Beyond the Reason-Emotion Divide: Philosophical Theories of Autonomy from a Neuroscience Perspective

Abstract

This dissertation explores how recent neuroscience research might bear on philosophical theories of personal autonomy, with a special focus on the work of Christine Korsgaard and Harry Frankfurt. A central question within the personal autonomy literature is what gives our actions self-governing authority? Many approaches have answered this question with requirements about how we ought to reason or feel about our desires. One prominent way of dealing with this question of authority is a requirement of reason being “in control” of our emotions, presenting the relationship between reason and emotion as competitive processes fighting for control over our decisions. However, by examining recent neuroscience research related to the concept of autonomy, I argue that this research paints a different picture, where reason and emotion function cooperatively rather than antagonistically. Furthermore, the research suggests a prominent role for emotion in many different autonomy-related processes. In order to widely capture the many processes that underlie autonomy, I discuss the neuroscience of decision-making, self-control, voluntary action, and the conscious feelings related to agency and ownership over our actions. I examine some of the emerging trends in cognitive neuroscience that suggests that complex behaviours like decision-making and self-control emerge from large-scale neural networks located across widely distributed areas of the brain, where cognitive, emotional, and motivational information are deeply integrated at the neural level. I argue that this new notion of cognitive, emotional and motivational information as integrated in various processes, such as decision-making and control, has a direct impact on the concept of personal autonomy. First, this integration suggests that cognitive, emotional and motivational information all cooperatively contribute to autonomy processes, rather than competing. Second, the research suggests a larger role for emotion and motivation in processes like decision-making and self-control than is commonly assumed in philosophical theories of autonomy. Therefore, I argue that this integrated neuroscientific perspective highlights some important tensions between the neuroscience research on autonomy processes and philosophical theories of personal autonomy, like those of Korsgaard and Frankfurt. I examine the possible implications that the neuroscience of decision-making, self-control, voluntary action, and conscious feelings of agency may have on the autonomy theories of Korsgaard and Frankfurt. I point out several key tensions between the neuroscience research and how these theories of autonomy understand desires as motivating our actions, the role of emotion in decision-making and self-control, and whether we ought to rely on our conscious feelings of agency and control over our actions when determining whether our actions are autonomous. I suggest overall that an integrated neuroscientific understanding of the processes that support autonomy-related behaviours can provide a novel approach to understanding the concept of personal autonomy.