Eze Paez, visiting researcher – « A Republic for All Sentients: Social Freedom Without Free Will » (en ligne | online)

Eze Paez, chercheur invité au CRÉ/GRÉEA, « A Republic for All Sentients: Social Freedom Without Free Will »

Cette activité a lieu dans le cadre des Midis de l’éthique du CRÉ. Pour obtenir le lien zoom, contacter: valery.giroux@umontreal.ca

Abstract

Most nonhuman animals, whether domesticated or wild, live on the terms imposed on them by human beings. This condition of being under the mastery of another, or domination, is what the intellectual tradition of republicanism has identified as political unfreedom. There are several desiderata that a successful republican account must meet if it is to be an intellectually satisfactory and practically workable political philosophy for an interspecies community. It is necessary to show that freedom as nondomination is something from which animals can benefit, and that it can be robustly secured through a system of laws and social norms. In this article I discuss part of the problem of freedom: that is, how social freedom as nondomination can be a good for agents who lack a free will, as animals presumably do. First, sentient animals are intentional systems that make choices in a reliably reason-responsive way and perceive at least some things as inherently attractive or avoidable. If it can be valuable for typical human adults to retain control of their choices and decide on their own terms, then it can be valuable for less cognitively complex intentional agents as well. Furthermore, I argue that it is appropriate to use the language of freedom in order to articulate the problem of how to relate politically with them, since it is the one employed in the struggle for the political enfranchisement of those who have been denied full citizenship.