Expanding Autonomy: Scaffolded, Embedded and Distributed

自主性--每个人都有权利和能力根据我们自己关于生活应该如何发展以及什么对我们有价值的个人概念来管理自己--是我们道德、政治和智力生活中的核心价值。它是我们政治的核心，也是我们对政府权力的正当限制的认识的核心。自由民主在很大程度上是正当的，因为它们声称，它们保护个人在他们认为合适的时候追求自己生活计划的权利。例如，这种民主政体应该在不同宗教之间以及在宗教和非宗教之间保持中立，让自主的成年人有能力和需要为自己做出重要选择。自治权受到法律的保护。例如，法律规定我们有权根据自己的价值观做出重要的医疗决定。普通人和专家都认为，在几乎所有的情况下，只有在某人自愿同意的情况下，才能证明治疗是正当的。自治通常被理解为保护个人自主决策的权利和能力。即使是最近的女权主义著作，强调我们的决策能力是如何得到社会支持的，仍然认为知识本质上是个人的财产，认为背景只是增强或限制了我们的决策能力。但根据最近在知识论方面的工作，这种个人主义的精神生活方式正变得越来越过时。过去20年来，有关知识和认知的前沿研究在很大程度上是反个人主义的；它表明，我们的思维和决策是如何深深地、不可或缺地建立在我们对新技术和他人证词的依赖之上的。我们越来越认识到，依赖他人和我们的环境可以使我们成为知识的人。这个项目以一种反映这些重要发展的方式重新思考自主性。特别是，它首次评估了自主性和我们的决策能力在多大程度上需要他人和我们决策环境的投入或支持，并询问我们是否需要修改我们的自主性概念，以反映我们对他人和我们决策环境的普遍依赖。除了完善或修改我们的自主性概念外，该项目还解决了知情同意和我们根据自己的价值观做出决策的能力等实际问题。一旦重新思考自治，它将评估这些核心价值观在多大程度上应该保持正常的核心地位。它还将提出一个问题，即如何才能最好地保护和促进自主性--以其新的、更少的个人主义伪装。它将以知情同意和在选择中表达我们的价值观作为案例研究，询问政策和程序如何才能最好地支持自主，并评估自主对合法使用轻推的限制，以促进个人更好地做出决策。

Autonomy - the right and capacity of each us to govern ourselves, in accordance with our own individual conception of how our lives should go and what is valuable to us - is a central value in our moral, political, and intellectual lives. It is central to our politics and to our sense of the rightful limits of government power. Liberal democracies are justified, in important part, on the basis of the claim that they protect the rights of individuals to pursue their own life plans as they judge fit. For example, such democracies are supposed to remain neutral between different religions and as well as between religion and no religion, leaving autonomous adults with the capacity and the need to make important choices for themselves. Autonomy is protected in law. For example, the law enshrines our right to make important medical decisions in light of our own values. Ordinary people and experts alike hold that in almost all cases, only if someone freely consents can a treatment be justified.Autonomy is normally understood as protecting the right and the capacity of individuals to make decisions on their own. Even recent feminist work, which emphasises how our capacities for decision-making are socially supported, continues to think of knowledge as essentially the possession of the individual and to think of the context as merely enabling or constraining our capacity to decide. But in the light of recent work in the theory of knowledge, this individualistic approach to our mental lives is becoming increasingly outdated. Cutting-edge work on knowledge and cognition over the past 20 years has been largely anti-individualistic; it shows how our thinking and decision-making is deeply and indispensably scaffolded by our reliance on new technologies and on the testimony of others. Increasingly, we are coming to recognise that depending on others and our environment can empower us as knowers.This project rethinks autonomy in a way that reflects these important developments. In particular, it assesses for the first time the extent to which autonomy and our capacity to make decisions requires input from or support by others and by the environment in which we decide, and asks whether we need to revise our notion of autonomy to reflect our pervasive dependence on others and on the context in which we decide.As well as refining or revising our conception of autonomy, the project addresses the practical questions of informed consent and our capacity to make decisions guided by our own values. It will assess the extent to which these central values should remain normatively central, once autonomy is rethought. It will also ask how autonomy, in its new and less individualistic guise, can best be protected and promoted. Taking informed consent and the expression of our values in choice as case studies, it will ask how policy and procedure can best support autonomy and assesses the constraints that autonomy places on the legitimate use of nudges to promote better decision-making by individuals.