-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
have a more fundamental issue than the question of multiple selves, or at least a more tractable one. All are problems for people because those activities impose costs on others, particularly now that we as tax payers have to pay for everyone's decisions regarding them.
Drug addict's treatment is often state sponsored, whether they commit crimes or not to feed their addiction. The mentally ill who go untreated are noticed because they commit crimes (or breaches of peace). Substance abusers... are drug addicts? At any rate, those who abuse substances and don't cause problems for other people are ignored. Eating habits are the newer one, previously being shameful but not punishable, yet now that state run healthcare is de jure we have put the costs back on everyone else. (Is it a coincidence that the fat "body positivity" movement from the left started shortly afterwards?)
In sum, the reason our moral intuitions point against individual autonomy is that most of the consequences of individual decisions have been put off onto the public. By giving up responsibility we gave up control.
I may be going off at a bit of a tangent here but.....
Before the post-60's onset of narcissistic hyper-'individualism', it used to be our cultural norm - an axiom - for society to view each individual (and for them to view themselves) as having a Self A and a Self B. Your Self A was your moral, upstanding self and your Self B was your sinful, backsliding self - (against which you constantly needed to be vigilant). The great tragedy of our modern era is that once this dual sense of self was undermined by endless invocations to 'self love', 'self esteem' etc, the result was that - if you personally were without sin - then it must follow that someone (or something) else must be to blame for each and every one of your discontents.
Re: "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."
Let me focus on paternalism about seemingly self-defeating behaviors by adults. (Any theory of justice requires special principles for children and for disabled persons.)
Note: If the self-defeating behavior also involves crime, nuisance, and the like, then laws to protect the public should be strictly enforced.
I defend a presumption against paternalistic coercion by government. Various problems are (a) majority rule and attendant tyranny of the majority, (b) black markets and attendant gangs and corruption, and (c) bigger government and all that.
And I defend a presumption in favor of private paternalism in civil society — by family, friends, social norms, orgs. Private paternalism generally has an edge in information and in flexibility, compared to government paternalism. It does not coerce participants — not on the supply side, not on the demand side. It can involve penalties (e.g., exclusion, ostracism) or help (e.g., AA), depending on the person and situation. Civil society, I submit, is the proper sphere of "humane liberalism" (Emily Chamlee-Wright).
If a person has a divided self, then there should be experiments with new contracts, mechanisms, and institutions to enable Peter sober to bind Peter drunk. Here, too, there is a presumption in favor of voluntary forms of self-binding, including voluntary collective self-binding, rather than coercive paternalism. There is room and need for entrepreneurship for self-control.
A distinction should be drawn between *permissions* (liberty) and *subsidies* for what might be self-defeating behaviors. Strangely, instead, we often observe prohibitions with subsidies (e.g., a ban on narcotics, but public taxpayer-funded distribution of paraphernalia for "safe use.")
A difficult wrinkle is private insurance for adverse outcomes of seemingly self-defeating behaviors.
A classical liberal may countenance a measure of coercive government paternalism if the polity meets two standards: (a) readily accessible *exit options*; and (b) *subsidiarity* — the principle of decentralization of jurisdiction/policy, unless there are exceptional economies of scale/scope for governance of particular issues.
This idea of multiple selves rather than a single self is a conundrum but seems, at least to me, realistic especially when I look back at myself over time and consider my choices and behaviors at different points in my life. In particular, thinking of adolescence, complexion problems made me a withdrawn, angry person through high school. Now, decades later, a zit appears but I don’t give a damn. This is a mundane example but illustrates emotionally driven states of mind. And the adolescent stage of life is nothing if it isn’t an emotional, hormonal, state of mind! This tracks very well with a conservative approach with teenage interest in “transitioning”. As to life or death, the dilemma is greater of course, but an adult’s state of mind, affected by drugs or life’s circumstances, is still *their* state of mind. This is why there are legal tools like health care directives where we can willfully declare, while we are of sound mind, that if we’re incapacitated by terminal conditions, etc., that we be permitted to die.
Do you need a multiple selves model here, or is Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 enough?
