This chapter will explore how the provisions governing best interests assessments ought to be reformed so as to better ensure that an agent’s authentic desires are being prioritised in decisions being taken about them. The starting point should be that the assessor ascertains ‘so far is reasonably practicable’ the individual’s wishes, feelings, beliefs, and values. This should then be supplemented by a presumption that the agent’s wishes and feelings will be determinative of what is in their best interests, except when giving effect to them will expose the person to a risk of significant harm. Even where the harms are significant, however, there will still be occasions where the agent’s wishes and feelings should nonetheless take precedence; where to do otherwise would involve frustrating their deeply and authentically held beliefs, values, or commitments. This chapter will highlight some of the potential considerations which ought to guide assessors in these circumstances. It will propose that assessors be provided with a list of factors that they must take into account when determining the degree of weight to be ascribed to the agent’s wishes, which reflect these considerations.

The foregoing discussion has highlighted the fundamental fragility of assessments of capacity, which hinge on a series of complex yet unavoidable clinical judgements about the person’s cognitive capacities and the origins of the beliefs or values that motivate their decision. This chapter will explore the implications of this for best interests assessments and, in particular, the extent to which due weight is currently being given to the person’s authentically held values and beliefs in the assessment of their best interests. Drawing on case law, interviews, and post-legislative scrutiny of the Mental Capacity Act, it will conclude that despite a number of empowering court decisions, the lack of direction contained in the Act on how to apply the MCA has still resulted in different weight being attributed to the agent’s wishes. Moreover, the trend towards greater empowerment has not yet trickled down to decisions being taken on the ground by doctors and care workers, which still remain characterised largely by paternalism and risk aversion. Those undertaking best interests assessments could therefore benefit from a more unified starting point and greater clarity on the factors which ought to influence the degree of weight accorded to the individual’s wishes.

This chapter will explore a key problem with the current law’s approach – namely, that it is impossible to assess a person’s capacity to ‘use or weigh’ the information relevant to a decision without engaging with the values that underpin their decision. It will suggest that while some recourse to the person’s values is unavoidable, the current approach gives assessors ample room to invoke other values when assessing the person’s capacity, thus creating space for paternalistic judgments to go unchecked. Despite this risk, it will be claimed that in many of the cases in which this occurs, underpinning the assessment is in fact a concern that the values or beliefs that motivate a person’s decision have been affected by an illness or impairment, such that the decision reached is not one that the agent would have made, but for that disorder or impairment. The current law cannot account for this, and so assessors are forced to manipulate the test for capacity instead. While this prevents unnecessary harm, it has the effect of obscuring the value-laden and highly controversial claims that may underpin such decisions, which remain insulated from scrutiny or challenge.

The aim of this chapter is to show how the relationship between education and freedom is informed by the ethics of authority. Freedom is a central human value. Education contributes to our humanity. If human freedom is something valuable for all, and education is necessary for the promotion of this value, then we need an agent – an authority – that can direct our efforts in support of this educational goal. The chapter describes two different justifications of political authority over education that are (plausibly) compatible with an education for human freedom. Each offers a different view on the necessity of educational institutions – and institutional authority more generally – in realizing worthwhile educational goals.

This chapter introduces the theoretical literature concerning children’s rights. Although there is now widespread international agreement that children possess human rights, the theoretical underpinning of those rights is often said to be under-theorised. Further, sceptics have questioned whether children’s rights undermine their interests and the central place of the family in protecting those interests. This chapter addresses these debates, considering the theoretical basis on which children hold rights, the content of those rights and the connection between moral rights and international human rights law.

This chapter examines the duties of states to insiders (people living within a state’s physical territory) and outsiders (people in other states). It is argued that states have, provided the initiation of securitization is otherwise justified and that must cause is satisfied, an overriding duty to secure insiders from objective existential threat via securitization. Regarding morally mandatory other-securitization, the picture is more mixed, a range of costs to the self, including (1) the risk of death, disease, and disability; (2) the risk of instability and insecurity; and (3) financial costs can override an individual state’s obligation to secure and – where necessary – securitize outsiders from threat. This chapter goes on to examine what happens to pro tanto duties if states are liable for threat creation abroad. Moreover, it suggests a ranking of different triggers for remedial responsibility derived from common-sense morality, enabling the pinpointing of specific states as primary duty-bearers for morally mandatory other-securitization.

