Kyle van Oosterum

David Enoch argues that nudges undermine autonomy because they sever an important connection between sovereignty (self-rule) and non-alienation (acting in line with one’s deepest commitments). I accept that nudges can sever the link, but challenge Enoch’s further claim that such disruption necessarily undermines the full value of autonomy. I introduce the concept of scaffolding nudges: nudges that sever the link temporarily in order to strengthen it over time. These nudges support, rather than subvert, the realization of autonomy, thereby undermining an implicit uniformity assumption in Enoch’s account. The surprising conclusion is that some nudges may have a crucial but temporary role to play in enabling agents to live autonomous lives by helping sustain the integration between sovereignty and non-alienation – a point with implications for broader debates about nudging and autonomy.

David Enoch argues that nudges undermine autonomy because they sever an important connection between sovereignty (self-rule) and non-alienation (acting in line with one’s deepest commitments). I accept that nudges can sever the link, but challenge Enoch’s further claim that such disruption necessarily undermines the full value of autonomy. I introduce the concept of scaffolding nudges: nudges that sever the link temporarily in order to strengthen it over time. These nudges support, rather than subvert, the realization of autonomy, thereby undermining an implicit uniformity assumption in Enoch’s account. The surprising conclusion is that some nudges may have a crucial but temporary role to play in enabling agents to live autonomous lives by helping sustain the integration between sovereignty and non-alienation – a point with implications for broader debates about nudging and autonomy.

How should we interact with people in echo chambers? Recently, some have argued that echo-chambered individuals are not entitled to civility. Civility is the virtue whereby we communicate respect for persons to manage our profound disagreements with them. But for civil exchanges to work, people must trust one another and their testimony. Therefore, some argue, we can be moderately uncivil toward those in echo chambers who are unlikely to trust our attempts to be civil. I argue against this position. I suggest the focus should be on trying to rebuild these social relationships in alignment with the Confucian value of harmony. In this tradition, we aim to manage social relationships with disagreeable others by turning inward and cultivating certain dispositions in ourselves: open-mindedness, amenability, tactfulness, and courage. I argue this helps us craft a concept of ‘reparative civility’: an ideal for managing our fraught social relations in a world of echo chambers.

This paper challenges the two aims of Michael Cholbi’s Rational Will View (RWV) which are to (1) offer an account of why paternalism is presumptively or pro tanto wrong and (2) relate the relative wrongness of paternalistic interventions to the rational powers that such interventions target (Sections 1 and 2). Some of a paternalizee’s choices harm their future selves in ways that would be wrong if they were done to others. I claim this challenges Cholbi’s second aim (2) because the cases his account deems particularly wrong turn out to be not to be as wrongful as expected (Section 3). When this second aim is challenged, it has knock-on effects on the capacity of the RWV to discern which cases of paternalism are generally more wrongful than others, which undermines Cholbi’s first aim (1). I consider responses on behalf of Cholbi’s view but conclude that the account is insufficient on its own to vindicate its two aims (Section 4). Finally, I draw on recent work that adopts ideas from the practical reasoning literature to help determine paternalism’s wrongness (Section 5). I argue this helps Cholbi’s view withstand my objections, but we must remain skeptical of why interceding with rational powers is particularly wrong.

Blackshaw and Hendricks have recently developed and defended the impairment argument against abortion, arguing that the immorality of giving a child fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) provides us with reason to believe that abortion is immoral. In this paper, we forward two criticisms of the impairment argument. First, we highlight that, as it currently stands, the argument is very weak and accomplishes very little. Second, we argue that Blackshaw and Hendricks are fundamentally mistaken about what makes giving a child FAS immoral. Once we acknowledge this, it is clear that our intuitions about giving a child FAS provide no support for the supposed immorality of abortion.

What makes paternalism wrong? I give an indirect answer to that question by challenging a recent trend in the literature that I call the exclusionary strategy. The exclusionary strategy aims to show how some feature of the paternalizee’s normative situation morally excludes acting for the paternalizee’s well-being. This moral exclusion consists either in ruling out the reasons for which a paternalizer may act or in changes to the right-making status of the reasons that (would) justify paternalistic intervention. I argue that both versions of the exclusionary strategy fail to explain the wrongness of paternalism and that they struggle to accommodate the mainstream view that paternalism is only pro tanto wrong. Their failure consists either in being implausibly strong expressions of antipaternalism or in struggling to spell out the scope of exclusion in an uncomplicated way. After discouraging this exclusionary strategy, I suggest we can capture what is appealing about it—as well as avoiding its pitfalls—by sketching a philosophical model in which we compare the weights of reasons for and against paternalistically interfering. To precisify this sketch, I introduce some conceptual tools from the literature on practical reasoning—in particular, the concept of modifiers—and suggest that these tools offer a better starting point for figuring out what makes paternalism (pro tanto) wrong.

In ‘My body, not my choice: against legalised abortion’, Hendricks offers an intriguing argument that suggests the state can coerce pregnant women into continuing to sustain their fetuses. His argument consists partly in countering Boonin’s defence of legalised abortion, followed by an argument from analogy. I argue in this response article that his argument from analogy fails and, correspondingly, it should still be a woman’s legal choice to have an abortion. My key point concerns the burdensomeness of pregnancy which is morally relevant to the question of whether the state can coerce people to use their bodies to help another person.

In Vayena’s article, ‘direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics on the scales of autonomy’, she claims that there may be a strong autonomy-based argument for permitting DTC genomic services. In this response, I point out how the diminishment of one’s genetic privacy can cause a relevant autonomy-related harm which must be balanced against the autonomy-related gains DTC services provide. By drawing on conceptual connections between privacy and the Razian conception of autonomy, I show that DTC genetic testing may decrease the range of valuable options individuals possess, which impacts the extent to which would-be consumers can exercise their autonomy.