If the latter, and if the idea is to help people's System 2 calm considered thinking to win out over their System 1 impulses, then the most direct way to do that is generally going to be a waiting period or other such speed bump rather than an outright restriction on any potentially damaging impulsive conduct. That seems intuitively more respectful of autonomy and less paternalistic to me, and we already often do it where big decisions are concerned (buying a house for example) and it doesn't feel restrictive in those cases. Suicide is a notorious case where if you prevent people from doing it impulsively (e.g. with jump barriers on bridges) a large percentage don't do it at all.
Are you a different person in system 1 vs. system 2? The psychological distance of time is the key here, as I believe you are getting at with the waiting period. You only get one discrete life, but if you divide up your life into any sections beyond this unitary whole then are you a different person in any of those different sections or phases of life?
Well, no, I think you're not a different person in system 1 vs system 2, just applying different cognitive tools to the same tangle of perceptions, values, and beliefs. To the extent there is a self at all (and the Buddhists have a point when they question that), the self-thinking-fast and the self-thinking-slow are more the same than different.
For what it's worth, the Massachusetts Council of Churches, one of the most left-leaning such bodies in the US at the time, in 2000 deliberated and wrote a position paper opposing physician-assisted suicide on theological grounds. The board of directors included heads and representatives of most "main line" Protestant denominations in the state and included Roman Catholic and Orthodox representatives. In policy terms, we (I was a rep. on the board) concluded that PAS represented a failure to alleviate mental, physical, and spiritual suffering of the critically ill and others. https://www.masscouncilofchurches.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Physician-Assisted-Suicide_A-Christian-Perspective.pdf
I'm immediately reminded of the Experience self & the Agency self (of The Mind Club). Everybody is both, tho often we judge others as exclusively one or the other (almost always wrongful judgements).
Also "the line between Good and Evil goes thru every heart " (Solzhenitsyn, as I recall) as well as the Indian grandfather: the good wolf fighting the bad wolf in a battle in every heart.
Grandson asks: which one wins?
The one that we feed.
("Feed your head" Grace Slick, supporting drug use)
Richard Hanania seems a bit different than his earlier Hoste tweets - yet he remains the "same person", craving a spotlight.
We may strongly disapprove of another person's action for any of the reasons (drug/substance abuse, mental illness, gluttoness obesity) yet want such folk to be considered Moral Agents, and allowed freedom. UNTIL their actions cause actual problems for others, like drunk driving. Which problem is mostly that the drunk has a huge increase in the risk of accident that hurts others.
There is no good language to differentiate the increases in risk.
Kling is certainly partially right: "We have a model of people in which the individual has many selves, and the better self would choose differently." -- we want to constrain the bad acting person for their own good. But for me, and many, we want some of the actions to be constrained because in the real world the gov't is going to spend tax money on mitigating the problems caused by bad behavior.
Thus the gov't is justified in more constraints and even involuntary confinement in the case of the sicko Jordan Neely who was recently killed while acting in a threatening manner. After many years and incidents of harassment of innocents - the innocents need more protection.
The confinement needs to be far better than that of Nurse Ratched (I thought it was Ratchett).
(ht Althouse) Some with dementia remember their crimes only sometimes. Prisons maybe should move towards more "nursing home" (minimal) care - but the idea that those who don't remember are therefore "innocent" is wrong. It might be the innocent half is "unfairly" held hostage in the body of the criminal, but he is, and society is justified in being protected against more crimes of the criminal.
Hanania recently wrote about the HUGE decline of murders in El Salvador due to the policy of locking up more gang members, even without full convictions. The utopian idealists believe, falsely, that there are no trade-offs. For most folks, they want more safety even if it means stronger gov't action against criminals and unconvicted suspects.
Oh dear. That post is what my English teacher called "sophistry". It brings up a valid point and claims it supports something it does not support, and then gets everyone to argue about the validity of that point (which is, in fact, irrelevant). It's like the magician's "don't watch my left hand".
