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 When not only may we interfere in others’ lives, but must we?

I. Introduction
When we may or must interfere can refer both to concrete and to general conditions under

which these are the case. Concrete conditions are along the lines of the following example:

imagine that you are a physically strong person and you see that a child is physically

threatened by a drunk stranger. What must you do? Since this approach would basically

produce a list of situation such as these (X 1, X2, … Xn) with morally correct responses (Y1, Y2,

… Yn) – an exercise in stipulating all of these concrete situations would be practically

impossible.

Instead, I focus on general and procedural conditions. My main argument is that deciding

when one may and must interfere is context-specific and requires certain competences and

virtues from individuals. Through approximation or imagination of individuals with these

qualities, we can come to similar conclusions as these idealized individuals. The answer I

propose is therefore procedural rather than substantive.

To elaborate, these competences and virtues belong to idealized individuals which are (1)

mentally calm and reflective, (2) rational and reasonable, and (3) critical of own and

surrounding values. The deliberations of such a person should, in other words, be decisive

when deciding under which circumstances one may or must interfere with another person

The question points to the tension between the several values we might hold. This essay

suggests that the question presumes a triadic relationship, including (1) aspects of the negative

autonomy of the interferee, (2) aspects of the positive autonomy of the interferer, and (3) a

value that trumps both. The procedural account helps to decide what the values of (3) ought to

be.

2
It should by now be clear that the essay will not delve into thorny metaphysical and

theological questions on the fundaments and methods of realist morality. Instead I utilize a

pragmatic psychological account to arrive at moralities which can be respected by those who

suggest them and the communities and societies these individuals belong to.

In order to explain my argument, I first look into what the relevant terms in the question mean

and how they interact with the other terms of the question. From these interactions, I derive a

triadic relationship that exposes the field of tension between several relevant values. Third, I

argue why when deciding which values are relevant and should trump other values, a

psychological and pragmatic account is reasonable. Fourth, this account shapes my decision

to look at an idealized individual account that provides the procedure from which we ought to

attain moral judgements. Fifth, I explain how this account is to interact with priorly held

values and the values that surround someone. Finally, I anticipate a reasonable

counterargument, after which I show how such a context-specific morality is more robust than

initially might seem to be the case.

II. Conceptual and logical analysis

Any attempt to answer a complicated question benefits from understanding its concepts and

their logical connections. In this case these are: interference, may, and must. The first concept

refers to the intentional obstruction of future action or the disruption of current action through

force, e.g. physical. The second word, may, refers to the moral permission to do certain

actions, while must refers to the obligation to do so. In the question, we are asked when we are

both allowed and obliged to interfere. I take when to refer to the set of circumstances or

conditions rather than a point in time.

When these words are combined, they get more complex meanings. When person R is

morally allowed to interfere with person Q this means that the negative freedom of Q is

3
morally limited by the positive freedom of interferer R. However, if R is both allowed and

obliged to interfere with Q, this means that R is morally limited in his positive freedom by an

external obligation, while Q is morally limited, again, in his negative freedom. In my usage,

morally limited means that we ought to believe they ought to be physically limited given the

circumstances they are in. We generally believe that rapists and murderers are morally limited

and that they should therefore be physically limited.

Underlying these considerations is another important term: autonomy. The conditions under

which one is allowed and obliged to interfere with another person correspond to when certain

aspects of autonomy are trumped by other values. With autonomy – Greek for ‘self-rule’ –

Christman (2015) understands two things:

1. The ability to deliberate freely about one’s values, identity, and interests without

undue obstructions and pressures by others,

2. The ability to attempt to effectuate these values, interests, desires in the real world.

Coming back to the main question, we can notice that it holds the following premise: there are

certain circumstances under which permission and obligation to interfere are conceivable or

possible. Given our conceptual analysis, we can display this premise through a triadic

relationship:

1. Certain aspects of the negative autonomy of the interferee,

2. Certain aspects of the positive autonomy of the interferer,

3. A value that trumps both.

This relationship holds when the first part (A n) and the second part (Ap) are trumped by

another value or values (V). We can express this as follows: ‘An < V > Ap.’

4
In this section, I have set up the general logical structure of the question. Much revolves

around how to find the relative value of the autonomy-trumping value or values. In the next

section, I will set the first step towards answering this question.

III. Psychological pragmatism

What these autonomy-trumping values are is the open question of this argument. Focusing on

the psychology of humans, we can look at the sorts of things they respect, find important,

worth protecting, and motivating. I imagine these autonomy-trumping values not to exist as

part of a list of other commitments but rather as part of a complex web of values that

individuals hold.1 What we find important, in general terms, are related to the creation,

preservation, and attainment of things necessary, useful, good, and beautiful – while

distancing ourselves from what we find repulsive and disgusting. Relatedly, autonomy is

generally considered either inherently good or a useful means to other ends. In many cultures,

it holds a certain self-evident weight. In particular, when our actions do not directly harm

others, we expect others to respect our space of action. However, other values might be

considered more important under certain circumstances.

