Autonomy, Evidence-Responsiveness, and the Ethics of Influence

The impact of smart wearables on the decisional autonomy of vulnerable persons

“…If I am physically addicted to a narcotic and out of addictive compulsion choose to sell my most prized possession for a fix, this is (at least) not fully autonomous. For our purposes, we will follow Niker et al (2021) in holding that to decide autonomously is for that decision to be:…”

“…Even the prohibition on real-time remote biometrics, though more obviously aimed at preserving privacy (as mentioned already, unquestio nably an important moral consideration and one intimately ties to auto nomy itself), contains risks of autonomy impairment as it might coerce citizens out of public spaces. This is unsurprising, given that the protection of human rights is the chief moral principle at work in the draft law, and such rights have a long history of association with considerations of autonomy (Pateman 2002;Thrasher 2019;Niker et al 2021). It should be noted, however, that the EU draft law explicitly takes harm as the foremost consideration for evaluating the risk posed by a particular AI technology.…”

“…This is clearly a case where the nudge serves to promote welfare, while at the same time not obviously infringing on the autonomy of the user. But nudges can be better than autonomy-neutral, and in some cases can actively strengthen a user's capacity for self-governance (Levy 2017;Niker 2021). Envisage the following scenario: a smoker seeks to break her addiction, and to this end she purchases a health wearable that can remind a user of the dangers of smoking, perhaps accompanying the warning with off-putting images, when it detects the user is smoking.…”

“…This is particularly true if nudges operate by bypassing our deliberative capacities (Grüne-Yanoff 2012). Secondly, nud ging can serve to prevent or impair the development of capacities necessary for autonomy by cutting a user off from irreplaceable learning experiences (Blöser et al 2010;Niker et al 2021). This is exacerbated when the nudgee is the target of many concerted nudges or the source of the nudging is unreflectively integrated into the nudgee's decision-making.…”

Autonomous Military Systems: collective responsibility and distributed burdens

“…It is built on an individualist understanding of responsibility, where the only legitimate bearers of responsibility are individuals. However, decisions and actions are rarely free of influence from others in the way that this individualist notion of responsibility requires (Levy, 2018;Niker et al, 2021): they are often are the result of collective reasoning, agreement or negotiation (French 1979;List and Pettit 2011;Collins 2018). Consider the paradigmatic case of a decision reached by the executive committee of a corporation to undertake a given course of action.…”