Tim Aylsworth

In this paper, I defend a new way for consequentialists to reply to cases of collective harm. First, I explain why some of the popular proposals fail to generate compelling reasons in certain cases. I then suggest how consequentialism could respond to the issue by including modal robustness as a morally relevant consequence. Making a collectively caused harm more counterfactually robust is a bad consequence of an action, even when the individual action does not “make a difference.” Thus, we have an additional pro tanto reason to abstain from contributing to a collective harm.

In this chapter, we offer a review of the empirical findings that animate our concerns about the effects of mobile devices on individuals (the troublesome findings about the effects of mobile devices on collectives is reviewed in Chap. 7). We begin by clarifying what we mean by mobile devices, noting that these devices are not our only concern. We also explain why they are our primary concern. In short, we are especially concerned by mobile devices because their mobility, combined with their ability to track our behavior and provide real-time feedback to it, make them powerful behavior modification devices. After explaining how mobile devices can modify our behavior and why—given the structure of the attention economy—the interests of the developers of these technologies are not always in alignment with our own, we show that there is reason to think that mobile devices have detrimental effects on all eight facets of autonomy outlined in the preceding chapter.

Here we offer some concluding remarks and take stock of the arguments made throughout the book. We revisit the three examples from the first chapter, using the conclusions of previous chapters to explain what is going wrong in those scenarios. Each case demonstrates different ways that the attention economy threatens to undermine autonomy, and they underscore the importance of the moral obligations we defended in previous chapters. We conclude by offering some reasons to be optimistic about this situation and to hope that the situation will begin to improve once we start taking steps (both collectively and individually) to address these issues.

In the 1950s, duties to the self became unpopular in mainstream moral philosophy. We explain why some ethicists became skeptical of them, and we present Kant’s position on duties to oneself. Kantian moral philosophers have long maintained the existence of duties to oneself. After presenting this historical backdrop, we then provide our definition of digital minimalism; we understand this as a virtue—a robust disposition to do what is morally required. Given the conclusions of the last two chapters (viz. that autonomy matters morally and that mobile devices undermine autonomy), we argue that you have a moral duty to protect your autonomy from this threat. We define digital minimalism as the disposition to use mobile devices for a reasonable amount of time in light of your chosen ends. We conclude by showing how this duty fits in within the broader taxonomy of Kant’s ethical duties. In our view, the duty to be a digital minimalist is an imperfect duty because it is a duty to promote an obligatory end (one’s own perfection).

In this chapter, we introduce the duty to be an attention ecologist, one who promotes digital minimalism in others. After arguing for the existence of this duty on Kantian grounds (i.e., as following from a duty to respect humanity), we address an objection from Kant himself, who thought that we cannot be obliged to perfect others (which attention ecology seems to demand). We rebut the objection and explore one (of two) sides of attention ecology, i.e., the duty understood as a duty of virtue (in contrast to a duty of right, which we explore in Chap. 6). Here, “virtue” and “right” are Kantian terms of art, the core difference being that duties of virtue cannot be coercively enforced, whereas duties of right can. We show that attention ecology, understood as a duty of virtue, has implications for parents, teachers, friends, employers, and developers. The demands of the duty are conditioned by relationships that constitute these roles; the demands it makes of parents, for instance, are different from those it makes of employers because the relationship between parents and children is different from that of employers and workers. Much of the chapter is dedicated to exploring these differences.

Philosophers have defined autonomy in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we present a Kantian account of personal autonomy as the capacity to set and pursue your own ends (which Kant refers to as “humanity”). We explain how this involves two distinct components: capacity and authenticity. To have autonomous capacities, you must possess baseline abilities (to form intentions, evaluate commitments, etc.); be free of external constraints; be free of certain cognitive inhibitions, and you must have a sufficiently wide range of options. In order for your desires to count as authentic, they must be free of manipulation and coercion, consistent with other motivational states, free from alienation, and they must not be adaptive preferences. After developing our conception of autonomy, we explain and defend Kant’s view that we are morally obligated to respect humanity in ourselves and in others. We conclude by briefly explaining why other moral theories have similar commitments to the moral significance of autonomy.