Chapter 8 takes up what the subjectivity of socially embedded individuals involves. On the externalist view of individual autonomy, subjectivity is an embodied subjectivity because institutions and social relationships affect people’s choices and actions. To explain this idea, the chapter reviews the situated cognition and the embodied and distributed cognition literatures in cognitive science and psychology to explain the connection between social embeddedness and subjectivity. It then returns to the capability conception of individuals and what individual and personal identity involves. Using a two-level view of people’s capabilities, it argues that socially embedded individuals develop first-order capabilities regarding specific kinds of things that they can be and do and also a second-order self-concept or self-narrative capabilities in conjunction with one another, and rely on the latter to evaluate themselves in relation to their capability development. This discussion draws on the thinking of developmental psychologist Carl Rogers. How, and the extent to which, this understanding of individuals allows us to explain them as distinct and re-identifiable individuals closes the chapter.

Drawing on Putnam’s famous fact–value entanglement argument, Chapter 7 shows how economics is inescapably value-entangled, and argues that while economics is an inherently value-laden discipline it may still be an objective one. It describes economics’ value structure as being anchored by its main normative ideal shared across different approaches, individual realization – what most people in the discipline believe is most valuable and good about human society and characteristic of human nature. It compares two competing interpretations of what that ideal involves – one in mainstream economics and one in capability economics – distinguishing them according to the different additional values regarding what well-being involves, they adopt to give content to the individual realization ideal. It then evaluates these two approaches according to whether their different value structures are consistent – an analysis I characterize as value disentanglement. After this, the chapter turns to a general framework for ethics and economics – or ethics in economics – distinguishes four different forms of disciplinary relationships between economics and ethics, and argues that while cross-disciplinarity best describes the current status of economics and ethics, transdisciplinarity represents an aspirational conception of what an objective, value-laden economics ultimately requires.

This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”

Having addressed exploitation and violence towards elders, the book moves to consider how some enslavers chose the less physical – but no less cruel – route of abandoning, selling, or simply neglecting enslaved people once they had become “old and broken.” Chapter 2 covers manumission laws and the efforts of enslavers to work around these; the significance of age to the dynamics of, and experiences in, the internal slave trade; and the tragic consequences of neglect for elders deemed unproductive by those whom enslaved them. Proslavery claims of “retirement” or of care from cradle-to-grave were no match for the economic self-interest of enslavers, small and large, and the driving force of slavery revolved around taking the “best years and the best strength” from enslaved people. This chapter shows how enslaved people understood this exploitative dynamic, and the horrifying consequences of it for Black elders, all too well

Proponents of the harm principle often appeal to a notion of personal sovereignty in setting out their position. This notion helps to fix the application of the harm principle. Critics of the harm principle seize on this point and argue that, once a principle of sovereignty is introduced, it can do all the work that needs doing. Appeals to harm become otiose. Further, the critics contend, the harm principle cannot explain the impermissibility of certain “harmless” wrongs, such as those involved in harmless trespass. This chapter assesses this sovereignty-centered critique of the harm principle. It argues that neither the harm principle nor the sovereignty principle enjoys priority over the other. The two principles complement each other with neither meriting a privileged position. The chapter then discusses the content and stringency of the sovereignty principle, and its relation to the Volenti Maxim, which holds that a person is not harmed or wronged by that to which they consent. The critical discussion of the Volenti Maxim, in turn, reveals limits to the sovereignty principle.

Chapter 2 argues that the anarchist theses can be derived from a single meta-principle that limits which moral theories qualify as theoretically acceptable. This posited moral tyranny constraint holds that a theory of duties is acceptable only if full compliance with that theory (and the demands of morality more generally) would not allow any person to unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably act in a way that would leave others with less advantage than they would have possessed given some other choice by the agent. After explicating the constraint, the chapter defends its plausibility, arguing that it should be accepted on both foundationalist and coherentist grounds. The chapter then explains how the constraint entails three of the posited anarchist theses (the consent theory of legitimacy, the Lockean proviso, and luck egalitarianism’s responsibility component). Finally, it addresses three potential objections that might be raised against the moral tyranny constraint.

The chapter focuses on how the behavioural insights discussed in previous chapters affect policy, and how policy can use behavioural incentives to be more effective. It offers examples of policy interventions that have been successful in settings around the world. It provides some history and context for the proliferation of behavioural economics-related efforts in policy and in heath policy specifically. It describes four of the frameworks used to describe policymaking with behaviour in mind; MINDSPACE, COM-B, EAST and BASIC. It includes examples from international contexts where behavioural health policies have been enacted.