On Being Conscious as a Basic Liberty

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This article refers to:

The Conditions for Ethical Chemical Restraints

This article is referred to by:

Basic Liberties, Consent, and Chemical Restraints

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 We believe this is in line with ‘the embeddedness thesis’ Tsu (forthcoming) advocates in his forthcoming article in The Philosophical Quarterly, according to which, a feature of an action (intrusion upon consciousness in the current case) does not have a determinate moral status (as regards whether it is a violation of basic liberty or not) when it is abstracted away from contexts.

2 This is what we believe Crutchfield and Redinger should have said but somehow didn’t. In fact, our view, in contrast to the Crutchfield and Redinger’s own view, is actually more in line with Pettit’s (2008) notion of basic liberties (i.e. liberties that are required to ‘live the life of a free person’) which Crutchfield and Redinger themselves quoted approvingly. We oppose the Crutchfield and Redinger’s statement that ‘one can’t live freely if one is not conscious’ (7, emphasis added). For the notion of ‘freedom’ is a political one (e.g. the freedom of speech), according to Pettit (2008) and the political freedom does not vanish when one falls asleep.

3 But still the intrusion upon consciousness per se does not suffice to constitute a violation of basic liberty; it is its combination with the unavailability of informed consent that does.

4 The formulation of this principle is ours but is implicitly accepted by Crutchfield and Redinger.

Additional information

Funding

Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu’s relevant research was supported by MOST 109-2410-H194-107-MY3; NSTC 112-2410-H-194-063-MY3; Shunsuke Sugimoto’s was supported by JSPS 23K00036.