Agency, Authenticity and Individualism

My high school had around 100 students and a reputation for being where parents with money sent their fuck-up kids, although some were there because their hippie parents were attracted to the school’s branding and mission (e.g. calling teachers by their first names only, meditation before each class, logo that evoked liberal/environmentalist values). One of the values my school repeated, and had us repeat, was “authenticity.” When a kid would get in trouble for starting rumors or not doing homework, it was attributed to being “inauthentic” in their social relations or education. Most teenagers dislike “fakeness,” so this value was largely accepted as a positive thing. But a few of the smarter or more cynical teenagers noticed that the “authenticity” preached by the school still came with as many social standards as the mainstream to which we saw ourselves opposed, and more than one said to a teacher at some point “if I were truly living authentically, I would never do homework.” The fundamental problem with preaching authenticity is that you can only ever encourage people to “be themselves” within reason.

Every few months, twitter erupts into conflict over whether a woman was manipulated into sex. Sometimes, it has to do with “age gaps” and grooming, others, it’s about whether a powerful man implied or stated that careers could be made or broken based on a woman’s interactions with him. The one that stands out most to me, the now-old-news, logical conclusion of the #MeToo “movement,” was the Aziz Ansari callout, wherein he’s accused of manipulative coercion by trying to have sex while being famous and socially awkward. The contours of these debates are similar in each case – some say that consent was defective because of the “power dynamic,” the stakes, or the fear the woman experienced; others respond that this imagines women as lacking agency and is patronizing. Most people’s personal morality probably tries to split the difference: Weinstein was aggressive and brutal enough to overcome the resistance of his targets, and Elon and Grimes’ “age gap” is ridiculous to be upset over. But you cannot hold this perspective without believing that, at least sometimes, people do not exercise their agency, their decisions are not their own, and that is relevant to whether the situation was wrong.

There are similar issues in the “trans kids” debate. While many oppose transition in all cases, many believe that it is justifiable, just not in all cases. This group, sympathetic to trans adults, generally willing to use preferred pronouns, etc. is still shocked and unnerved by single moms claiming their sons have started saying they’re girls at age five or schools where multiple teenage girls “come out” as ftm trans simultaneously. These cases strike us as disturbing because there seem to be factors other than the individual’s own sense of their body causing the gender dysphoria; they look more like Munchausen’s by proxy or social contagion. But the question, for most of these sympathetic onlookers is “is the person REALLY trans?” or “is the decision to transition really their own or was it induced by social pressure? Was it authentic?”

Why care if a decision is what the individual, deep down, at the root of their being, wanted? Why worry if someone got married, took a job, or bought a house for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reasons at all? Remember that not everyone has an internal monologue (so they might not experience their deepest, truest self as a being that reasons). Why worry more about whether the person really intended their actions than whether those actions were good for them or others in the long haul?

With some things, it seems like we think this way. We only care about the reasons that people refrain from murdering if we think it indicates a likelihood that they actually will at some point, but most of us would not say that the lack of violence was actually bad because the person really did want to kill and only did not because they feared getting caught. We do not mind inauthenticity when the authentic move would result in massive harm, assuming that we disagree with the hippies that, since people are good at heart, behaving truly authentically could only lead to good and that any evil we observe is ipso facto the result of not following one’s true desires.

I’m not the first to notice that we seem to have a difficult time directly confronting the question of whether something is good. Even ethics professors, who should be most engaged in these debates, tend to avoid asking “is x good” and couch moral debates in terms of one of the three accepted schools, structuring their arguments around whether something is good “according to utilitarianism” or whether someone’s “defense of deontology fails.” For a culture more than willing to use morally charged rhetoric, we are somewhat reluctant to just ask and debate whether something is good, even in the narrow sense of good for a particular person or their family.

Imagine if we thought of a potential divorce this way. Instead of wondering whether the two people were still “compatible” or “right for each other,” i.e., whether they could still pursue their individual goals and/or desires if they stay together, we would instead ask questions like “who will this be good for? Who will it be bad for?” If assessing whether a person should transition, we would ask, if theoretically supportive, “will this person be happier and more fulfilled if they transitioned?” Or we would ask, if more skeptical, “is transition good at all?” Notice that these are different questions than “do they really want it?” In our new questions, we don’t care how badly, truly, or deeply the individual desires something if it would actually make them worse off. And notice that this is not about regret, or whether they later came to realize that they had inaccurately accessed their true desires – we simply do not care what the individual desires. We could ask whether things were good or bad even if we did not believe that the individual had true desires or existed at all.

We are very committed to the individual. We believe people should do what they want as long as they do not hurt others, but that puts a lot of pressure on “want.” Actions become moral, under individual-focused, agency/consent-based morality, when they are desired and the harmful externalities fall under a threshold. But if our desires never come from within, if there is no authenticity, then no decision can be moral because the first requirement is never met. Every sexual relationship becomes suspect because of power dynamics, even if it was healthy and good for both people (or when it was bad for one or both people for reasons that have nothing to do with consent). Every political movement becomes invalid because it was induced by the media or other elements of the ruling class, even if it is useful.

We think manipulation from the outside is bad, but is that the real issue? Or is wrongness dependent on something else entirely? Maybe the nature of the outside compulsion matters. We can follow the forces of desire, be completely at the mercy of our flesh and each other’s social pressure, or we can follow the force of morality. In which are we more bound?