What we consider in a positive or a negative light is not only part of the human condition, but

also varies across individual genes, temperaments, and cultures. 2 For most of the benefits of

the world, we need to cooperate with others and we need systems that guarantee our basic

interests. This is along the lines of a Hobbesian contractarianism. 3 Scanlon (2000), on the

other hand, suggests that our moral compass is not only egoistic and self-directed but also

aims to respect others. At any rate, morality also needs to be social in order to make sense

1
Exemplified by the holism of Neurath’s boat. (Neurath 1983, 92)

2
Regarding disgust and morality, social scientist Jonathan Haidt et al., (1994) have done research that shows a

connection between temperamental differences, disgust-sensitivity, and moral judgements.

3
Described in chapter 13 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).

5
given our basic psychological properties. We can derive the following moral psychological

claims from this section:

1. Morality is a means to attain and secure positive goods while removing negative ones,

2. motivates us (to some extent) or makes us feel some shame or guilt when we fail to

adhere to them,

3. is part of our repertoire of social sensibilities, and

4. is connected to a web of underlying values and expectations.

This listing finishes our discussion between the inherent relationship between human

psychology and morality. The next two sections will highlight the importance of respect for

judgements as mentioned in this section. In particular, I discuss how our selective respect for

judgements means we need an idealized account as a procedure to attain respectable moral

rules.4

IV. The divided self

We have a pre-existing sense of morality that we sometimes see as represented through

institutions such as the judiciary. 5 However, when a soldier of expensive lawyers win a court

from a poor defendant, we may feel there is something fishy about this ruling. Similarly,

when courts of banana republics find all political opponents of the dictator guilty of a crime,

we do not necessarily respect this ruling. This is, in simple terms, what is meant with our

selectiveness of respect for judgements. We do this for our own individual judgements as

well. During calm times, we would not trust our judgement to our future angry, frustrated, or
4
This notion is inspired by the Griffinian informed-desire account which states that ‘utility is the fulfilment of

desires that persons would have if they appreciated the true nature of their objects.’ (Griffin 1989, 11)
5
Primatologist Frans de Waal (2005) explains in Our Inner Ape how our early phylogenetic ancestors such as

chimps, bonobos, but also macaque monkeys have primitive moral dispositions: they care about fairness,

especially when they are the victim.

6
manic self. This division between the different states of an individual is not new and is echoed

in a dialogue in The Republic of Plato:

“[Is justice] truth-telling and paying back what one has received from anyone, or may

these very actions sometimes be just and sometimes unjust? I mean, for example, as

everyone I presume would admit, if one took over weapons from a friend who was in his

right mind and then the lender should go mad and demand them back, that we ought not

to return them in that case and that he who did so return them would not be acting justly

—nor yet would he who chose to speak nothing but the truth to one who was in that

state.”

(Plato The Republic, book I, 331d)

Plato thought that our souls existed of three parts: the wise, the passionate, and the desirous.

Some modern psychologists have theories that are not too unsimilar to the ancients.

According to them, thinking occurs either through automatic unconscious processes and

explicit and controlled conscious processes.6 This conception of a divided self can also be

found in our usage of the rational and the emotional as separate elements of our being. This

apparent division prompts the question which part of our embodiment gets to decide what we

are to value and to pursue.

My assumption is that even though we value our emotions and desires, we do not like to

identify ourselves with our instincts or uncontrollable desires. Tobacco addicts might agree

that they smoke too often, but often add that they want to stop. In other words: the addiction is

conceptualized as external. Moreover, when we are angry, we might temporarily hold other

norms than when we are not. When we are in love, we might let another person mistreat us

more often than we would have allowed otherwise.

6
Part of the dual process theory of thought, argued for psychologists like Daniel Levitt and Daniel Kahneman

(2011).

7
We often either regret or try to forget these actions or omissions. This means that even though

these nonrational states are parts of us, their sole judgements enjoy less respect than our calm,

conscious, and reflective self.7 To be sure, this does not mean that desires and emotions

should be cancelled out or considered void and unimportant for us to respect our judgements.

What is more, implying the psychological primacy of rationality and reflectiveness or its

independence from other dispositions might be seriously misguided. The point is that a certain

peace of mind necessitates some level of prudence that we cannot conjure up when we are

overwhelmed by distress, desires, or emotions.