1. Where did the idea that an entity's internal decision processes are invalid if not 'unitary' come from? The relevant issue is whether a boundary can be drawn such that the vast majority of the consequences of a decision are borne within it. Whether your priority is morality or ethics or economics, that's it. As it happens, for a wide class of decisions, the vast majority of the consequences are borne by the collection of mental processes and bounded physical entity we call an "individual". In other cases, that's not true. Drawing that boundary, deciding what the threshold is to justify expansion of the boundary, is relevant. "Unitary-ness" of what's inside the boundary is not.
2. Even if unitary-ness were relevant, the individual is vastly more 'unitary' than the alternative. Society (limited to the U.S.) is even less 'unitary' by about seven orders of magnitude.
“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.”
I should think that’s clear enough. The author suggests that multiple selves means another self would make a better choice than YOU did. So, we’ll just ignore your choice and defer to a better self.
I think this complicates a relative simplicity. It looks more like a tool to deny individual liberty. Now, in this new view, I may not know what I really want because there’s another me who might, on a different day, have rights that, frankly, my present decision-making self does not.
Yeah, the model of a "self" is ultimately wrong (but useful for ordering society). The model of multiple "selves" is more wrong and, as you say, only complicates matters.
There are insoluble problems with humanity, and the best we can do is hope to protect innocent people from being harmed by others.
Every human Justice system will have both errors: too much punishment on some guilty & innocent folk by the gov't, and too little protection of the innocent because of too little punishment of the guilty.
We should have more, shorter, sentences for first offenders, who are far more likely to be among the few wrongly convicted.
Individuals vary in the degree of integration of the self.
For example, one of the main empirical findings in psychology is "the fundamental attribution error." People commonly overestimate the unity of personality and its impact on behavior.
Arnold Kling highlights two distinct, overlapping issues:
(a) Myopia.
(b) Inconstancy. For example, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; or weakness of will, or recurrently courting regret.
Because these problems of imperfect integration of the self range from mild to extreme, paternalism towards adults is necessarily a slippery slope.
A current thing is to advocate forced treatment of persons, whom psychiatrists diagnose as "severely mentally ill" (whatever "severely" means). Unwillingness to accept the diagnosis and treatment is then interpreted as further evidence for the diagnosis. What could go wrong? Where does it stop? Should government force obese persons to undergo some kind of rehab? Why not force people to exercise regularly and adhere to a prescribed diet?
Arnold says, Leave individuals well-enough alone because coercion might not improve their lot. But what if, perchance, in particular types of myopia or inconstancy, coercion reliably would improve their lot? Then should the policy be, 'Use coercion if it will make the person better off'? Or, 'Use coercion if it passes cost-benefit analysis'?
Given (a) shades of gray of myopia/inconstancy, (b) wide prevalence of myopia/inconstancy, (c) slippery slopes in policy, and (d) the checkered history of psychiatry towards socially-disapproved preferences, there is room and need for arguments from autonomy.
Being a bit on the old side with a short planning horizon and being dependent upon SS and our savings over more than half a century of marriage we had a choice that came up as our children's financial positions changed of shoving some of our saving their way. This would increase our probability of running out of money.
I noted that 50% of my lifetime medical expenditures will apparently be in the last 6 mo of my life and if we run out of money (savings) the only people who will come up short will be the medical bureaucracy who won't be able to milk me as a "cash cow" as they keep me alive as a mass of tissue. We do care more about our family than about our over priced, over regulated, medical systems.
I highly recommend the show Severance (on AppleTV). The premise is, to use Arnold’s phrasing, what happens if you do something so Self A has no memory of what Self B does and vice versa. It makes the ethical questions raised here much more vivid.
I think the moral intuitions of your examples:
-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
have a more fundamental issue than the question of multiple selves, or at least a more tractable one. All are problems for people because those activities impose costs on others, particularly now that we as tax payers have to pay for everyone's decisions regarding them.
