Patrick Williamson (St Cross College): 'Demandingness and Autonomy'
Abstract: It’s regularly thought that certain moral requirements are overly demanding. I raise the following puzzle: some of the requirements which most strongly evoke the demandingness intuition are requirements which would not make the relevant agent worse-off. The puzzle can only be solved, I suggest, by becoming pluralists about demandingness. A requirement can be overly demanding insofar as it requires that I shoulder substantial welfarist costs, or alternatively, insofar as it undermines my capacity to exercise a certain kind of architectural autonomy over the course of my future life. I argue that this kind of pluralism can accommodate our various intuitions about demandingness, and furthermore, that it is has explanatory advantages over alternative pluralist proposals. Finally, I show that extant attempts to draw a connection between autonomy and demandingness have made important wrong turns in a way which inadvertently conceals some of the as yet unsolved challenges facing proponents of an autonomy-based approach to demandingness objections.
