Expanding Autonomy: Scaffolded, Embedded and Distributed

自主——我们每个人按照自己对生活应该如何进行以及什么对我们有价值的个人概念来管理自己的权利和能力——是我们道德、政治和智力生活的核心价值。这是我们政治的核心，也是我们对政府权力合理限制的认识的核心。在很大程度上，自由民主之所以有道理，是基于这样一种主张：它们保护个人按照自己认为合适的方式追求自己人生计划的权利。例如，这样的民主国家应该在不同的宗教之间，以及在有宗教和无宗教之间保持中立，让自主的成年人有能力和需要为自己做出重要的选择。自治权受法律保护。例如，法律赋予我们根据自己的价值观做出重要医疗决定的权利。普通人和专家都认为，在几乎所有情况下，只有在某人自由同意的情况下，治疗才是合理的。自主权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作品，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，认为环境只是赋予或限制了我们的决策能力。但根据最近知识论的研究，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，关于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，我们对新技术和他人证词的依赖，是如何深刻而不可或缺地支撑着我们的思维和决策的。我们逐渐认识到，依赖他人和环境可以让我们成为知者。这个项目以一种反映这些重要发展的方式重新思考自治。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做出决定的环境的输入或支持，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做出决定的环境的普遍依赖。除了完善或修改我们对自主权的概念，该项目还解决了知情同意的实际问题，以及我们在自己价值观的指导下做出决定的能力。它将评估一旦重新考虑自治，这些核心价值应在多大程度上保持规范的核心地位。它还将提出这样的问题：在新的、不那么个人主义的伪装下，如何才能最好地保护和促进自治。以知情同意和我们在选择中的价值观表达为案例研究，它将询问政策和程序如何最好地支持自主权，并评估自主权对合法使用轻推以促进个人更好决策的限制。

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of recent work in the theory of knowledge, this individualistic approach to our mental lives is becoming increasingly outdated.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.