Drug addict's treatment is often state sponsored, whether they commit crimes or not to feed their addiction. The mentally ill who go untreated are noticed because they commit crimes (or breaches of peace). Substance abusers... are drug addicts? At any rate, those who abuse substances and don't cause problems for other people are ignored. Eating habits are the newer one, previously being shameful but not punishable, yet now that state run healthcare is de jure we have put the costs back on everyone else. (Is it a coincidence that the fat "body positivity" movement from the left started shortly afterwards?)
In sum, the reason our moral intuitions point against individual autonomy is that most of the consequences of individual decisions have been put off onto the public. By giving up responsibility we gave up control.
I may be going off at a bit of a tangent here but.....
Before the post-60's onset of narcissistic hyper-'individualism', it used to be our cultural norm - an axiom - for society to view each individual (and for them to view themselves) as having a Self A and a Self B. Your Self A was your moral, upstanding self and your Self B was your sinful, backsliding self - (against which you constantly needed to be vigilant). The great tragedy of our modern era is that once this dual sense of self was undermined by endless invocations to 'self love', 'self esteem' etc, the result was that - if you personally were without sin - then it must follow that someone (or something) else must be to blame for each and every one of your discontents.
Re: "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."
Let me focus on paternalism about seemingly self-defeating behaviors by adults. (Any theory of justice requires special principles for children and for disabled persons.)
Note: If the self-defeating behavior also involves crime, nuisance, and the like, then laws to protect the public should be strictly enforced.
I defend a presumption against paternalistic coercion by government. Various problems are (a) majority rule and attendant tyranny of the majority, (b) black markets and attendant gangs and corruption, and (c) bigger government and all that.
And I defend a presumption in favor of private paternalism in civil society — by family, friends, social norms, orgs. Private paternalism generally has an edge in information and in flexibility, compared to government paternalism. It does not coerce participants — not on the supply side, not on the demand side. It can involve penalties (e.g., exclusion, ostracism) or help (e.g., AA), depending on the person and situation. Civil society, I submit, is the proper sphere of "humane liberalism" (Emily Chamlee-Wright).
If a person has a divided self, then there should be experiments with new contracts, mechanisms, and institutions to enable Peter sober to bind Peter drunk. Here, too, there is a presumption in favor of voluntary forms of self-binding, including voluntary collective self-binding, rather than coercive paternalism. There is room and need for entrepreneurship for self-control.
A distinction should be drawn between *permissions* (liberty) and *subsidies* for what might be self-defeating behaviors. Strangely, instead, we often observe prohibitions with subsidies (e.g., a ban on narcotics, but public taxpayer-funded distribution of paraphernalia for "safe use.")
A difficult wrinkle is private insurance for adverse outcomes of seemingly self-defeating behaviors.
A classical liberal may countenance a measure of coercive government paternalism if the polity meets two standards: (a) readily accessible *exit options*; and (b) *subsidiarity* — the principle of decentralization of jurisdiction/policy, unless there are exceptional economies of scale/scope for governance of particular issues.
This idea of multiple selves rather than a single self is a conundrum but seems, at least to me, realistic especially when I look back at myself over time and consider my choices and behaviors at different points in my life. In particular, thinking of adolescence, complexion problems made me a withdrawn, angry person through high school. Now, decades later, a zit appears but I don’t give a damn. This is a mundane example but illustrates emotionally driven states of mind. And the adolescent stage of life is nothing if it isn’t an emotional, hormonal, state of mind! This tracks very well with a conservative approach with teenage interest in “transitioning”. As to life or death, the dilemma is greater of course, but an adult’s state of mind, affected by drugs or life’s circumstances, is still *their* state of mind. This is why there are legal tools like health care directives where we can willfully declare, while we are of sound mind, that if we’re incapacitated by terminal conditions, etc., that we be permitted to die.
Now this I understand
Do you need a multiple selves model here, or is Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 enough?
If the latter, and if the idea is to help people's System 2 calm considered thinking to win out over their System 1 impulses, then the most direct way to do that is generally going to be a waiting period or other such speed bump rather than an outright restriction on any potentially damaging impulsive conduct. That seems intuitively more respectful of autonomy and less paternalistic to me, and we already often do it where big decisions are concerned (buying a house for example) and it doesn't feel restrictive in those cases. Suicide is a notorious case where if you prevent people from doing it impulsively (e.g. with jump barriers on bridges) a large percentage don't do it at all.
