develop this view via discussions of Frankfurt, Taylor, and Habermas. I reconstruct Frankfurt's emerging view and criticize it for underestimating the importance of making sense of what one cares about. Though I defend Taylor's view that critical reflection involves self-interpretation that is transformative and yet subject to subject-transcending constraints, I criticize his ontological understanding of these constraints as conflicting with intuitions about authentic individuality. In my discussion of Habermas, I offer a pragmatic and contextualist reading of his theory of communicative action, which makes it plausible to view "ethical-existential" claims as admitting of discursive justification, thereby opening up space for the view sketched above.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are interactive online tools designed to assist voters by improving the basis on which they decide how to vote. In recent years, they have been widely adopted, but their design is the subject of ongoing and often heated criticism. Most of these debates focus on whether VAAs accurately measure the standpoints of political parties and the preferences of users and on whether they report valid results while avoiding political bias. It is generally assumed that if their methodology is sound, then VAAs can be seen as strengthening the democratic process. But as we argue in this chapter, the setup of VAAs raises basic questions of normative democratic theory as well. Insofar as VAAs are supposed to improve the functioning of the democratic process, it must be clarified in what sense they aim to make a contribution, before it even makes sense to discuss their effectiveness at doing so. VAAs are often intended to enhance the democratic process by one or all of the following: (I) informing voters about the policy standpoints of political parties (or individual candidates), (2) increasing voter turnout, and (3) ensuring that the composition of parliaments more accurately reflects the political attitudes of the electorate. In the next three sections, we discuss three central bones of contention in current democratic theory that are crucial to these ways in which VAAs typically take themselves to contribute to strengthening the democratic process: 1. Questions about citizen competence: What forms of competence do citizens need to have, and to what extent, for a democracy to function properly? 2. Questions about political participation: What forms and extent of participation are vital to democracy? 3. Questions about democratic representation: How should the relation between the elected and the electorate be understood? For each issue we aim to show, first, how the design and setup of mainstream VAAs are tacitly structured by a specific conception of the democratic aim at issue and, second, what some alternative positions on these questions are within contemporary political theory. In the final section, we will discuss some of the implications of this analysis for the responsibilities of VAA developers, and particularly for the procedural neutrality to which they are typically committed. Our conclusion will be that once these issues are identified, developers of VAAs should either argue in favour of their views on democratic competence, participation and representation, or they should rethink the design of VA As in ways that move beyond their current assumptions, or both.

