The autonomous life: a pure social view

In this paper I propose and develop a social account of global autonomy. On this view, a person is autonomous simply to the extent to which it is difficult for others to subject her to their wills. I argue that many properties commonly thought necessary for autonomy are in fact properties that tend to increase an agent’s immunity to such interpersonal subjection, and that the proposed account is therefore capable of providing theoretical unity to many of the otherwise heterogeneous requirements of autonomy familiar from recent discussions. Specifically, I discuss three such requirements: (i) possession of legally protected status, (ii) a sense of one’s own self- worth, and (iii) a capacity for critical reflection. I argue that the proposed account is not only theoretically satisfying but also yields a rich and attractive conception of autonomy

Is Morality Relative?

This is a short (c. 4000 words) teaching piece aimed at first year undergraduates, on the topic of moral relativism

Practical reason and the unity of agency: critical notice of Christine M. Korsgaard's 'Self-Constitution'

In her book Self-Constitution, Christine Korsgaard unfolds an impressive chain of reasoning intended to tie the normativity of the moral law at one end to the very idea of action at the other. In this paper I voice concerns regarding two key links in this chain. The first relates to her so-called 'argument against particularistic willing', an argument designed to derive the authority of the categorical imperative from the very idea of reflective action, by showing that one truly qualifies as an agent only insofar as one acts on a 'principle of choice'. The second concerns her attempted explanation of how bad action can be possible if principles of practical reason are, as she thinks they are, constitutive principles of action. I suggest that her attempt to deal with this problem by appeal to the idea that practical principles can be more or less agentially unifying is ultimately hindered by her employment of an insufficiently explicated notion of agential unity

Fischer-style compatibilism

John Martin Fischer’s new collection of essays, Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value, constitutes a trenchant defence of his well-known compatibilist approach to moral responsibility (Fischer 1994, 2006; Fischer and Ravizza 1998).1 Predominantly a collection of detailed responses to recent critics, this is not a book for beginners. It is, however, essential reading for specialists, as well as useful reading for non-specialists seeking a snapshot of the current state of the debate. Fischer’s papers are dense with argument and alive with original and productive ideas. As is customary, however, I here focus only on lines of thought that failed to convince. In particular, I discuss two arguments: one aimed at vindicating Frankfurt-style counterexamples in deterministic contexts and one aimed at undermining the ‘source’ incompatibilist’s conception of moral responsibility

Freedom and unpredictability

In A Metaphysics for Freedom (2012), Helen Steward proposes and defends a novel version of the libertarian account of free action. Amongst several objections that she considers to her view, one that looms particularly large is the Challenge from Chance: ‘the most powerful, widely-promulgated and important line of anti-libertarian reasoning’ (2012: 125). This paper begins by arguing that Steward’s response to the Challenge (or, at least, to one strand of it) is not fully convincing. It then goes on to explore a further possible libertarian line of defence against the Challenge, arguing that it, too, ultimately fails. The conclusion is that the Challenge remains an important source of dialectical advantage for the compatibilist

Anomaly Detection and Removal Using Non-Stationary Gaussian Processes

This paper proposes a novel Gaussian process approach to fault removal in time-series data. Fault removal does not delete the faulty signal data but, instead, massages the fault from the data. We assume that only one fault occurs at any one time and model the signal by two separate non-parametric Gaussian process models for both the physical phenomenon and the fault. In order to facilitate fault removal we introduce the Markov Region Link kernel for handling non-stationary Gaussian processes. This kernel is piece-wise stationary but guarantees that functions generated by it and their derivatives (when required) are everywhere continuous. We apply this kernel to the removal of drift and bias errors in faulty sensor data and also to the recovery of EOG artifact corrupted EEG signals.Comment: 9 pages, 14 figure

Brief for Council of Islamic Schools in North America, Partnership for Inner-City Education, and Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners

DAVID AND AMY CARSON, as Parents and next Friends of O.C., and TROY AND ANGELA NELSON, as Parents and next Friends of A.N. and R.N., Petitioners v. A. PENDER MAKIN, in Her Official Capacity as Commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, Respondent. On Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit BRIEF FOR COUNCIL OF ISLAMIC SCHOOLS IN NORTH AMERICA, PARTNERSHIP FOR INNER-CITY EDUCATION, AND UNION OF ORTHODOX JEWISH CONGREGATIONS OF AMERICA AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS No. 20-1088 March 11, 2021 Amici curiae operate, represent, and support elementary and secondary schools in three faith traditions: Catholic (Partnership for Inner-City Education), Islamic (Council of Islamic Schools in North America), and Jewish (Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America). Students attending many of the schools that are operated or supported by amici participate in publicly-funded private-school-choice programs. Central to these schools’ religious and educational missions is the integration of faith throughout all aspects of their educational programs, making the status/use distinction employed by the court below both unworkable and discriminatory

Autonomy as social independence: reply to Weimer

I defend my pure social account of global autonomy from Steven Weimer’s recent criticisms. In particular, I argue that it does not implicitly rely upon the very kind of nonsocial conception of autonomy that it hopes to replace

Freedom and indoctrination

It has been alleged that compatibilists are committed to the view that agents act freely and responsibly even when subject to certain forms of radical manipulation. In this paper I identify and elucidate a form of compatibilist freedom, social autonomy, that is essential to understanding what is wrong with ordinary indoctrination and argue that it also holds the key to understanding what goes wrong in more fanciful manipulation cases