Moral Autonomy Quotes

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

Bauman argues that most people “slip” into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that “faulty personalities” are the cause of human cruelty. For him the exception—the real “sleeper”—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.

We are against ignorance. We feel that you have to educate yourself, no matter what the situation is. People who refuse to educate themselves - people who refuse to find out what something is about, that they're frightened of - find comfort in being ignorant.” --Zeena Schreck Interview for KJTV-1990

Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most leftwing segment. 28. (fr) The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.

The Golden Rule is intolerable; if millions did to others whatever they wished others to do to them, few would be safe from molestation. The Golden Rule shows anything but moral genius, and the claim by which it is followed in the Sermon on the Mount -- 'this is the Law and the Prophets' -- makes little sense.

However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a world that is of our making.

Were not the autonomy of the individual the secret longing of many people it would scarcely be able to survive the collective suppression either morally or spiritually.

Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.

If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and the assertion of their self-government is one of the few unarguable benefits of regime change in Iraq. It is not a position from which any moral retreat would be allowable.

What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant— which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer." Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will [ This conception of "freedom of the will" ( alias, autonomy) does not involve any belief in what Nietzsche called "the superstition of free will" in section 345 ( alias, the exemption of human actions from an otherwise universal determinism).] that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

Here then is the link between freedom as autonomy and Kant's idea of morality. To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end; it is to choose the end itself, for its own sake - a choice that human beings can make and billiard balls cannot.

However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political. Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation?

Most people today also believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms. American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like - provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors - unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or 'egalitarian' people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid - what contemporary European observers often referred to as 'communism' - was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.

We must recognize the fact that philosophy at the present time is entirely at an impasse concerning the problem of the origin of values. This theoretical failure is reflected in the practical antinomy between submission and rebellion that infects the daily concerns of education, politics, and ethics. If no decision can be made at this level, we must retrace our steps, extricate ourselves from the impasse, and try to gain access, by means of a nonethical approach, to the problem of autonomy and obedience.

Veganism is instead a social justice issue that recognises that non-human animals deserve autonomy, moral consideration and the recognition that their lives are far more valuable than the reasons we use to justify exploiting them.

I've always stressed the value of autonomy for intellectual and moral development. Autonomy provides us with a sphere of discretion which we all require.

There will be rebels. They will live in the shadows. They will be the renegade painters, sculptors, poets, writers, journalists, musicians, actors, dancers, organizers, activists, mystics, intellectuals and other outcasts who are willing to accept personal sacrifice. They will not surrender their integrity, creativity, independence and finally their souls. They will speak the truth. The state will have little tolerance of them. They will be poor. The wider society will be conditioned by mass propaganda to write them off as parasites or traitors. They will keep alive what is left of dignity and freedom. Perhaps one day they will rise up and triumph. But one does not live in poverty and on the margins of society because of the certainty of success. One lives like that because to collaborate with radical evil is to betray all that is good and beautiful. It is to become a captive. It is to give up the moral autonomy that makes us human. The rebels will be our hope.

Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces. That raises the sinister and seemingly paradoxical possibility that radical individualism is the handmaiden of collectivist tyranny. This individualism, it is quite apparent in our time, attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral behavior in its members. Private association are routinely denied the autonomy to define their membership for themselves. The upshot is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly dictated or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less of a member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the state. Thus does radical individualism prepare the way for its opposite.

Despite the many occasions when its characters feel frustrated before the weight of circumstances, and despite blaming their feeling of impotence on daiva, 'fate', moral autonomy shines through in the epic. Because they have some freedom to choose they can be praised when they follow dharma or blamed when they follow adharma. At the moment of making a decision they become conscious of their freedom, and it is this perception of autonomy that gives them the ability to lead authentic moral lives.

Living under the tremendous illusion that personal freedoms and freedom of speech are devoid of moral assumptions and responsibilities, we have bankrupted ourselves, so that honor, truth, and morality have been sacrificed at the altar of autonomy and self-worship.

David’s experience of unmitigated blessing from the hand of God might have lulled David into thinking that he was not accountable and that God would continue to bless him no matter what David did or did not do (what Walter Brueggemann describes as “moral autonomy”).

It is my personal belief that the abhorrence of abortion expressed by the men who place themselves at the barricades in front of abortion clinics is actually a misplaced horror at women’s sexual autonomy. It stands to reason: women’s sexual independence is the thing that men have always wanted to control. But for the women in the abortion clinic waiting room, the sex itself is history and totally beside the point. They are here to pursue their lives. Every

It may seem somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church finds itself advocating the same position against abortion as its severest Christian critics, the Protestant fundamentalists. In fact, it is no more surprising than finding the so-called pro-life movement keeping company with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, all of whom at one time or another banned abortions. What they have in common is their belief, rooted in misogyny, that the woman's right to choose - a fundamental aspect of her autonomy - must be crushed in order to achieve what they have deemed a 'higher' religious, moral or social goal.

A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment. "When people start to lose a sense of meaning and get disconnected, that's where disease comes from, that's where breakdown in our health — mental, physical, social health — occurs," the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry told me. If a gene or virus were found that caused the same impacts on the population's well-being as disconnection does, news of it would bellow from front-page headlines. Because it transpires on so many levels and so pervasively, we almost take it for granted; it is the water we swim in. We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy. Among psychologists there is a wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of. These have been variously listed as: - belonging, relatedness, or connectedness; - autonomy: a sense of control in one's life; - mastery or competence; - genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others; - trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life; - purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature. "The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature." So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx in 1844. None of this tells you anything you don't already know or intuit. You can check your own experience: What's it like when each of the above needs is met? What happens in your mind and body when it's lacking, denied, or withdrawn?

the doctrine of morals is an autonomy of practical reason, while the doctrine of virtue is at the same time an autocracy of practical reason.

The more you learn, the more you understand how little you truly know.

