Externalist Autonomy and Availability of Alternatives

Abstract

as well. I shall call accounts adopting the first approach internalist, and those adopting the second externalist} The externalist approach is typi cally motivated by an example involving mind control, the most compel ling of these perhaps being psychological twins cases, in which two agents come to have exactly similar mental structures, but in one case that structure is the result of ordinary character-development processes while in the other it was implanted against the agent's will by a neurolo gist or intervening demon.2 We intuitively want to say that only the first agent possesses her mental structure autonomously, and that is a request, the externalist claims, that cannot be met by any internalist theory. Their present mental structures being exactly similar, the only way to distin guish between the autonomy of the two agents is, according to the exter nalist, to employ a theory of autonomy that looks beyond an agent's cur rent beliefs, desires, and abilities. The externalist theories with which I am concerned fall into two general camps, depending on whether the external factors to which they appeal concern (a) the way in which an agent's present mental structure came about, or (b) what that mental structure would be in some particular counterfactual scenario.3 The first,