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ABSTRACT
Serene Khader and Rosa Terlazzo have each recently proposed theories of adaptive preferences (APs) which purport to both respect persons’ agency and provide an effective political tool. While Khader and Terlazzo thus share a similar goal, they take fundamentally different paths in its pursuit: Khader offers a perfectionist account of APs and Terlazzo an autonomy-based theory. In this paper, I argue first that if it is to adequately respect persons’ agency, a theory of APs should in some way include autonomy considerations. If it is to provide an effective political tool, however, our theory should not be entirely autonomy-based, but include a condition addressing a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing. The suggestion is thus that it is worth considering the possibility of a ‘mixed,’ rather than exclusively perfectionist or exclusively autonomy-based, theory of APs. I outline two such theories. The first, I argue, does quite well with respect to the political efficacy aim of AP theorizing, but has difficulty satisfying the respect for agency aim. The reverse is true of the second. I conclude by suggesting that respect for agency should in this context take priority over political efficacy and that we therefore should accept the latter of the two theories outlined.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 In these contexts, ‘preference’ is typically used to refer not only to pro-attitudes which involve a comparison between two objects (e.g. ‘I prefer A to B’) but also to non-comparative desires, values, and pro-attitudes more generally. I will do the same here.
2 See, for instance, Baber (Citation2007) and Narayan (Citation2002).
3 Or, as she puts it elsewhere, ‘An AP, on my view, is a preference (higher or lower-order) that is incompatible with an agent’s basic welfare and is causally related to the conditions of oppression under which it formed,’ where a preference is causally related to oppression if, among other possibilities, ‘the preference would disappear upon the agent’s increased exposure to better conditions or the (moral or nonmoral) facts’ (Khader Citation2012, 310). While there are subtle differences between these two statements of Khader’s account, they share the same central features: both include an assessment of a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing/welfare as well as a moral evaluation of the conditions in which it developed. Especially important for my purposes will be that both statements take the likelihood/certainty that a preference would change/disappear in more favorable conditions to render that preference non-adaptive. I will thus regard the two statements of the account as interchangeable, and shall thus do the same for ‘basic flourishing’ and ‘basic welfare’.
4 Although both Terlazzo and Khader refer to ‘better’ alternatives/options in the statements cited above, we shall see below that they each in fact require that the options in question are not merely superior to the agent’s current preference in some sense (but perhaps still awful), but genuinely valuable (in ways they go on to identify). Hence the reference to ‘valuable alternatives’ in my formulation of the MMC. While alike in this way, the versions of the MMC offered by Terlazzo and by Khader differ in several important respects. First, whereas Terlazzo deems non-adaptive only those preferences which have actually been maintained in the presence of valuable alternatives, Khader’s version includes a counterfactual element: she deems non-adaptive not only those preferences that have been maintained in the face of valuable alternatives, but also any that would be maintained were the agent exposed to such alternatives. Hence the ‘(or would be)’ qualifier in my formulation of the MMC. Second, whereas Terlazzo’s version applies only to preferences which have ‘survived a process of reflection in light of better alternatives’, what matters on Khader’s is simply whether a preference is or would be retained in the presence of valuable alternatives; it need not be subjected to reflection in the light of those alternatives. Hence the ‘(reflectively)’ qualifier. Finally, Terlazzo specifies that the significant sense in which preferences satisfying her version of the MMC are the agent’s own is that they are autonomous; Khader simply states that such preferences are ‘really’ the agent’s. This last point of divergence will be especially important for our purposes and is examined in detail below.
5 I will for this reason focus on conditions (d), (e), and (f) in what follows.
6 For an example of a substantive theory, see Oshana (Citation1998). As Terlazzo (Citation2016, 215) notes, although her theory of autonomy places no content requirement on the preference itself, and is thus ‘ultimately content-neutral’, that theory is, like Raz’s (Citation1986), indirectly substantive in that it does place a content requirement on the alternatives in the presence of which a preference was endorsed. It requires for the autonomy of a preference that there were genuinely valuable options available to its bearer, but not that she chose one of those options; the object of the preference itself may be entirely without value. I argue in Section 4 that this requirement is conceptually and morally problematic.
7 For an example of this approach, see Valdman (Citation2011).
8 As Buss (Citation2012, 653–654) explains,
on an attitude-based conception of autonomous agency … the agent herself need not do anything to bring it about that she has the attitudes with which she is ‘identified’. She need not engage in practical reasoning; nor need she weigh the considerations in favor of alternative attitudes.
9 Albeit one which is indirectly substantive – see note 6.
10 For further discussion and defense of this understanding of the relationship between autonomy and alternatives, as well as examples of how it might be fleshed out, see Raz (Citation1986) and Weimer (Citation2009).
11 Importantly, not all deliberation is autonomy-conferring on this approach. In particular, neither reflective contemplation of a preference taken in itself nor reflective consideration of how to implement a preference in a given case can plausibly be taken to render the preference in question autonomous. After all, an agent who was brainwashed to hold a particular preference may well be able to subject it to reflection of these sorts. The deliberation relevant to autonomy is instead deliberation regarding whether one should hold a given preference, which is possible only if one can seriously consider holding some alternative to that preference.