One of liberalism’s core commitments is to safeguarding individuals’ autonomy. And a central aspect of liberal social justice is the commitment to protecting the vulnerable. Taken together, and combined with an understanding of autonomy as an acquired set of capacities to lead one’s own life, these commitments suggest that liberal societies should be especially concerned to address vulnerabilities of individuals regarding the development and maintenance of their autonomy. In this chapter, we develop an account of what it would mean for a society to take seriously the obligation to reduce individuals’ autonomy-related vulnerabilities to an acceptable minimum. In particular, we argue that standard liberal accounts underestimate the scope of this obligation because they fail to appreciate various threats to autonomy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Accurate Self-Assessment, Autonomous Ignorance, and the Appreciation of DisabilityJoel Anderson (bio) and Warren Lux (bio)In their thoughtful commentaries on our essay, "Knowing your own strength: Accurate self-assessment as a requirement for personal autonomy," George Agich, Ruth Chadwick, and Dominic Murphy (2004) provide both criticisms and insights that give us a context in which to clarify further our claim that one's autonomy is impaired when one is unable to appreciate whether one has the capacities required for tasks one is undertaking. We focus on two issues: the extent to which our account of autonomy suggests a problematically "externalist" or "objective" approach and the issue of whether our talk of accurate self-assessment entails an overdemanding requirement that one know numerous facts about oneself to count as autonomous.The External Point of ViewFor many, the idea that specific regions of the brain might be relevant to a person's autonomy evokes nightmarish, startlingly reductionist visions of a world in which informed consent is decided on the basis of neuroimaging. In arguing that a capacity for self-assessment is essential for autonomy and also presupposes executive function that is often impaired by prefrontal damage, we do not wish to engage in such reductionism by suggesting that there is any straightforward, one-to-one mapping comparable to that presupposed by the nightmare scenarios. Given what we know about the brain's plasticity, the prospects (although limited at present) for neurorehabilitation, the multiplicity of the instantiation of autonomy-related capacities, and, especially, the constitutively moral/normative dimensions of these capacity concepts, such mappings are clearly problematic. This is true even in the easy cases, which, as Murphy points out, include our case of "John." This is all the more true with regard to the more complicated psychiatric cases, including disorders such as depression where the normative dimensions and the greater interpretive leeway in diagnosis preclude reductionist solutions (See Anderson 2004). For these reasons and for independent philosophical reasons, we are uncomfortable with the label "externalist," [End Page 309] although we acknowledge and confirm our view that externally applied neuroscientific notions—and evidence—can inform these matters. Nonetheless, we do not wish to argue for a fully externalist point of view, especially when paired with the idea that we are advocating a "smooth naturalistic picture of the cognitive basis of autonomy" (Murphy 2004, 303). Murphy puts us in some terrific company with the likes of John Doris, Shaun Nichols, and—we would add—himself, and this is welcome and flattering. But, to avoid any misunderstanding of an issue that we do not actually take up in our essay, we should caution that we do not endorse a program of naturalizing the normativity on which many of central autonomy-related concepts are based. The notion, for example, of what it is to assess competently one's chances of success cannot be replaced with a set of nomological regularities or a self-applying list of necessary and sufficient conditions.Appreciating Disability and Knowing the FactsOne of the central challenges we face in presenting our approach is to distinguish our requirement of "accurate self-assessment" from an implausible requirement that one have no false beliefs about one's capacities. In different ways, all three commentaries make it clear that our argument would benefit from further clarification of this distinction.In her commentary, Chadwick suggests that our approach may commit us to requiring too much self-knowledge, specifically, that it seems to require accurate knowledge of things like our genetic makeup as a requirement for autonomy. To begin with, it is worth underscoring again that the requirement we have introduced is explicitly task specific: we are focused here on whether an agent has an understanding of things that are relevant for undertaking an intended task, and declarative knowledge of facts, genetic or otherwise, about oneself is relevant only insofar as they bear on that understanding.But Chadwick's point clearly goes deeper. In that regard, it is particularly important to underscore that ours is actually a requirement that has less to do with knowing facts—even task-specific ones—about oneself and much more to do with having the ability to incorporate available...

In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political theory, the volume covers inter alia the following topics: the nature of the self and its relation to autonomy, the social dimensions of autonomy and the political dynamics of respect and recognition, and the concept of autonomy underlying the principles of liberalism.

In this paper, I examine two versions of the so-called “hierarchical” approach to personal autonomy, based on the notion of “second-order desires”. My primary concern will be with the question of whether these approaches provide an adequate basis for understanding the dynamics of autonomy-ascription. I begin by distinguishing two versions of the hierarchical approach, each representing a different response to the oft-discussed “regress” objection. I then argue that both “structural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Frankfurt, Bratman) and “procedural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Dworkin, Christman, Mele) have difficulties accommodating the dynamics of how the attribution of autonomy to persons is claimed, disputed, and resolved. Although they differ in details, both shortcomings can be traced to viewing autonomy as a metaphysical rather than a normative, practical matter. I conclude by suggesting that these difficulties underscore the advantages of a more constructivist and pragmatist.