For now we see that when we conceive ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it, and recognise the autonomy of the will with its consequence, morality; whereas, if we conceive ourselves as under obligation we consider ourselves as belonging to the world of sense, and at the same time to the world of understanding.

Sexual morality, according to the Catholic Church, is all about denial of male restlessness and control of female agency. There is simply no place in this schema for a woman's autonomy.

The recasting of the Origin Myth as a story about the perils of disobedience precipitated a kind of decoupling of scripture from religious experience: when religious authorities began to insist on the literal truth of scripture, they were effectively promoting a kind of secular rationalism that states that one does not need to have a religious experience of any kind to live a moral life: all one has to do is declare one’s faith in scripture, in the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity and such, and accept the authority of the Holy Catholic Church as God’s representative on Earth.

Here’s why an allowance is good for kids: Having a little of their own money, and deciding how to save or spend it, offers a measure of autonomy and teaches them to be responsible with cash. Here’s why household chores are good for kids: Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that family members need to help each other. Here’s why combining allowances with chores is not good for kids. By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into an “if-then” reward. This sends kids a clear (and clearly wrongheaded) message: In the absence of a payment, no self-respecting child would willingly set the table, empty the garbage, or make her own bed. It converts a moral and familial obligation into just another commercial transaction—and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is in exchange for payment.

A will whose maxims necessarily coincide with the laws of autonomy is a holy will, good absolutely. The dependence of a will not absolutely good on the principle of autonomy (moral necessitation) is obligation. This, then, cannot be applied to a holy being. The objective necessity of actions from obligation is called duty. From what has just been said, it is easy to see how it happens that, although the conception of duty implies subjection to the law, we yet ascribe a certain dignity and sublimity to the person who fulfills all his duties. There is not, indeed, any sublimity in him, so far as he is subject to the moral law; but inasmuch as in regard to that very law he is likewise a legislator, and on that account alone subject to it, he has sublimity. We have also shown above that neither fear nor inclination, but simply respect for the law, is the spring which can give actions a moral worth.

Human beings possess the gift of personal freedom and liberty of the mind. We each possess the sovereignty over the body and mind to define ourselves and embrace the values that we wish to exemplify. Personal autonomy enables humans to take independent action and use reason to establish moral values. We are part of nature. Consciousness, human cognition, and awareness of our own mortality allow us to script an independent survival reality and not merely react to environmental forces.

We all say that this is the century of the common man, that he is the lord of the earth, the air and the water, and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of the nations. This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion only and is counterbalanced by a reality which is very different. In this reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for him; he is intimidated and endangered by the might of the war technique which is supposed to safeguard his physical existence; his spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of his world, is threatened with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half it is abolished altogether. Finally, to add comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp his dignity as worthless and turn his autonomy into an absurdity. All his achievements and possessions do not make him bigger; on the contrary, they diminish him, as the fate of the factory worker under the rule of a ‘just’ distribution of goods clearly demonstrates.

Lovers of freedom are, of course, also by and large lovers of tolerance and permissiveness. Being tolerant and permissive, especially toward others, but even at times toward oneself, are virtues. But as virtues, tolerance and permissiveness always have limits -- there is always the intolerable and the impermissible. Unlimited tolerance and permissiveness are not virtues; in the end, they are even enemies of freedom. Freedom, therefore, is not wholly opposed to coercion. Freedom even consists, in part, in certain kinds of coercion. Moral autonomy consists in rational self-coercion, civil freedom in rightful external social (state) coercion.

I’ve written this book to explore and illuminate the lives, values, and experiences of just such people, and to offer a glimpse at how we raise our kids with love, optimism, and a predilection for independence of thought, how we foster a practical, this-worldly morality based on empathy, how we employ self-reliance in the face of life’s difficulties, how we handle and accept death as best we can, how and why we do or do not engage in a plethora of rituals and traditions, how we create various forms of community while still maintaining our proclivity for autonomy, and what it means for us to experience awe in the midst of this world, this time, this life.

It must be freely admitted that there is a sort of circle here from which it seems impossible to escape. In the order of efficient causes we assume ourselves free, in order that in the order of ends we may conceive ourselves as subject to these laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of will; for freedom and self-legislation of will are both autonomy...

My main point is to show how so-called health values of therapy, hormonal treatment, and surgery have replaced ethical values of choice, freedom, and autonomy; how these same “health” values have diffused critical awareness about the social context in which the problem of transsexualism arises; how more and more moral problems have been reclassified as technical problems

This change of perspective makes it apparent that the ‘Pro Life’ or ‘Right to Life’ movement is misnamed. Those who protest against abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have concern for ‘life’ as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased concern for the lives of members of our own species. On any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy – whereas if we make the comparison with an embryo, or a fetus of less than three months, a fish shows much more awareness.

A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me—if I needed convincing—that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into “style,” has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world.

Many people think self-critical thoughts are the voice of their conscience, but that’s not true. Legitimate conscience guides you; it doesn’t make sweeping indictments of how good or bad you are. A healthy conscience supports moral growth by leading you to make corrections or offer amends. Harsh self-judgment and self-blame are mockeries of self-guidance, echoing the rigid thinking of EIPs in your childhood. Your conscience’s proper role is as guide, not attacker.

