Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy by Alfred R. Mele

by Alfred R. Mele

This book addresses two related self-control and individual autonomy. In approaching these issues, Mele develops a conception of an ideally self-controlled person, and argues that even such a person can fall short of personal autonomy. He then examines what needs to be added to such a person to yield an autonomous agent and develops two overlapping one for compatibilist believers in human autonomy and one for incompatibilists. While remaining neutral between those who hold that autonomy is compatible with determinism and those who deny this, Mele shows that belief that there are autonomous agents is better grounded than belief that there are not.

Genres: Philosophy

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Alfred Remen Mele is an American philosopher. He has been the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University since 2000. He specializes in irrationality, akrasia, intentionality and philosophy of action.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mele attended Wayne State University, and received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1979. He took a position at Davidson College in 1979 as a visiting professor, which led to a tenured position at Davidson, where he remained for 21 years until accepting his position with Florida State.

Mele explores the concepts of autonomy or self-rule and the concept of self-control. as they relate to terms like "free will."

Without committing himself to the idea that human autonomy is compatible with determinism or incompatible (a position held by both libertarians and incompatibilists), Mele provides arguments in support of autonomous agents for both positions. He is, as he says, "officially agnostic about the truth of compatibilism" and describes his position as "agnostic autonomism."

Mele proposed a two-stage model of "Modest Libertarianism" that follows Daniel Dennett's 1978 "Valerian" model for decision making. Like Dennett, Mele requires that the indeterminism should come early in the overall process. He describes the latter - decision - part of the process as compatibilist (effectively determinist).

Reviews

[Dan DalMonte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an important gateway book into the free will literature. Mele is a difficult writer and his frequent examples get tedious, but sometimes are quite sharp and funny. This book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with self-control, and how we as humans are subject to weakness of will, or akrasia, in which we act in way that are contrary to our best judgment even without coercion. Mele claims that even the ideally self-controlled agent lacks autonomy, and then he speculates about the conditions that would be necessary to establish autonomy. An agent might be brainwashed to have the values she has, and so an externalist account of autonomy is needed to capture the importance of history in an agent's development. Even so, some libertarians may demand a degree of indeterminism that we may or may not have. Mele is mainly concerned, though, with rebutting the non-autonomist, and so he remains agnostic between compatibilism and incompatibilism. He claims that compatibilism offers a coherent picture of free agency, even though I don't think he successfully differentiates between causation and compulsion. If history is important, how is deterministic causation different from brainwashing or other forms of manipulation? Mele claims that libertarianism might also be true, insofar as certain nonoccurent beliefs that characterize us become occurent and inform a decision through an indeterministic process. If indeterminism turns out to be false, Mele can fall back on compatibilism to deal with the non-autonomist.
The problem is, I don't think Mele really does rebut the nonautonomist. His conditions for compatibilist freedom don't seem truly compatible with determinism. Is self-evaluation, and assessment of one's decision according to evidence, consistent with determinism? I think not, since it would only a psuedo-assessment ultimately determined by the luck of one's contextual factors. And Mele's libertarian agent is an automatic product of the determinism that follows from the indeterministic process filtering out her nonoccurent beliefs.