In this chapter, we summarize the main arguments of the book. Our central thesis is that the moral weight of autonomy gives us reasons to restructure our relationship with mobile devices and the attention economy. In Chap. 2, we explain what autonomy is and why it matters morally. In Chap. 3, we present empirical evidence to justify our concern with mobile devices. We then turn, in Chap. 4, to Kantian moral arguments about the duty we owe to ourselves to protect and safeguard our capacities. We extend this argument in Chap. 5 by discussing duties we owe to others (especially parents to children, teachers to students, employers to employees, and developers to users). In Chap. 6, we explore the possibility of using government regulation to rein in the attention economy, and we justify these arguments by means of Kant’s political philosophy. Having exhausted our concerns with individual-level autonomy, we discuss group-level autonomy in Chap. 7, and we argue that the attention economy contributes to things like polarization which put a drag on democratic legitimacy. We conclude in Chap. 8 by taking stock of our arguments and offering some reasons for optimism.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the distinction between duties of virtue (which cannot be coercively enforced) and duties of right (which can). It explores attention ecology (the duty to promote digital minimalism in others), understood as a duty of right. This takes us into the territory of Kantian political philosophy. The core tenets of Kant’s political philosophy are introduced and applied to the question of regulating the attention economy through legislation. One core tenant is that state interference can be legitimately called upon to protect freedom. Understanding certain harms of the attention economy (e.g., damaging a child’s capacities for setting and pursuing her ends) as threats to freedom opens the door to revisiting some previously discussed cases (e.g., education, employment, and the development of applications) from the point of view of legislation. It is important to note that while regulating the attention economy via legislation is explored, we do not advocate this as the only means by which the attention economy should be checked. In this chapter and others, we emphasize the important role that culture and education can and should play in restructuring our relationship with our devices.

We argue that students have moral reasons to refrain from using chatbots such as ChatGPT to write certain papers. We begin by showing why many putative reasons to refrain from using chatbots fail to generate compelling arguments against their use in the construction of these papers. Many of these reasons rest on implausible principles, hollowed out conceptions of education, or impoverished accounts of human agency. They also overextend to cases where it is permissible to rely on a machine for something that once required human cognition. We then give our account: you have a moral obligation to respect your own humanity (i.e., your capacity to set and pursue your own ends), and the process of writing a humanities paper is important for the cultivation of your humanity. We conclude by considering objections and offering replies. In the end, we argue that the moral reasons students have to refrain from using chatbots depend crucially on instructors’ ability to make writing assignments worthwhile. This relies on instructors having the right kind of institutional support, which sheds light on implications that this duty has for administrators, legislators, and the general public.

There is wide consensus among bioethicists about the importance of autonomy when determining whether or not a patient has the right to refuse life-saving treatment (LST). In this context, autonomy has typically been understood in terms of the patient’s ability to make an informed decision. According to the traditional view, decision-making capacity (DMC) is seen as both necessary and sufficient for the right to refuse LST. Recently, this view has been challenged by those who think that considerations of authenticity and putative counterexamples should lead us to revise the traditional account. In this paper, we respond to these revisionist arguments, and we defend the traditional view according to which we have autonomy-based reasons to respect a patient’s decision to refuse LST if and only if she has DMC.

In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a flurry of books making “self-help” arguments about how we could live happier, more fulfilling lives if we were less addicted to our phones. But none of these authors see this issue as one involving a moral duty to protect our autonomy.

In this chapter, we turn our attention to the effects of the attention economy on our ability to act autonomously as a group. We begin by clarifying which sorts of groups we are concerned with, which are structured groups (groups sufficiently organized that it makes sense to attribute agency to the group itself). Drawing on recent work by Purves and Davis (2022), we describe the essential roles of trust (i.e., depending on groups to fulfill their commitments) and trustworthiness (i.e., the property of a group that makes trusting them fitting) in autonomous group action, with particular emphasis on democratic institutions (which we view as group agents) and democratic legitimacy (which depends on trust and trustworthiness). We then explain how engagement maximization promotes polarization, which is detrimental to trust and trustworthiness and, in turn, democratic legitimacy and democratic institutions. We close by considering what groups might do to protect themselves from the threat posed to them by the attention economy.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of freedom in Kant's critical philosophy, and there are few scholars whose expertise on this subject could rival Henry E. Allison's. In this magisterial commentary, Allison meticulously chronicles the development of Kant's theory of freedom from his earliest pre-critical works all the way through the Metaphysics of Morals. Great care is taken to explain how and why Kant's views changed over time, and Allison provides compelling, sympathetic interpretations at every turn. The first four chapters deal with Kant's pre-critical writings and his lectures on metaphysics and ethics from the 1760s. The general narrative here is likely to be a familiar one for the target audience...