Are you a different person in system 1 vs. system 2? The psychological distance of time is the key here, as I believe you are getting at with the waiting period. You only get one discrete life, but if you divide up your life into any sections beyond this unitary whole then are you a different person in any of those different sections or phases of life?
Well, no, I think you're not a different person in system 1 vs system 2, just applying different cognitive tools to the same tangle of perceptions, values, and beliefs. To the extent there is a self at all (and the Buddhists have a point when they question that), the self-thinking-fast and the self-thinking-slow are more the same than different.
For what it's worth, the Massachusetts Council of Churches, one of the most left-leaning such bodies in the US at the time, in 2000 deliberated and wrote a position paper opposing physician-assisted suicide on theological grounds. The board of directors included heads and representatives of most "main line" Protestant denominations in the state and included Roman Catholic and Orthodox representatives. In policy terms, we (I was a rep. on the board) concluded that PAS represented a failure to alleviate mental, physical, and spiritual suffering of the critically ill and others. https://www.masscouncilofchurches.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Physician-Assisted-Suicide_A-Christian-Perspective.pdf
I'm immediately reminded of the Experience self & the Agency self (of The Mind Club). Everybody is both, tho often we judge others as exclusively one or the other (almost always wrongful judgements).
Also "the line between Good and Evil goes thru every heart " (Solzhenitsyn, as I recall) as well as the Indian grandfather: the good wolf fighting the bad wolf in a battle in every heart.
Grandson asks: which one wins?
The one that we feed.
("Feed your head" Grace Slick, supporting drug use)
Richard Hanania seems a bit different than his earlier Hoste tweets - yet he remains the "same person", craving a spotlight.
We may strongly disapprove of another person's action for any of the reasons (drug/substance abuse, mental illness, gluttoness obesity) yet want such folk to be considered Moral Agents, and allowed freedom. UNTIL their actions cause actual problems for others, like drunk driving. Which problem is mostly that the drunk has a huge increase in the risk of accident that hurts others.
There is no good language to differentiate the increases in risk.
Kling is certainly partially right: "We have a model of people in which the individual has many selves, and the better self would choose differently." -- we want to constrain the bad acting person for their own good. But for me, and many, we want some of the actions to be constrained because in the real world the gov't is going to spend tax money on mitigating the problems caused by bad behavior.
Thus the gov't is justified in more constraints and even involuntary confinement in the case of the sicko Jordan Neely who was recently killed while acting in a threatening manner. After many years and incidents of harassment of innocents - the innocents need more protection.
The confinement needs to be far better than that of Nurse Ratched (I thought it was Ratchett).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/opinion/dementia-prisons.html?smid=url-share
(ht Althouse) Some with dementia remember their crimes only sometimes. Prisons maybe should move towards more "nursing home" (minimal) care - but the idea that those who don't remember are therefore "innocent" is wrong. It might be the innocent half is "unfairly" held hostage in the body of the criminal, but he is, and society is justified in being protected against more crimes of the criminal.
Hanania recently wrote about the HUGE decline of murders in El Salvador due to the policy of locking up more gang members, even without full convictions. The utopian idealists believe, falsely, that there are no trade-offs. For most folks, they want more safety even if it means stronger gov't action against criminals and unconvicted suspects.
Oh dear. That post is what my English teacher called "sophistry". It brings up a valid point and claims it supports something it does not support, and then gets everyone to argue about the validity of that point (which is, in fact, irrelevant). It's like the magician's "don't watch my left hand".
1. Where did the idea that an entity's internal decision processes are invalid if not 'unitary' come from? The relevant issue is whether a boundary can be drawn such that the vast majority of the consequences of a decision are borne within it. Whether your priority is morality or ethics or economics, that's it. As it happens, for a wide class of decisions, the vast majority of the consequences are borne by the collection of mental processes and bounded physical entity we call an "individual". In other cases, that's not true. Drawing that boundary, deciding what the threshold is to justify expansion of the boundary, is relevant. "Unitary-ness" of what's inside the boundary is not.