A system of justice does not need to pursue retribution. If the purpose of drug sentencing is to prevent harm, all we need to do is decide what to do with people who pose a genuine risk to society or cause tangible harm. There are perfectly rational ways of doing this; in fact, most societies already pursue such policies with respect to alcohol: we leave people free to drink and get inebriated, but set limits on where and when. In general, we prosecute drunk drivers, not inebriated pedestrians. In this sense, the justice system is in many respects a battleground between moral ideas and evidence concerning how to most effectively promote both individual and societal interests, liberty, health, happiness and wellbeing. Severely compromising this system, insofar as it serves to further these ideals, is our vacillation or obsession with moral responsibility, which is, in the broadest sense, an attempt to isolate the subjective element of human choice, an exercise that all too readily deteriorates into blaming and scapegoating without providing effective solutions to the actual problem. The problem with the question of moral responsibility is that it is inherently subjective and involves conjecture about an individuals’ state of mind, awareness and ability to act that can rarely if ever be proved. Thus it involves precisely the same type of conjecture that characterizes superstitious notions of possession and the influence of the devil and provides no effective means of managing conduct: the individual convicted for an offence or crime considered morally wrong is convicted based on a series of hypotheses and probabilities and not necessarily because he or she is actually morally wrong. The fairness and effectiveness of a system of justice based on such hypotheses is highly questionable particularly as a basis for preventing or reducing drug use related harm. For example, with respect to drugs, the system quite obviously fails as a deterrent and the system is not organised to ‘reform’ the offender much less to ensure that he or she has ‘learned a lesson’; moreover, the offender does not get an opportunity to make amends or even have a conversation with the alleged victim. In the case of retributive justice, the justice system is effectively mopping up after the fact. In other words, as far as deterrence is concerned, the entire exercise of justice becomes an exercise based on faith, rather than one based on evidence.

It is all those moral deviations that constitute the developmental process of society and its relations of recognition. In every historical epoch, individual, particular anticipations of expanded recognition relations accumulate into a system of normative demands, and this, consequently, forces societal development as a whole to adapt to the process of progressive individuation. The process of development goes in the direction of ever-greater liberation of individuality, increasing personal autonomy.

We must recognize the fact that philosophy at the present time is entirely at an impasse concerning the problem of the origin of values. This theoretical failure is reflected in the practical antinomy between submission and rebellion that infects the daily concerns of education, politics, and ethics. If no decision can be mad at this level, we must retrace our steps, extricate ourselves from the impasse, and try to gain access, by means of a nonethical approach, to the problem of autonomy and obedience.

The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you?

In judging the importance of moral concerns, recall, social liberals place little weight on In-group Loyalty and Purity/Sanctity (which Fiske lumps under Communal Sharing), and they place little weight on Authority/Respect. Instead they invest all their moral concern in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five.197 The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights.

In the days of slavery, the moral reasoning went something like this: Black slaves are not fully human but are the powerless, voiceless property of powerful slave owners to dispose of as they choose. Call it “property justice,” if you will. The moral reasoning for abortion is identical. In “reproductive justice,” the unborn are not fully human but rather are the powerless, voiceless property of mothers. According to the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, women have the right to exercise their “personal bodily autonomy” by disposing of their unborn as they see fit.

Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this “knowledge” forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The “tree” of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil “are in a combined state,” where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the “tree” is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition “to eat” means “to assimilate.” To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative “combines” good and evil. Adam’s transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly “that of autonomy,” accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be “the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law.

in the field of ethics, of moral knowledge, it was approached by Kant with his principle of autonomy. This principle expresses his realization that we must not accept the command of an authority, however exalted, as the basis of ethics. For whenever we are faced with a command by an authority, it is for us to judge, critically, whether it is moral or immoral to obey. The authority may have power to enforce its commands, and we may be powerless to resist. But if we have the physical power of choice, then the ultimate responsibility remains with us. It is our own critical decision whether to obey a command; whether to submit to an authority.

Government surveillance, with its invasive reach into the private lives of citizens, is an egregious violation of the principles that underpin a free and just society. The emotional toll is staggering, as the constant awareness of being monitored erodes the sense of autonomy and security essential for individual well-being. Trust, a cornerstone of any healthy democracy, is shattered, breeding an environment of suspicion and fear. The historical resonance of unlawful surveillance, from oppressive regimes to modern controversies, serves as a stark reminder of the perilous consequences when the state oversteps its bounds. The unlawfulness of such surveillance is not just a legal matter but a moral imperative to safeguard the sanctity of private lives and preserve the emotional health of a free society.

Les employés, enrégimentés toute leur vie, happés par le travail au sortir de l'école et mis entre parenthèses par leur famille à l'âge préscolaire puis à celui de l'hospice, sont accoutumés à la hiérarchie et psychologiquement réduits en esclavage. Leur aptitude à l'autonomie est si atrophiée que leur peur de la liberté est la moins irrationnelle de leurs nombreuses phobies. L'art de l'obéissance, qu'ils pratiquent avec tant de zèle au travail, ils le transmettent dans les familles qu'ils fondent, reproduisant ainsi le système en toutes façons et propageant sous toutes ses formes le conformisme culturel, politique et moral. Dès lors qu'on a vidé, par le travail, les être humains de toute vitalité, ils se soumettent volontiers et en tout à la hiérarchie et aux décisions des experts. Ils ont pris le pli.

In an effort to justify the prohibition of 186 species of mushroom, including the ‘offending’ psilocybin containing mushrooms sold to the public through smart shops, Dutch Minister of Health, Dr. Ab Klink, refers to the high instance of anxiety and ‘even paranoia’ experienced by those who use them. He makes no mention of the very low incidence of harm (social or otherwise) involving fresh psilocybin containing mushrooms, or the disproportionate number of alcohol and tobacco related deaths, injuries and social disruptions. We are left with an impression that the Minister believes the state has a duty to banish fear itself. This exemplifies the degree to which scientific and medical rationales may become confused with moral and ideological commitments that undermine the ‘wall of separation between Church and State,’ a fundamental tenet of modern democracy.

We saw in the discussion of the law of small numbers that a message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability. The gist of the message is the story, which is based on whatever information is available, even if the quantity of the information is slight and its quality is poor: WYSIATI. When you read a story about the heroic rescue of a wounded mountain climber, its effect on your associative memory is much the same if it is a news report or the synopsis of a film. Anchoring results from this associative activation. Whether the story is true, or believable, matters little, if at all. The powerful effect of random anchors is an extreme case of this phenomenon, because a random anchor obviously provides no information at all. Earlier I discussed the bewildering variety of priming effects, in which your thoughts and behavior may be influenced by stimuli to which you pay no attention at all, and even by stimuli of which you are completely unaware. The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring effects are threatening in a similar way. You are always aware of the anchor and even pay attention to it, but you do not know how it guides and constrains your thinking, because you cannot imagine how you would have thought if the anchor had been different (or absent). However, you should assume that any number that is on the table has had an anchoring effect on you, and if the stakes are high you should mobilize yourself (your System 2) to combat the effect.