12 This is true even if the ‘choice’ in question does not involve conscious selection of one option over another. The various components of the deliberative capacity with which an agent is on this approach identified may play a meaningful role in determining a preference in the absence of any such selection. For instance, an agent might employ her alternative-identification and consequence-prediction/evaluation abilities in getting a sense of her options and then simply find herself drifting toward one of them.
13 This would remain the case even if our understanding of flourishing includes something like deliberative autonomy. Although she has not, to my knowledge, done so herself, we might on Khader’s behalf say that the ability to ‘choose’ preferences from amongst live options is, like endorsement, an objectively valuable functioning. Also like endorsement, however, this ability could not plausibly be taken to suffice for the flourishing-compatibility of a preference. It would thus remain possible that a preference which was in a meaningful sense chosen might nevertheless be incompatible with basic flourishing and thus inauthentic by the lights of a perfectionist understanding of authenticity.
14 Both Khader and Terlazzo could perhaps be interpreted as moving toward a theory of this general sort. As we have seen, Khader attempts to avoid the straightforwardly perfectionist conclusion that all preferences incompatible with basic flourishing are adaptive by attributing, in roughly the same manner as would a deliberative theory of autonomy, self-depriving preferences which are ‘chosen’ by the agent to her authentic self. Khader’s appeal to this seemingly autonomy-based claim could perhaps be seen as an implicit step toward a mixed theory of APs. I have argued, however, that this aspect of Khader’s theory is at odds with its perfectionist foundation and justifiable only by explicit appeal to autonomy considerations. It is also perhaps worth noting that while she has not, to my knowledge, abandoned her claim that APs should be understood along (exclusively) perfectionist lines, rather than as autonomy deficits, Khader (Citation2016) has recently argued that a deliberative form of autonomy, which she calls ‘thin relational autonomy’, is necessary for women’s empowerment. Conversely, Terlazzo’s claim that although the autonomy of a preference does not require that the preference itself have any specific content, it must be endorsed in the presence of alternatives that are genuinely valuable, could be seen as an attempt to move toward perfectionism while still grounding the theory in autonomy. As I have just argued, though, this is insufficient: if it is to be politically efficacious, an account of APs must directly address the flourishing-compatibility of the preference. Hence, if we interpret both theorists as taking steps toward a mixed theory of APs, my argument to this point would be that the step Khader takes in that direction cannot be justified on her perfectionist approach, that the step Terlazzo takes does not go far enough, and that we should instead explicitly and fully embrace a mixed approach to APs.
15 Although I will not attempt to do so here, in order to fully elaborate either mixed theory I outline we would, of course, need to specify both the account of basic flourishing/well-being to which it appeals and the understanding of ‘recognized’ and ‘live’ options at work in the conception of autonomy it employs. For one highly influential account of basic well-being, see Nussbaum (Citation2001). Weimer (Citation2009) both offers a somewhat more detailed account of ‘live’ options than that provided by Terlazzo and attempts to answer the question of when such options are ‘recognized’ (or as I put there, ‘reflectively available’), which Terlazzo leaves unaddressed.
16 Mixed Theory 1 is similar to Khader’s account in that both address a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing as well as the conditions in which it developed. The two theories would likely yield similar implications as well, since Khader’s ‘conditions conducive to basic flourishing’ would presumably coincide to a significant extent with conditions that enable people to recognize and reflectively consider live, valuable options. Presumably, valuable options will be compatible with basic flourishing and conditions are conducive to such flourishing only if the valuable options they offer are such that people can recognize and realistically imagine adopting them. However, whereas the normative significance of valuable options is not clear on Khader’s account, Mixed Theory 1 explains their significance by reference to the self-determination such options enable. As I have argued, this enables that theory to better justify the MMC and the respect for agency that claim provides.
17 I assume here that autonomy is not a binary property, but admits of degrees. As explained below, Terlazzo shares that assumption.
18 This example elaborates upon one offered by Terlazzo (Citation2016, 206).
19 As explained in note 16, these two accounts would likely yield similar implications as to which preferences deserve social scrutiny.
20 For a discussion of this specific danger of AP theorizing see Jaggar (Citation2006).
21 The ‘compatibility with basic flourishing’ condition included in Mixed Theory 2 as well as Mixed Theory 1 does, of course, require appeal to an objective theory of value with which persons whose preferences are deemed adaptive may disagree. The clinically depressed man, for example, might judge his preference not to seek help to be compatible with flourishing. Importantly, however, that condition comes into play only if a preference is non-autonomous, which on Mixed Theory 2 means that the individual had no recognized, live alternatives to the preference. If the clinically depressed man had options he deemed worthy of serious reflection, then his preference would be authentically his own and thus an inappropriate object of social scrutiny even if we deem not only the preference itself but those alternatives to be without value. In this way, what we think of the value of an individual’s preferences and options is on Mixed Theory 2 irrelevant if he finds them to be worth thinking about.