What Justifies Judgments of Inauthenticity?

Jesper Ahlin

doi:10.1007/s10730-018-9356-5

Abstract

The notion of authenticity, i.e., being “genuine,” “real,” or “true to oneself,” is sometimes held as critical to a person’s autonomy, so that inauthenticity prevents the person from making autonomous decisions or leading an autonomous life. It has been pointed out that authenticity is difficult to observe in others. Therefore, judgments of inauthenticity have been found inadequate to underpin paternalistic interventions, among other things. This article delineates what justifies judgments of inauthenticity. It is argued that for persons who wish to live according to the prevailing social and moral standards and desires that are seriously undesirable according to those standards, it is justified to judge that a desire is inauthentic to the extent that it is due to causal factors that are alien to the person and to the extent that it deviates from the person’s practical identity. The article contributes to a tradition of thinking about authenticity which is known mainly from Frankfurt and Dworkin, and bridges the gap between theoretical ideals of authenticity and real authenticity-related problems in practical biomedical settings.

Highlights

Personal autonomy, i.e., self-determination, is a central notion in contemporary bioethics
I.e., being “genuine,” “real,” “true to oneself,” or similar, is held as critical to a person’s autonomy, so that inauthenticity prevents the person from making autonomous decisions or leading an autonomous life
I do not claim that my proposal is the only way to justify judgments of inauthenticity

Summary

Introduction

I.e., self-determination, is a central notion in contemporary bioethics. By “sanctionist theories,” for instance, I intend a hypothetical theory which only displays sanctionist features, the wording is only for pedagogical reasons; authenticity theories can display features from more than one category, and to different degrees One strength of this taxonomy is that it shows that two distinct families of theories are conflated in Noggle’s taxonomy, namely, those that emphasize affirmative self-reflection and those that emphasize coherence. Consider this thesis, which is formulated with sanctionism as a starting point: The dissenting self-reflection thesis: Judgments of inauthenticity are justified if there is sufficient reason to believe that the desire-holder would disapprove of having the desire upon informed and critical self-reflection. They are spelled out dialectically after this short but important subsection on a fixed point in the analysis

A Fixed Point in the Analysis

A Delimiting Clause

Concluding Remarks