Natives” of course are always immoral, but racial renegades and drop-outs must be downright polymorphous-perverse. The Buccaneers were buggers, the Maroons and Mountain Men were miscegenists, the “Jukes and Kallikaks” indulged in fornication and incest (leading to mutations such as polydactyly), the children ran around naked and masturbated openly, etc., etc. Reverting to a “state of Nature” paradoxically seems to allow for the practice of every “unnatural” act; or so it would appear if we believe the Puritans and Eugenicists. And since many people in repressed moralistic racist societies secretly desire exactly these licentious acts, they project them outwards onto the marginalized, and thereby convince themselves that they themselves remain civilized and pure. And in fact some marginalized communities do really reject consensus morality — the pirates certainly did! — and no doubt actually act out some of civilization’s repressed desires. (Wouldn’t you?) Becoming “wild” is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness.

Just as, in the case of love, children acquire, via the continuous experience of 'maternal' care, the basic self-confidence to assert their needs in an unforced manner, adult subjects acquire, via the experience of legal recognition, the possibility of seeing their actions as the universally respected expression of their own autonomy. The idea that self-respect is for legal relations what basic self-confidence was for the love relationship is already suggested by the conceptual appropriateness of viewing rights as depersonalized symbols of social respect in just the way that love can be conceived as the affectional expression of care retained over distance. [...] What is required are conditions in which individual rights are no longer granted disparately to members of social status groups but are granted equally to all people as free beings; only then will the individual legal person be able to see in them an objectivated point of reference for the idea that he or she is recognized for having the capacity for autonomously forming judgments.

The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is thus anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon's formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions - such as the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed - that unite the church across time and around the globe are not 'live' in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.

This about it for a moment. It is truly very odd. We apparently believe that we own our own bodies as possessions and should be allowed to do with them more or less anything we choose, from euthanasia to a boob job, but we do not want to be on our own with these precise possessions. We live in a society which sees high self-esteem as a proof of well-being, but we do not want to be intimate with this admirable and desirable person. We see moral and social conventions as inhibitions on our personal freedoms, and yet we are frightened of anyone who goes away from the crowd and develops 'eccentric' habits. We believe that everyone has a singular personal 'voice' and is, moreover, unquestionably creative, but we treat with dark suspicion (at best) anyone who uses one of the most clearly established methods of developing that creativity - solitude. We think we are unique, special and deserving of happiness, but we are terrified of being alone. We declare that personal freedom and autonomy is both a right and good, but we think anyone who exercises that freedom autonomously is 'sad, mad or bad'. Or all three at once.

The point is, you must show them how to live and not just teach them theory while contradicting yourself in practice, because cynicism, hypocrisy and insincerity are adult character traits that children have no way of appreciating. Children learn by imitating our behavior, and if it contradicts our thinking then at best they learn to simply ignore what we say and at worst become troubled by it. Suppose you teach them about the environmental devastation they will witness during their lives, and explain to them that it is being caused by burning fossil fuels, and that during their lives fossil fuels will disappear altogether with nothing to replace them … while continuing to burn hundreds of gallons of heating oil to heat an oversized house, driving all over creation in an oversized vehicle, jetting off to the tropics on brief winter holidays and going on shopping sprees to buy on a whim things you don’t need. Then what you would be teaching them is that you can’t be trusted. And this doesn’t help them; instead, it damages their spirit. It is better to have an ignorant fool for a parent than a well-informed hypocrite because being a fool is not a moral failing. Fools deserve pity and mercy; hypocrites—neither.

The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies. You find it in the writings of utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer11 (who value justice and rights only to the extent that they increase human welfare), and you find it in the writings of deontologists such as Kant and Kohlberg (who prize justice and rights even in cases where doing so may reduce overall welfare). But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends. The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.13

In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo, citing decades of research, details all of the ways that ordinary, average individuals—whether they be soldiers in Guatemala, doctors in Nazi Germany, Hutus in Rwanda—can be stripped of their values, their morality, their souls. After elaborating on the variables that contribute to this process—isolation, drug use, denying people identities—he declares that the most important variable, far and away more important than the others, is the fear of being excluded from the in-group. Manipulating this fear, he asserts, is the most effective way people are transformed from ordinary human beings into human beings capable of evil. We tend to associate the desire for acceptance by the in-group with high school, but according to Zimbardo, this need does not stop at adolescence but continues through adulthood. He cites people’s willingness to suffer painful and or humiliating initiation rites in return for acceptance in fraternities, cults, social clubs, or the military. When the desire to be included is coupled with the terror of being excluded, Zimbardo writes that it can cripple initiative, negate personal autonomy, and lead people to do virtually anything to avoid rejection. “Authorities can command total obedience not through punishment or rewards but by means of the double-edged weapon: the lure of acceptance coupled with the threat of rejection.

Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled by sustained lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption--even murder and genocide--generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie. Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship. By lying, we deny others our view of the world. And our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they *can* make--in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to. By lying to one person, we potentially spread falsehoods to many others--even to whole societies. We also force upon ourselves subsequent choices--to maintain the deception or not--than can complicate our lives. In this way, every lie haunts our future. We can't tell when or how it might collide with reality, requiring further maintenance. The truth never needs to be tended like this. It can simply be reiterated. The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle-blowers, even when they are telling the truth. Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.