Habermas's collection of essays "The Future of Human Nature" is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willingness to engage in applied ethics at all. The real key to Habermas’s argument is that human personhood and moral agency presuppose certain modes of relating to oneself that are threatened by the asymmetrical way in which genetic enhancements would presumably work. Thus, instead of taking up and then extending familiar normative concerns about unequal opportunities or the criteria for moral personhood, Habermas believes that the emerging technologies of genetic enhancement demand genuinely new arguments, and he proposes to focus on the effects of genetic programming on whether the agent can consider herself free and equal—effects, that is, regarding what one might call the reflexive attitudinal preconditions for moral agency. Like contractarians and Kantians more generally, Habermas faces difficulties accommodating the intuition that we might have obligations toward potential persons. The difficulty is particularly pronounced in the case of Habermas’s “discourse theory of morality,” since it construes the moral point of view in terms of processes of deliberation among all those affected by the norm at issue which the participants consider in the deliberative process to be open, fair, and inclusive. Future generations do not fit neatly into this deliberative process, nor do prepersonal humans. Moral norms adjudicated in such discourse clearly affect their interests, but they cannot themselves participate in the discourse. In the past, Habermas and other “discourse ethicists” have tried to address this worry by introducing “advocatory discourses.” But this move threatens to undo a distinctive, appealing feature of Habermas’s moral theory: the pragmatist insistence on the innovative, critical, unpredictable discourse generated by actual participants in discourse and the refusal (contra Rawls, in particular) to rely on hypothetical representatives. In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas ventures a different strategy,focused on expanding what he calls the “ethical” domain, which differs from the “moral” domain in being a matter of a community’s articulation of its core values and conception of the good. Previously, Habermas distinguished “ethical-existential” and “ethical-political” domains, as a matter of who an individual or a community, respectively, is and wants to be. In the present book, Habermas makes the remarkable move of introducing the category of the “species-ethical,” which is supposed to be the domain of questions raised by the human species as a whole about the question of what it is to be human. This theoretical move extends further steps Habermas had already taken in speaking of ethical solidarity within the global community.

Should society intervene to prevent the risky behavior of precocious teenagers even if it would be impermissible to intervene with adults who engage in the same risky behavior? The problem is well illustrated by the legal case of the 13-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker, who set out in 2009 to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone, succeeding in January 2012. In this paper we use her case as a point of entry for discussing the fundamental question of how to demarcate childhood from adulthood. After summarizing the case, we identify a ‘demarcation dilemma’ that frames much of the public and expert debate. On the one hand, it seems morally imperative ‘to treat like alike’, which means that both children and adults should be allowed to undertake all actions for which they have the relevant competences. On the other hand, requiring proportional treatment of children and adults seems to neglect the special nature of childhood as a distinct stage in life that ends at a specific age. We introduce the notion of a ‘regime of childhood’ to deal with this problem. This regime includes several dimensions, including the limited liability for children, the supervisory responsibilities of parents, the role of age-based thresholds, and the overarching purpose of childhood as a context for developing autonomy. We argue that, all things considered, there are good reasons not to shift to a regime that offers individual children the option of qualifying for adulthood on the basis of age-neutral criteria.

It has been argued - most prominently in Harry Frankfurt's recent work - that the normative authority of personal commitments derives not from their intrinsic worth but from the way in which one's will is invested in what one cares about. In this essay, I argue that even if this approach is construed broadly and supplemented in various ways, its intrasubjective character leaves it ill-prepared to explain the normative grip of commitments in cases of purported self-betrayal. As an alternative, I sketch a view that focuses on intersubjective constraints of intelligibility built into social practices and on the pragmatics of how those norms are contested in an ongoing fashion.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are interactive online tools designed to assist voters by improving the basis on which they decide how to vote. Current VAAs typically aim to do so by matching users’ policy-preferences with the positions of parties or candidates. But this ‘matching model’ depends crucially on implicit, contestable presuppositions about the proper functioning of the electoral process and about the forms of competence required for good citizenship—presuppositions associated with the social choice conception of democracy. This paper aims to make those presuppositions explicit and to contrast them with two possible alternative perspectives on VAAs, associated with deliberative and agonistic conceptions of democracy and citizenship.