To end, if our selective respectability of judgements, as proposed in this section, is true, what

we believe are our core values cannot be satisfactorily decided or cancelled when we are, for

instance, in an emotional storm, suffer great pains, or are tired and sleepy.

V. Idealized account

The previous section discussed the many ways in which we are in suboptimal states. Given

the ambitious claim of our idealized account, we are more often than not in this deficient

state. This means that proper moral judgement needs either some exertion on the side of the

person who is to judge and criticism of his or her day-to-day judgements. We can, indeed,

either try to approximate this idealized state or use it as a thought experiment: what would our

idealized account decide under these circumstances? So far we have only pointed out one of

the three characteristics of my idealized account: peace of mind versus being overwhelmed

by desires and emotions.

7
Immanuel Kant (1781) referred to this respect for the rational as Achtung (Ak 4:401), which he deemed to be a

guiding motivating principle of human cognition. My account allows for a compassionate or desirous

reflectiveness, instead of a Reine Vernunft.

8
Two other considerations also have a reasonable claim to be part of this account. I now dis-

cuss the second. Imagine, for instance, that someone has a certain peace of mind but does not

have certain other virtues, capacities, and competences. Think of people who are uncareful

when formulating their thoughts leading to frequent contradictions or people who are not soci-

able but have strictly egoistic, narcissistic, or, sociopathic tendencies. To start with a simple

example, an 8-year old might argue that (1) he ought to have full autonomy, while (2) he be-

lieves adults should interfere as much as they want. Regardless of a certain peace of mind,

these two propositions do not allow for a workable ethics. Other problems occur when people

with sociopathic tendencies completely discard sociability, making them lack both impartial-

ity and consistency. The second set of characteristic are therefore: the virtue and competence

to prevent contradictions, impartialities, and inconsistencies.

No argument is necessary to display the problems with contradictions in reflective thought.

But the problems of partiality and inconsistency might require more explanation. In the next

section, I will propose that the antonyms of these two terms (impartiality and consistency) are

the necessary building blocks of moral thinking and should therefore guide much of our moral

reasoning.

In short, this section explored how the idealized subject allows for a procedure of value

assertion which are, upon proper reflection, respected. This procedure will prove useful when

trying to answer what the relative value of other (candidate) values (V) in relationship to

autonomy (A) is. In other words, idealized subjects are part of the procedure to decide when

one may and must interfere with another person and when others are able to do the same.

The next section dives into the question why preventing contradictions, partiality, and

inconsistency are problematic for our account of pragmatic morality.

9
VI. Primacy of coherence, impartiality, and consistency
Taking a closer look at the second characteristic of our idealized account, we find certain vir-

tues and competences. These, in turn, lead to the prevention of contradictions, partiality, and,

inconsistency whenever we have a moral judgement. Impartiality and inconsistency, in partic-

ular, imply that whatever moral judgements we have in general, should also apply to

ourselves and without exceptions given similar circumstances. That is, we cannot be capri-

cious when a moral judgement risks affecting a member of our family or ourselves, nor can

we decide to have a stronger moral judgement because we have had a bad day. Thus, so far, I

have conceived morality as both socially constructed and both self and other-directed, but

have not yet completely argued why this is a reasonable pragmatic assumption.

I mentioned the Hobbesian contractarianism and the Scanlonian contractualism. The first ar-

gues that we agree to moral norms for our self-protection, the second adds that we also care

about others. In both cases, we have to realize that in order to create a harmonious together-

ness, we need moral systems that guarantee that others respect our rights when we are being

judged and that the caprices of individuals do not become a fear for us. A small minority of

individuals might not feel that others deserve their consideration, they might agree with

Glaucon’s rebuttal from The Republic that ‘it seems best to be have the reputation of being

just, while benefiting from being unjust.’ (Book II) But even they should know that if every-

one would believe this, they would be in a dangerous place. Therefore it is better to instil a

certain level of conscience and virtue in others. In our times, we value inclusiveness and

might not want to discard this egocentric point of view. However, I suggest that living to-

gether in communities and societies require certain basic competences and attitudes that a

small minority of people might simply not hold. Aristotle put this most harshly when he said:

10
 “Society is something that precedes the individual. Man is by nature a social

animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally or cannot lead

the common life is either a beast or a god.” (Aristotle, paraphr. Politics 1253a)