In the story of Wagner and Wagnerism, we see both the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled. It is the triumph of art over reality and the triumph of reality over art; it is a tragedy of flaws set so deep that after two centuries they still infuriate us as if the man were in the room. To blame Wagner for the horrors committed in his wake is an inadequate response to historical complexity: it lets the rest of civilization off the hook. At the same time, to exonerate him is to ignore his insidious ramifications. It is no longer possible to idealize Wagner: the ugliness of his racism means that posterity's picture of him will always be cracked down the middle. In the end, the lack of a tidy moral resolution should make us more honest about the role that art plays in the world. In Wagner's vicinity, the fantasy of artistic autonomy falls to pieces and the cult of genius comes undone. Amid the wreckage, the artist is liberated from the mystification of "great art”. He becomes something more unstable, fragile, and mutable. Incomplete in himself, he requires the most active and critical kind of listening. So it goes with all art that endures: it is never a matter of beauty proving eternal. When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.

On the other hand, the moral law, although it gives no such prospect, does provide a fact absolutely inexplicable from any data of the world of sense or from the whole compass of the theoretical use of reason, and this fact points to a pure intelligible world―indeed, it defines it positively and enable us to know something of it, namely a law. This law gives to the sensible world, as sensuous nature (as this concerns rational beings), the form of an intelligible world, i.e., the form of supersensuous nature, without interfering with the mechanism of the former. Nature, in the widest sense of the word, is the existence of things under laws. The sensuous nature of rational beings in general is their existence under empirically conditioned laws, and therefore it is, from the point of view of reason, heteronomy. The supersensuous nature of the same beings, on the other hand, is their existence according to laws which are independent of all empirical conditions and which therefore belong to the autonomy of pure reason. And since the laws, according to which the existence of things depends on cognition, are practical, supersensuous nature, so far as we can form a concept of it, is nothing else than nature under the autonomy of the pure practical reason. The law of this autonomy is the moral law, and it, therefore, is the fundamental law of supersensuous nature and of a pure world of the understanding, whose counterpart must exist in the world of sense without interfering with the laws of the latter. The former could be called the archetypal world (*natura archetypa*) which we know only by reason; the latter, on the other hand, could be called the ectypal world (*natura ectypa*), because it contains the possible effect of the idea of the former as the determining ground of the will." ―from_Critique of Practical Reason_. Translated, with an Introduction by Lewis White Beck, p. 44.

As implied in Levy’s quote, the process of freely choosing what sort of person you become, despite whatever bad constitutive luck you’ve had, is usually framed as a gradual, usually maturational process. In a debate with Dennett, incompatibilist Gregg Caruso outlined chapter 3’s essence—we have no control over either the biology or the environment thrown at us. Dennett’s response was “So what? The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc.” This is a logical outcome of Dennett’s claim that bad and good luck average out over time: Come on, get your act together. You’ve had enough time to take responsibility, to choose to catch up to everyone else in the marathon.[2] A similar view comes from the distinguished philosopher Robert Kane, of the University of Texas: “Free will in my view involves more than merely free of action. It concerns self-formation. The relevant question for free will is this: How did you get to be the kind of person you now are?” Roskies and Shadlen write, “It is plausible to think that agents might be held morally responsible even for decisions that are not conscious, if those decisions are due to policy settings which are expressions of the agent [in other words, acts of free will in the past].”[3] Not all versions of this idea require gradual acquisition of past-tense free will. Kane believes that “choose what sort of person you’re going to be” happens at moments of crisis, at major forks in the road, at moments of what he calls “Self-Forming Actions” (and he proposes a mechanism by which this supposedly occurs, which we’ll touch on briefly in chapter 10). In contrast, psychiatrist Sean Spence, of the University of Sheffield, believes that those I-had-free-will-back-then moments happen when life is at its optimal, rather than in crisis.

The free market system of capitalism enhances freedom in three ways. Traditionally freedom of exchange has been seen as a basic form of individual freedom, with which it would be wrong to interfere, and in this sense is a basic, negative freedom like the freedom of speech, assembly, the press, or conscience. Gerald Gaus, a liberal defender of the morality of markets, summarizes the liberal case for freedom in capitalism: “classical liberalism embraces market relations because (but not, of course, only because) they (1) are essentially free, (2) respect the actual choices of individuals, and (3) legitimately express different individuals’ rational decisions about the proper choice between competing ends, goods, and values.”98 Market freedom is necessary to respect individuals as free choosers and designers of their own “experiments in living,” as Mill famously puts it.99 Free markets also have positive aspects, however, in providing opportunities by increasing persons’ material wealth in order to choose things that they value. Another aspect of the positive freedom that markets promote is the freedom of persons to develop their autonomy as decision makers, and to find opportunities to escape from oppressive traditional roles. Markets also promote a third, more controversial, sense of freedom in that they allow persons to interact in mutually beneficial ways even when they do not know each other or have any other traditional reason to care about the other. I call this sense of freedom “social freedom.” In each of these ways – negative, positive, and social – markets have much, and in some cases even more, to offer to women, as women have been more confined by traditional roles to a constrained family life, deprived of a fair distribution of benefits and burdens of family life, and treated as second-class citizens in their communities. While capitalism has already, as we have seen, brought great advances in the realm of negative and positive liberties, capitalism’s ability to destruct the old and create new forms of community offer a vision of freedom that is yet to be fulfilled.

