Is there a unitary self?

If not, then autonomy and liberty become harder to define

Emily Chamlee-Wright writes,

There’s no guarantee that Canada or, for that matter, America will get the ethical balancing act of assisted suicide right. But if we do, it will be because individuals—as citizens, members of the legal and medical professions, ethicists, journalists, advocates for people in various forms of crisis and distress, and people who care about the plight of our loved ones—have participated in an open contest of ideas out of which new ethical standards and new social norms will emerge. In other words, the search for a humane liberalism may be a joint project, but it’s autonomy that gets us there.

Canada’s experiment with assisted suicide, called MAiD, is an example where the simple individualist rule “let an individual do what he wants, as long as he does not hurt others” comes up against our moral intuition. Chamlee-Wright acknowledges this.

Critics charge that MAiD is essentially a cost-saving measure by which society greases the skids toward death rather than providing adequate care for people with disabilities and those facing poverty or a mental health crisis. As one critic observes, in Canada an assisted death is already easier to procure than the services of a mental health professional. As if by design, MAiD seems to leave society’s most vulnerable people even more vulnerable.

I can think of other examples where the simple individualist rule comes up against intuition.

• a drug addict

• a mentally ill person (or, as Bryan Caplan would have it, a person with socially-disapproved preferences) who decides to go untreated

• a substance abuser

• someone whose eating habits bring about obesity and diabetes

I think that the reason we hesitate to respect people’s choices in these examples is that we do not believe that people are doing what they really want. We have a model of people in which the individual has many selves, and the better self would choose differently.

I think that the multiple-selves model is more realistic than the single-self model. But that means that individual autonomy is not so clearly defined as Chamlee-Wright would like it to be.

Suppose that today a person’s decision is made by Self A, but tomorrow the person would be more attuned to Self B, which would have decided differently. Does autonomy mean that we respect Self A, who makes a decision in the moment, or Self B, who has to live with that decision?

If you want to protect the conclusion that you should never interfere with another person’s decision, then you can define autonomy as allowing Self A to do whatever it wants. But do not expect to persuade someone whose moral intuition is to respect Self B. Don’t try to eliminate the moral dilemma by defining it away.

The moral dilemma is that we may be able to justify interference with someone’s decision. And by interference, I mean coercive interference, including interference by government.

Even if we hold the multiple-selves model, and even if we respect Self B, there are still grounds for being cautious about such interference. Just because somebody has a Self B does not mean that I or someone else knows what Self B wants. I think that many young people who indicate that they want to undergo gender transition actually have a Self B that does not want to do so. But the trans movement would denounce me for saying that.

Once you give me the authority to intervene in someone else’s decisions, I may use that authority to do something that is neither in the interest of Self A or Self B. The critics of MAiD seem to me to be worried about this.

Given these risks, we may end up saying that the simple individualist rule against interference is wise. But I don’t think that we can play “autonomy” as a trump card.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.

Substacks mentioned above:

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Humane Liberalism Begins with Autonomy