The attention economy — the market where consumers’ attention is exchanged for goods and services — poses a variety of threats to individuals’ autonomy, which, at minimum, involves the ability to set and pursue ends for oneself. It has been argued that the threat wireless mobile devices pose to autonomy gives rise to a duty to oneself to be a digital minimalist, one whose interactions with digital technologies are intentional such that they do not conflict with their ends. In this paper, we argue that there is a corresponding duty to others to be an attention ecologist, one who promotes digital minimalism in others. Although the moral reasons for being an attention ecologist are similar to those that motivate the duty to oneself, the arguments diverge in important ways. We explore the application of this duty in various domains where we have special obligations to promote autonomy in virtue of the different roles we play in the lives of others, such as parents and teachers. We also discuss the consequences of our arguments for employers, software developers, and policy makers.

The harms associated with wireless mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) are well documented. They have been linked to anxiety, depression, diminished attention span, sleep disturbance, and decreased relationship satisfaction. Perhaps what is most worrying from a moral perspective, however, is the effect these devices can have on our autonomy. In this article, we argue that there is an obligation to foster and safeguard autonomy in ourselves, and we suggest that wireless mobile devices pose a serious threat to our capacity to fulfill this obligation. We defend the existence of an imperfect duty to be a ‘digital minimalist’. That is, we have a moral obligation to be intentional about how and to what extent we use these devices. The empirical findings already justify prudential reasons in favor of digital minimalism, but the moral duty is distinct from and independent of prudential considerations.

This paper offers some refinements to a particular objection to act consequentialism, the “causal impotence” objection. According to proponents of the objection, when we find circumstances in which severe, unnecessary harms result entirely from voluntary acts, it seems as if we should be able to indict at least one act among those acts, but act consequentialism appears to lack the resources to offer this indictment. Our aim is to show is that the most promising response on behalf of act consequentialism, the threshold argument, cannot offer a fully general prescription about what to do in cases of collective action.

Critics of persuasive advertising argue that it undermines the autonomy of consumers by manipulating their desires in morally problematic ways. My aim is this paper is to refine that argument by employing a conception of autonomy that is not at odds with certain forms of manipulation. I argue that the charge of manipulation is not sufficient for condemning persuasive advertising. On my view, manipulation of an agent’s desires through advertising is justifiable in cases where the agent accepts the process through which the desires were developed. I show how the standard manipulation objection proves too much as it would also condemn cases of that kind. I argue that this distinction is especially important when we consider the implications of “new media.” In addition to increasing vulnerability to manipulation, new media have considerable impacts on well-being. By siding with the traditional autonomy argument, we would be compelled to take an implausible stand against all forms of manipulation through advertising, but I suggest that only a proper subset of those cases are morally problematic. This conclusion opens up a space for persuasive advertising that is permissible while nevertheless condemning cases that violate consumers’ autonomy.

In this paper, I give an explanation and defense of Kant’s claim that we cannot comprehend how freedom is possible. I argue that this is a significant point that has been underappreciated in the secondary literature. My conclusion has a variety of implications both for Kant scholars and for those interested in Kantian ideas more generally. Most notably, if Kant is right that there are principled reasons why freedom is beyond our comprehension, then this would release his ethical views from an undesirable explanatory burden. It would be a boon for Kantians if they could ground their lofty claims about the unique, elevated status of rational agency without committing to an implausible view of libertarian freedom. I also suggest that there are certain debates concerning moral motivation and transcendental idealism that might have to change in response to Kant’s claims about the incomprehensibility of freedom.