What exogenous causes are shifting the allocation of moral intuitions away from community, authority, and purity and toward fairness, autonomy, and rationality? One obvious force is geographic and social mobility. People are no longer confined to the small worlds of family, village, and tribe, in which conformity and solidarity are essential to daily life, and ostracism and exile are a form of social death. They can seek their fortunes in other circles, which expose them to alternative worldviews and lead them into a more ecumenical morality, which gravitates to the rights of individuals rather than chauvinistic veneration of the group. By the same token, open societies, where talent, ambition, or luck can dislodge people from the station in which they were born, are less likely to see an Authority Ranking as an inviolable law of nature, and more likely to see it as a historical artifact or a legacy of injustice. When diverse individuals mingle, engage in commerce, and find themselves on professional or social teams that cooperate to attain a superordinate goal, their intuitions of purity can be diluted. One example, mentioned in chapter 7, is the greater tolerance of homosexuality among people who personally know homosexuals. Haidt observes that when one zooms in on an electoral map of the United States, from the coarse division into red and blue states to a finer-grained division into red and blue counties, one finds that the blue counties, representing the regions that voted for the more liberal presidential candidate, cluster along the coasts and major waterways. Before the advent of jet airplanes and interstate highways, these were the places where people and their ideas most easily mixed. That early advantage installed them as hubs of transportation, commerce, media, research, and education, and they continue to be pluralistic—and liberal—zones today. Though American political liberalism is by no means the same as classical liberalism, the two overlap in their weighting of the moral spheres. The micro-geography of liberalism suggests that the moral trend away from community, authority, and purity is indeed an effect of mobility and cosmopolitanism.202

IDEOSFERĂ: Ideile sunt ca nişte fiinţe vii. Se nasc, cresc, proliferează, se confruntă cu alte idei şi în cele din urmă pier. Şi dacă ideile, ca şi fiinţele vii, ar avea propria lor evoluţie? Şi dacă ideile s-ar selecta între ele ca să le elimine pe cele mai slabe şi să le reproducă pe cele mai puternice ca în darwinism? În lucrarea Hazard şi Necesitate, apărută în 1970, Jacques Monod a emis ipoteza că ideile ar putea avea o autonomie şi, ca şi fiinţele organice, ar fi capabile să se reproducă şi să se înmulţească. În 1976, în Genă egoistă, Richard Dawkins pomeneşte conceptul de „ideosferă”. Ideosfera ar fi pentru lumea ideilor ceea ce este biosfera pentru lumea fiinţelor vii. Dawkins scrie: „Cînd plantezi o idee fertilă în mintea mea, îmi parazitezi literalmente creierul, transformîndu-l în vehicul pentru propagarea acestei idei”. Şi citează conceptul de Dumnezeu, o idee care s-a născut într-o zi şi a evoluat şi propagat continuu, preluată şi amplificată de parabole, scrieri, apoi muzică, artă, preoţii reproducînd-o şi interpretînd-o astfel încît să o adapteze spaţiului şi timpului în care trăiesc. Dar ideile, mai mult decît fiinţele vii, suferă repede mutaţii. De exemplu, conceptul, ideea de comunism, născută în mintea lui Karl Marx, s-a răspîndit într-un timp foarte scurt în spaţiu pînă la a acoperi jumătate din lume. Ea a evoluat, a suferit mutaţii, ca în cele din urmă să se reducă, stăruind la un număr din ce în ce mai mic de persoane, ca o specie animală pe cale de dispariţie. Dar, în acelaşi timp, a constrîns ideea de „capitalism” să sufere şi ea mutaţii. Din lupta ideilor din ideosferă apare civilizaţia noastră. Actualmente, computerele sunt pe cale să dea ideilor o accelerare a mutaţiei. Datorită Internetului, o idee se poate răspîndi mai repede în spaţiu şi timp, putînd să se confrunte mai rapid cu rivalii sau cu prădătorii ei. E excelent pentru răspîndirea ideilor bune, dar şi pentru cele rele, căci în noţiunea de idee nu există noţiunea de „moral”. De altfel, nici în biologie, evoluţia nu ascultă de nici un fel de morală. Iată de ce poate că ar trebui să reflectăm de două ori înainte de a răspîndi idei. Căci ele sunt de acum înainte mai puternice decît oamenii care le inventează şi decît cei care le vehiculează. În fine, e doar o idee... Edmond Wells, Enciclopedia cunoaşterii relative şi absolute, volumul IV

If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle. … Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself; (p. 6) In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin. ... …; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth. (p. 8) At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (p. 10) It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets. (p. 12) Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see (p. 17) That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism. (p. 31) Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. (p. 32) The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism. (p. 38) The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. (p. 42) Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. (p. 42) According to its basic principles, the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations. (p. 43) It is exactly the weakness of contemporary society that it offers no ideals, that it demands no faith, that it has no vision—except that of more of the same. (p. 49) Socialism must be radical. To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man. (p. 49)

and self-responsibility can only occur where the child is surrounded with moral behavior and allowed to grow her own understanding of the ideals of integrity, interdependence and interconnectedness. He put it this way, “Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressure.” But this moral autonomy is not supported in our topsy-turvy school and family systems where respect for authority actually means fear of authority. Where there is fear there cannot be respect. Although a child may envy or fear the power a parent or teacher wields over them, their feelings do not include the sacred, essential quality of loving reverence which makes respect, respect. It is akin to the battered dependent wife saying she loves and respects her abuser, when her daily experience is fear. Jerry Jampolsky, author and founder of the Center for Attitudinal Healing, reminds us that it is fear, not hate, that is love’s opposite. If, however, a truly educational atmosphere is created based on respect for autonomy instead of intimidating indoctrination, children can then deeply understand that rules are needed to maintain the social order, and do not have to be obeyed out of a blind acquiescence to authority, but are followed on the bases of mutual agreement. At the same time, the needs of the individual are protected and respected. Nice “Guise”and Gals It is at this Stage Six—Universal Ethical

The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. To Borlaug, the landscape of late-twentieth-century capitalism, with its teeming global markets dominated by big corporations, was morally acceptable, though ever in need of repair. Its emphasis on personal autonomy, social and physical mobility, and the rights of the individual were resonant. Vogt thought differently. By the time he died, in 1968, he had come to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with Western-style consumer societies. People needed to live in smaller, more stable communities, closer to the earth, controlling the exploitative frenzy of the global market. The freedom and flexibility touted by advocates of consumer society were an illusion; individuals’ rights mean little if they live in atomized isolation, cut off from Nature and each other.

All of this, however, is really of only secondary importance. The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its “originary” myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said; and the Enlightenment language of an “age of reason” was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of “irrational” belief. But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead. The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom—conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will—is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth.

