Shen Pan

Humans have freedom, do other animals? This paper argues that they do. Specifically, it advances an account of a kind of freedom which I term animal freedom. Animal freedom is constituted by an agent’s pursuit of the things that matter to them. My account depends on two central considerations. The first is that many things matter to us independently of whether we endorse or consider their importance for our values or projects, because they reflect who we are. The second is that many things matter to other animals in just this way – that is, in a manner that reflects who they are. Since other animals can act in pursuit of the things that matter to them, they have animal freedom. But animal freedom is not restricted to the psychological lives of other animals, nor is it something which is easily contrasted with the way that we think of ourselves as free, such that we can say that ours is the freedom of persons while theirs is the freedom of animals. Instead, much of our own lives is also made up of instances of animal freedom, ones which we would regard as genuinely constituting or realizing our free agency. There is therefore considerable overlap in the free lives of human and other animals. Recognizing this fact stands to enrich our conception of ourselves as free agents, as well as our understanding of the psychological lives of other animals.

Each of us ought to decide what others can do to our bodies. This is so obvious it does not cry out for explanation; and philosophers have not given it much. What few philosophical explanations there are of our rights in our bodies tend to appeal to claims about identity—my body, so they say, is mine because it is me, or is part of something that is me. I argue that, given the kind and degree of metaphysical specificity that would be required to make it work, this “Identity-Based” view is prima facie inconsistent with plausible constraints against introducing controversial metaphysics into public reasoning. In the second half I consider and reject recent Kantian attempts to frame an Identity-Based view of our body rights without reference to fundamental metaphysics. Then, drawing on what still seems right in these Kantian proposals, I sketch a view of how public reason can construct persons as loci of body rights, on the analogy of how international public reason constructs its constituent “peoples” as the loci of territorial sovereignty. The result is an argument for a novel view of our rights in our bodies, a view that, among other things, provides materials to defend public reason liberalism against the charge that issues around embodiment make contentious metaphysics unavoidable in politics.

I argue against mnemic reliabilism, an influential view that successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process. Drawing on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience, I refute mnemic reliabilism by demonstrating that: (1) patients with memory impairments (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) can also successfully remember the past despite the unreliability of their corresponding memory processes; (2) some reliability-affecting factors (e.g., stress, divided attention, and insufficient encoding time) can render the memory processes of healthy individuals unreliable without preventing them from occasionally resulting in successful remembering. Potential responses available for mnemic reliabilism are also evaluated. I show that those responses are susceptible to a challenge akin to the generality problem for process reliabilism.