2. Even if unitary-ness were relevant, the individual is vastly more 'unitary' than the alternative. Society (limited to the U.S.) is even less 'unitary' by about seven orders of magnitude.
I don't mean to clutter up the comment section but just to say this was one of the best posts I've seen on Substack in a while.
If you believe people are in the image of G-d, as I do, a unitary self is impossible.
So, give up your God-given free will, because other humans can’t trust your multiple selves to know what’s best for them?
I have no idea how you got there, from what I said. Please explain
You didn’t read the post? This is from it:
“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.”
I should think that’s clear enough. The author suggests that multiple selves means another self would make a better choice than YOU did. So, we’ll just ignore your choice and defer to a better self.
I think this complicates a relative simplicity. It looks more like a tool to deny individual liberty. Now, in this new view, I may not know what I really want because there’s another me who might, on a different day, have rights that, frankly, my present decision-making self does not.
I’m trying to say that this positively stinks.
Yeah, the model of a "self" is ultimately wrong (but useful for ordering society). The model of multiple "selves" is more wrong and, as you say, only complicates matters.
There are insoluble problems with humanity, and the best we can do is hope to protect innocent people from being harmed by others.
Every human Justice system will have both errors: too much punishment on some guilty & innocent folk by the gov't, and too little protection of the innocent because of too little punishment of the guilty.
We should have more, shorter, sentences for first offenders, who are far more likely to be among the few wrongly convicted.
I like that idea. Great thought.
let an individual do what he wants, as long as he does not hurt others”
The rule allows suicide but says nothing about assisted suicides.
Re: "Is there a unitary self?"
Individuals vary in the degree of integration of the self.
For example, one of the main empirical findings in psychology is "the fundamental attribution error." People commonly overestimate the unity of personality and its impact on behavior.
Arnold Kling highlights two distinct, overlapping issues:
(a) Myopia.
(b) Inconstancy. For example, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; or weakness of will, or recurrently courting regret.
Because these problems of imperfect integration of the self range from mild to extreme, paternalism towards adults is necessarily a slippery slope.
A current thing is to advocate forced treatment of persons, whom psychiatrists diagnose as "severely mentally ill" (whatever "severely" means). Unwillingness to accept the diagnosis and treatment is then interpreted as further evidence for the diagnosis. What could go wrong? Where does it stop? Should government force obese persons to undergo some kind of rehab? Why not force people to exercise regularly and adhere to a prescribed diet?
Arnold says, Leave individuals well-enough alone because coercion might not improve their lot. But what if, perchance, in particular types of myopia or inconstancy, coercion reliably would improve their lot? Then should the policy be, 'Use coercion if it will make the person better off'? Or, 'Use coercion if it passes cost-benefit analysis'?
Given (a) shades of gray of myopia/inconstancy, (b) wide prevalence of myopia/inconstancy, (c) slippery slopes in policy, and (d) the checkered history of psychiatry towards socially-disapproved preferences, there is room and need for arguments from autonomy.
I've been a "modular mind" believer since Robin Hanson recommended "Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite".
It's not self A/B -- it's Self 1-9A-Za-z with a press secretary self explaining what the committee is doing without ever having been there.
That said -- I love this critique of purist individualism -- have to think on it.
Being a bit on the old side with a short planning horizon and being dependent upon SS and our savings over more than half a century of marriage we had a choice that came up as our children's financial positions changed of shoving some of our saving their way. This would increase our probability of running out of money.
I noted that 50% of my lifetime medical expenditures will apparently be in the last 6 mo of my life and if we run out of money (savings) the only people who will come up short will be the medical bureaucracy who won't be able to milk me as a "cash cow" as they keep me alive as a mass of tissue. We do care more about our family than about our over priced, over regulated, medical systems.
I highly recommend the show Severance (on AppleTV). The premise is, to use Arnold’s phrasing, what happens if you do something so Self A has no memory of what Self B does and vice versa. It makes the ethical questions raised here much more vivid.