The Reformation is one root of the idea of human freedom and autonomy as it is represented in modern democracy. However, while this aspect is always stressed, especially in non-Catholic countries, its other aspect—its emphasis on the wickedness of human nature, it insignificance and powerlessness of the individual, and the necessity for the individual to subordinate himself to a power outside himself—is neglected. This idea of the unworthiness of the individual, his fundamental inability to rely on himself and his need to submit, is also the main theme of Hitler's ideology, which, however, lacks the emphasis on freedom and moral principles which was inherent to Protestantism.

When misunderstood autonomy governs our life, it is inevitable that the dignity of others must be rejected, for everyone else threatens our unchecked sovereignty. This terrible covenant is especially acute given the new power of technology. Not only have we freed ourselves from the bonds and bounds of creation, but we have alienated ourselves from them, declaring them enemy. Not only against the physical world, although that too, but also other persons and ourselves, as everything is bleached out and rendered defenseless against our frightful autonomy. Finding the world as nought, and ourselves as unchecked, we consume ourselves and all other creatures. To be free as we wish requires hatred of being, even hating life itself, just as Evagrius warned. As John Paul II recognized, this “encourages the ‘culture of death’ creating and consolidating actual ‘structures of sin’ which go against life. The moral conscience, both individual and social, is today subjected . . . to an extremely serious and mortal danger.”10

It is my personal belief that the abhorrence of abortion expressed by the men who place themselves at the barricades in front of abortion clinics is actually a misplaced horror at women's sexual autonomy. It stands to reason: women's sexual independance is the thing that men have always wanted to control.

My objective is to place these issues in their broader political context by exploring how the denial of Black reproductive autonomy serves the interests of white supremacy. I am also interested in the way in which the dominant understanding of reproductive rights has been shaped by racist assumptions about Black procreation. Three central themes, then, run through the chapters of this book. The first is that regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions had been a central aspect of racial oppression in America. Not only do these policies injure individual Black women, but they also are a principal means of justifying the perpetuation of a racist social structure. Second, the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America. The traditional understanding of reproductive freedom has had to accommodate practices that blatantly deny Black women control over critical decisions about their bodies. Highlighting the racial dimensions of contemporary debates such as welfare reform, the safety of Norplant, public funding of abortion, and the morality of new reproductive technologies is like shaking up a kaleidoscope and taking another look. Finally, in light of the first two themes, we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression. While Black women’s stories are sometimes inserted as an aside in deliberations about reproductive issues, I place them at the center of this reconstructive project.

The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e. moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader — including the ethics of community and divinity— in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.

Growth into the rule of conscience is experienced as a real liberation. It is the passage from the Old to the New Testament, from moral inhibition to adult goodness, from anxiety to security, from heteronomy to autonomy.

Hofstadter fretted that in a “populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy,” democracy was open to being co-opted by “the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes,” where “a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

One must choose theonomy or autonomy, but autonomy is morally crippled. So also are half-way measures between theonomy and autonomy; the blending of the two yields subtle antinomianism.

If vou choose the airline of autonomy you're going to have to end up where you don't want to be, illogical, immoral, unfree with no dignity. And at that point the choice is between life and death. Spiritual life and death, moral life and death, intellectual life and death.

Therefore, the authority of Christ and His word, rather than intellectual autonomy, must govern the starting point and method of his apologetics, as well as its conclusion. He challenges the philosophical adequacy of the unbeliever's worldview, showing how it does not provide the preconditions for the intelligibility of knowledge and morality. His case for Christianity, then, argues from the impossibility of the contrary. From beginning to end, both in his own philosophical method and in what he aims to bring about in the unbeliever's thinking, the Christian apologist reasons in such a way "that in all things Christ might have the preeminence" (Col. 1:18).

It makes no more sense, then, to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or out of his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender regard for her moral autonomy.

Only a minority of nonconformists managed to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy that emboldened them to employ patterns of behavior and stratagems of evasion that kept them from becoming killers at all.

Jane Austen is quite clear that both sexes must be allowed the full play of their moral autonomy and that a healthy society values equally the contributions each can make. Danger arises when the sex which has the monopoly of money and mobility assumes that the pick of the world's pleasures must be therefore theirs to plunder. Marianne, Fanny and Jane are unfortunate in being desired and trifled with by men who have been used all their lives to having their own way. That these women, of no feeble character any of them, should be crushed to the point where their only resource seems to be self-destruction, must be a reflection on their society and on those in whom its power resides.

First, in the seventeenth century, came the secularisation of knowledge in the form of science and philosophy. Then in the eighteenth century came the secularisation of power by way of the American and French Revolutions and the separation – radical in France, less doctrinaire in the United States – of church and state. In the nineteenth century came the secularisation of culture as art galleries and museums were seen as alternatives to churches as places in which to encounter the sublime. Finally in the 1960s came the secularisation of morality, by the adoption of a principle first propounded by John Stuart Mill a century earlier – namely that the only ground on which anyone, including the state, is justified in intervening in behaviour done in private is the prevention of harm to others. This was the beginning of the end of traditional codes of ethics, to be replaced by the unfettered sanctity of the individual, autonomy, rights and choice.

Another source of satisfaction for the atheist that no theist can hope to enjoy is moral autonomy. If we demand our autonomy—if we hold dear the notion that we (as individuals or as a race) are entirely self-determining, that we can become what we please without further consequences than those that follow logically and physically upon our choices, that we should finally be answerable to no one—atheism sits well with that.

recent issue of the weekly magazine The Economist (2 June 2012) on ‘Morals and the machine’ raises some pertinent issues about the degree of autonomy reached by robots and calls for society to develop new rules to manage them.

If a democratic society comes to believe, for example, that agnosticism and moral relativism are necessary to preserve social peace, truth becomes the enemy of freedom, and freedom itself is reduced to individual autonomy. The common life, which participatory liberalism was designed to protect, can then be lost to dominant interests divorced from the common good but capable of influencing politics and public life. Democracy is based on more than legal procedures; it needs a shared vision.

