Duration: 01/09/2024- 31/08/2028
Code: CIPROM/2023/55
Funded by: Conselleria d’ Innovació, Universitats, Ciència i Societat Digital – Generalitat Valenciana

Principal Investigator: Josep Corbí (UV) and Marc Artiga (UV)
Research Team: XXX

SUMARY

What counts as an autonomous subject? The standard idea about autonomy is that a subject is autonomous if and only if they are the ultimate source of their actions. Still, how is a subject formed and structured? Should the subject as a whole be considered the ultimate source of their actions or just a privileged part of them? These are some of the perplexities that the standard idea of autonomy typically raises. The received view is that an individualistic, first-person perspective provides the framework where such questions must be answered and, therefore, where the ultimate source of one’s actions is to be identified. This model seems to be in conflict, however, with an obvious fact of the human condition, namely, dependency. The first-person model typically tries to account for this by presenting the situations a subject is confronted with as hurdles or incentives for the exercise of their autonomy. Thus, this model assumes that one’s agency can be disentangled from the circumstances in which it is exercised, and that it is the subject’s ability to exercise their agency in any given context that makes them autonomous.

There are, however, some crucial cases of human dependency (moral luck, epistemic dependency, and so on) where this assumption is hard to preserve. In our view, all these worries constitute a serious case against the disentanglement assumption and, therefore, we must accept that human dependency is deeply entangled with our agency and, therefore, that the first-person model of autonomy is ultimately at odds with human dependency. Thus, we intend to elaborate an alternative model of autonomy which we will call the address model insofar as the overarching hypothesis that inspires this model is that a subject’s autonomy is to be assessed (and individuated) in light of their responsiveness to the scenes of address they are engaged in and, therefore, to their constitutive processes of triangulation. We will divide our elaboration and assessment of the address model into four work packages. WP1 to WP3 will examine some philosophical topics where the first-person model has come into severe difficulty when trying to account for the fundamental aspects of the corresponding phenomena and where the address model, in contrast, offers a far more promising alternative.