School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Start date: 2000 × End date: 2019 × Subject: Ethics × Author: Johnson, Thomas Anthony ×

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    Evolving autonomy : the mutual selection of social values
    Johnson, Thomas Anthony ( 2005)
    As essential preconditions for intelligent social action, the evolution of human reason and autonomy has considerable significance for the efficacy of moral and political systems. The synergistic co-evolution of these two faculties are shown to enhance the power of human agency in a manner consistent with organic selection processes, such as those proposed and elaborated by Baldwin and Piaget. The superior adaptability of human agents is manifested in the capacity to conceive and judge actions for their pragmatic value as means and ends that can be designed to alter the course of social evolution through co-operative institutions. Moral and political ideas based on the extension of natural co-operation are thereby construed as adaptive strategies that progressively reduce the influence of natural selection in determining human nature, while still requiring the continual growth of reason and autonomy as the indispensable conditions for maintaining and enhancing well-being. As an evolutionary stable strategy, reciprocal altruism is founded upon inherited categories and constraints in the pragmatism of human reasoning which restrict the feasibility of alternative moral and political systems. However, by acknowledging the evolutionary constraints and conditions which maintain and enhance human agency, those systems can be progressively and adaptively reconstructed in accordance with principles and norms of rational coherence and moral reasonability as modelled by the concept of an organic social contract. The hypothetical contract effectively models the dialectical process of social and moral adjustment suggested in Dewey's evolutionary account of reflective thought. By examining the essential conditions of agency in their ecological and dynamic dimensions, Gewirth's argument for establishing categorical rights to those conditions are modified to reflect the organic nature of the conditions which govern the development of adaptive moral agency. Finally, those adaptive concerns are found to be most accurately addressed by Sen's approach in attempting to rectify the inherited inequalities in agents' functional capabilities.