The hubris that has isolated our country politically and now economically is heard, but not usually recognized, in moral arguments based simply and solely on individual moral autonomy. This personal and social dilemma is not, of course, a matter of ultimate importance, for America is not the Kingdom of God; but it makes America herself far less than she claims to be in this world.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy. And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and this display our character.

THE WRITERS WE discussed in Part I all lived between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. What has changed in the meantime? Not much, basically, except for the fact that survivors of childhood abuse can now seek therapy in an attempt to free themselves from the consequences of that abuse. Frequently, however, not only the victims themselves but also their therapists are reluctant to square up to the truth of what happened to them in childhood. Accordingly, it is still very rare for that liberation process to be fully successful. If clients can actually experience their emotions, there may be a temporary alleviation of the symptoms. The emotions can be consciously felt, they can be expressed in another’s presence, and this is something that has never been possible before. But as long as the therapist tacitly stands in the service of some “deity” (parental figure), she will hardly be able to help her clients find their way to genuine autonomy. The morality implicit in the Fourth Commandment will continue to hold sway over both of them, and the body will pay the price for this sacrifice. If I assert, here and now, that this sacrifice is unnecessary, that one can free oneself of the dictatorship of conventional morality and the Fourth Commandment without having to punish oneself for it or do harm to others, some people may accuse me of naïve optimism.

Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently. People come to their decisions in their own way. People who believe the decision is up to the woman are typically called “pro-choice.” “Choice” echoes what is called “moral agency,” “conscience,” “informed will,” or “personal autonomy”—spiritually or religiously. I favor the term “informed will” because it captures the idea that we learn and decide: First, inform the will. Then exercise conscience. In Reform Judaism, for instance, an individual demonstrates “informed will” in approaching and deciding about traditional dietary rules—in a fluid process of study of traditional teaching, consideration of the personal significance of that teaching, arriving at a conclusion, and taking action. Unitarian Universalists tell me that the search for truth and meaning leads to the exercise of conscience. We witness moral agency when a member of a faith community interprets faith teachings in light of historical religious understandings and personal conscience. I know that some religious people don’t do

the passage on dignity is an addendum to the formula of autonomy: ‘act only so that the will could regard itself as at the same time giving universal law through its maxim’ (G IV 434). Kant raises the question of why a morally good being abides by this formula. His answer (in brief) is because morality has an elevated worth (i.e. only moral dictates are categorical).

I have spoken here of what ought and ought not to be done, of what is morally repugnant, and of what is dangerous. I am, of course, aware of the fact that these judgements of mine have themselves no moral force except on myself. Nor, as I have already said, do I have any intention of telling other people what tasks they should and should not undertake. I urge them only to consider the consequences of what they do do. And here I mean not only, not even primarily, the direct consequences of their actions on the world about them. I mean rather the consequences on themselves, as they construct their rationalizations, as they repress the truths that urge them to different courses , and as they chip away at their own autonomy. That so many people ask what they must do is a sign that the order of being and doing has become inverted. Those who know who and what they are do not need to ask what they should do. And those who must ask will not be able to stop asking until they begin to look inside themselves. It it is everyone's task to show by example what questions one can ask of oneself, and to show that one can live with the few answers there are.

In fact, the Nazis did not have a euthanasia program, in the proper sense of the word. Their so-called euthanasia program was not motivated by concern for the suffering of those killed. If it had been, they would not have kept their operations secret, deceived relatives about the cause of death of those killed, or exempted from the program certain privileged classes, such as veterans of the armed services or relatives of the euthanasia staff. Nazi ‘euthanasia’ was never voluntary and often was involuntary rather than nonvoluntary. ‘Doing away with useless mouths’ – a phrase used by those in charge – gives a better idea of the objectives of the program than ‘mercy-killing’. Both racial origin and ability to work were among the factors considered in the selection of patients to be killed. It was the Nazi belief in the importance of maintaining a pure Aryan Volk – a quasi-mystical racist concept that was thought of as more important than mere individuals’ lives – that made both the so-called euthanasia program and later the entire holocaust possible. Proposals for the legalization of euthanasia, on the other hand, are based on respect for autonomy and the goal of avoiding pointless suffering.

I cannot tell why the spokesmen I have cited want the developments I forecast to become true. Some of them have told me that they work on them for the morally bankrupt reason that "If we don't do it, someone else will." They fear that evil people will develop superintelligent machines and use them to oppress mankind, and that the only defense against these enemy machines will be superintelligent machines controlled by us, that is, by well-intentioned people. Others reveal that they have abdicated their autonomy by appealing to the "principle" of technological inevitability. But, finally, all I can say with assurance is that these people are not stupid. All the rest is mystery.

Whatever its effect on the autonomy of the child, the drive to banish contingency and to master the mystery of birth diminishes the designing parent and corrupts parenting as a social practice governed by norms of unconditional love. . . . Even if it does not harm the child or impair its autonomy, eugenic parenting is objectionable because it expresses and entrenches a certain stance toward the world—a stance of mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements, and misses the part of freedom that consists in a persisting negotiation with the given.

When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies, they reach first for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of our moral vocabulary does not equip us to address the hardest questions posed by cloning, designer children, and genetic engineering.

Striking compromises across people. Finding ways of making teammates feel valued. Being able to agree to things that are suboptimal for you in the interest of the greater team good. Understanding people’s underlying motivations and incentives. Motivating teams and boosting morale. Relinquishing your ego and encouraging others to do the same. Setting common goals, metrics, and procedures. Balancing autonomy with team cohesion. Building the confidence of those around you. Increasing individual accountability. Setting a good example. Taking personal responsibility. Showing compassion and empathy for coworkers. Identifying and dividing responsibilities. Sharing knowledge and responsibilities. Mitigating the damage from a negative teammate or situation. Building trust across the team.