Coming back to my previous point, allowing inconsistencies would beat the very purpose of

moral systems, which is to prevent arbitrary and illegitimate interference in our lives and the

lives of others. At any rate, moral systems and attitudes that are partial and inconsistent would

be threats to our basic needs. This intuition is so strong that we do not know of a normative

ethical tradition in our canons that does not emphasise these two conditions. The Kantian

deontologists are sceptical and dismissive of anything that reeks of partiality and

inconsistency when deciding one’s duties, the utilitarians (at least in its standard form)

emphasise impartiality to the point that they remove the special obligations to family

members and loved ones and merely look at happiness creation and pain prevention. The

social contract theorists Hobbes and Locke found such contracts to be necessary or useful to

live in harmony with others without the caprice, arbitrariness, and thus inconsistency and

partiality of other people. Hobbes, admittedly, does allow the Leviathan to be capricious, but

only to prevent the bigger evil: the all-against-all perennial and unpredictable conflicts that,

according to him, are in the nature of pre-society. Much of our ethical canon therefore seems

to look for ways to reduce social anxiety caused by the potential whim of others.

To be sure, this does not mean that impartiality and consistency amount to normative equality

since, for instance, individuals in more authority-oriented societies might expect or want their

leaders to have certain powers they do not have. But even they would agree that he should act

within the bounds of his role e.g. support his people and punish transgression.

To summarize, this section discussed the idealized account in two of the three conditions:

1. Mental calmness

11
 2. Reasonableness and virtue preventing failures of moral judgement such as

contradiction, partiality, and, inconsistency.

The next section discusses how these properties ought to interact with our individual context,

the values that we hold, and the cultures that surround us. This discussion will make way to

the assertion of the third and final characteristic of our idealized account which amounts to a

certain critical attitude towards our current values, attitudes, and culture.

VII. Context-specificity
An important part of this argument is that morality is and should be taken as context-specific.

Individual temperament, sex and gender, age and socioeconomic class, family and personal

interests are among contextual factors that can affect the reasoning of the idealized individual.

Especially upbringing and early childhood values might turn out to be the most influential. As

was stated before, our values are connected to the web of other values that we have internal-

ized over time. Remember also the triadic relationship that we had suggested. How much we

value autonomy and what we believe trumps autonomy and under which circumstances do not

occur in voids. They are the products of the embodied history of individuals.

One might therefore ask: since moral judgements are contingent, why do we not hold that all

morality is relative and that, as such, morality is nothing more than one’s expression of norm-

ativity at a given point in time? I reject this for two reasons. First of all, the idealized subject

account of moral judgement does not consider all dispositions, opinions, instincts, or desires

as morally valid. Some people may lack basic rational skills, others might lack the sociability

to form a useful and respectable moral system. Secondly, our idealized account forces us to

reject a naïve absorption of cultural, political, or even legal norms. From time to time, partial

interests and feelings of resentment and hate – think of Nazi Germany – might shift the dis-

12
course of a people towards attitudes they would never have promoted in their children in calm

times.

Another example is how egalitarianism, freedom, and brotherhood mentality can be found in

the canonization of French Revolution thought. The possibility that modern policies of France

(indirectly) promote segregation does not change this paradigmatic value. Nor does it, for in-

stance, change the framework of Christianity that clerics throughout history have been corrupt

e.g. promised heaven in exchange of money or that they were, in more recent times, involved

in scandals involving sexual misconduct.

Finally, the context-specificity does mean that criticisms from one context might not apply to

other contexts. What one group might consider exalted morality, does not have to be

represented by another group of people to be called moral. Cultures are complex systems that

cannot be analysed by viewing a small set of interactions or roles. One might simultaneously

reject the moral validity of patriarchy in one’s own context, while holding that in such

systems fathers ought to take care of the material needs of their wife and children (i.e. are

morally limited) – even at their own peril.

VIII. Conclusion
With this final part being added, the idealized account can be summarised to hold three

conditions:

1. We should be unhindered by strong and fleeting emotions and desires,

2. Reject basic errors through reasonableness and virtue: contradiction, partiality, and

consistency,

3. Aim towards paradigmatic values rather than morality supported by the fashion of the

day.

13
When we approximate or imagine this idealized account, we are most apt to make moral

claims about the moral limit of others. This way, we answer the question when we may and

must interfere with the autonomy of another.

To be sure, no direct answer to dividing autonomy related questions such as euthanasia,

abortion, or capital punishment are provided. However, this account pushes us to make sure

we are in the right psychological state and that our conventions follow paradigmatic

guidelines. In this way, we provide a procedure based solution that respects the context-

specificity of morality and can demand a higher form of moral discourse that rejects relativist

shortcuts or top-down paternalism.

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‘Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)’, 2015.

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Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance. Reprint.

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Haidt, Jonathan, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin. ‘Individual Differences in Sensitivity to

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Differences 16, no. 5 (1 May 1994): 701–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(94)90212-7.

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Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Riga, 1785.

Locke, John. Two Treatises on Government. London, 1689.

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