The Challenge of Authentic Behavior

The goal of authentic behavior is postulated as an important factor in greater understanding of man as well as in more effective utilization of his potential, particularly in interpersonal relationships. The purposes and criteria for authentic behavior are described. The philosophical and psychological origins of authentic behavior are examined with particular reference to existentialism and humanistic psychology. Suggestions are offered for individual attainment of more authentic behavior. The core concern is the need for seeking greater implicit awareness of experiencing by deriving more felt meaning from experiences that involve both feeling and events or concepts. Such an expanded awareness can lead to the discarding of perceptual distortions and a greater accord between man's nature and the being of the world itself. Emphasis is placed on the serious responsibility for decisions resulting from authentic conduct. Implications of authentic behavior for personal living, for professional functions and for social action are outlined.     

Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault,the Will,and Freedom in Somatic Practice

This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can (rather than the I-will) cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political.     

Three types of freedom 1

Freedom interpreted as absence of restraints, as such, is a vacuous ideal. It requires reference to some setting and course of action in order to distinguish those restraints that block human effort from those, say, that support it. More broadly, this notion of freedom has little meaning and less value without some external criterion for evaluating human action and its conditions. Many thinkers have argued that the. criterion must be the absolute Truth — truth that is unconditioned, indubitable, and imperative. They have often argued that there is no freedom of error, and that the many persons who do not know such Truth are free only in obeying the few who do. This concept of freedom is often regarded as intolerable. A third possibility is to interpret freedom as a name for a range of significant alternatives for thought and action. Freedom, here, is compatible with truth interpreted in terms of the process of inquiry, rather than as substantive possession. It is a necessary condition for judging which restraints are real obstacles and which courses of action may be harmless, legitimate or good. The third meaning, especially, is illustrated with reference to the freedoms of utterance (expression) and speech (communication).     

Patterns of psychotherapy development: A mixed-method analysis using assimilation indices

Understanding how assimilation develops is essential in promoting personal change. By attending to signs or indices of assimilation in the speech of clients, therapists can use this process to assess how the therapy is developing and to tailor intervention. The system of assimilation indices was developed to use assimilation to understand the process of change. This system signals five sub-processes of assimilation: external distress, pain, noticing, decentring, and action. This study consisted of a longitudinal mixed-method analysis, following a multiple cases embedded design. The system of assimilation indices was applied to the recordings of nine psychotherapies and contrasted with both the outcome of the therapy and the perspectives of the therapists and clients about their therapy process. The results show that the system of indices is useful in understanding multiple pathways for assimilation. The system of indices is seen as a useful tool for understanding assimilation and as having clinical value in anticipating challenges to the success of the therapy. This study also shows how the indices are sensitive to the nuances in the change process observed in clinical settings.     

Exercising Doxastic Freedom

This paper defends the possibility of doxastic freedom, arguing that doxastic freedom should be modelled not on freedom of action but on freedom of intention. Freedom of action is exercised by agents like us, I argue, through voluntary control. This involves two conditions, intentions‐reactivity and reasons‐reactivity, that are not met in the case of doxastic states. Freedom of intention is central to our agency and to our moral responsibility, but is not exercised through voluntary control. I develop and defend an account of freedom of intention, arguing that constitutive features of intention ensure that freedom of intention cannot require voluntary control. Then I show that an analogous argument can be applied to doxastic states. I argue that if we had voluntary control of intentions or of doxastic states, this would actually undermine our freedom.     

Tolerance as a Primary Virtue

The commonly perceived tension between authentic moral and ethical action and action involving tolerance is held to be the illusory product of an unduly individualistic frame of thought. Moral and ethical actions are produced not by independent individuals but by participants in cultural traditions. And even the wholly routine continuation of a single homogeneous tradition must always and invariably involve mutual tolerance: participants must interact not as independent individuals but as tolerant members. Tolerance deserves recognition, accordingly, as a primary virtue, not merely compatible with authentic moral and ethical action, but required by it. An explicit rhetoric enjoining tolerance needs to be understood as performative discourse employed to change, or else to sustain, the systems of tolerances in which all cultures, whether simple or differentiated, homogeneous or diverse, unified or fragmented, invariably consist. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Tapestry of Black Anthropology of Freedom: Insights from James H. Cone and Frantz Fanon

Abstract: What is freedom without the ability to wonder and imagine new ways of being in the world? This question is at the heart of the works and contributions of Frantz Fanon and James H. Cone in their responses to the colonialities operating in the Black world, and the appropriate response to such colonialities through the medium of strategic alliances and a theological imagination of what it means to be human that is oriented towards blackness itself. However, since blackness is a production of white gaze, it is intended to embody pathologies of dehumanisation. Fanon and Cone do not shy away from shedding light on these pathologies. However, rather than slipping into the realm of nihilism, a pneumatological turn is articulated that allows for blackness to be a medium of encountering the gift of authentic humanity that is in solidarity with God's epiphany of life in the world. Fanon's and Cone's centring of rebellion as the pathway for an embrace of an anthropology of freedom is retrieved as a way of understanding the link between hope and a rich reading of anthropology of freedom that blackness evokes.     

Early Sartre on Freedom and Ethics

This paper offers a revisionary interpretation of Sartre's early views on human freedom. Sartre articulates a subtle account of a fundamental sense of human freedom as autonomy, in terms of human consciousness being both reasons‐responsive and in a distinctive sense self‐determining. The aspects of Sartre's theory of human freedom that underpin his early ethics are shown to be based on his phenomenological analysis of consciousness as, in its fundamental mode of self‐presence, not an object in the world (Section 1). Sartre has a multi‐level theory of the reasons‐sensitivity of consciousness. At one level, consciousness's being alive to reasons is a matter of the affective perception of values and disvalues as features of phenomenal objects (Section 2). This part of his theory, a development of Scheler's, is, however, situated within a broader phenomenological analysis resulting in the claim that the ultimate reasons acknowledged by consciousness neither are nor justifiably could be values adequately presentable as intentional objects. Consciousness's ultimate reasons are, in this sense, not given by the world but by itself (Section 3). Section 4 reconstructs and assesses Sartre's argument that consciousness cannot rationally have an ultimate end other than self‐transparent (‘authentic’) freedom itself.     

On the Value and Scope of Freedom

We have a practical, not merely theoretical interest in freedom. The question that is considered in this paper, is what it is that we value about freedom. It is proposed that what we value is being able to get what we most want (or value), because that is what we most want (or value). This account is compatible with determinism. Certain accounts opposed to determinism are considered and rejected. On these accounts freedom requires either a particular sort of indeterminism, or requires a special form of causation, agent-causation, or requires that the agent be a certain sort of self-constituting entity. It is argued that even if these accounts were less metaphysically problematic than they are, they would not give us a 'freedom' that we would value, nor would they secure conditions under which an action would be praise – or blameworthy. It is also argued, that a certain sort of capacity to control ourselves is not a precondition for freedom, though such a capacity would add to the scope of our freedom     

Can God or the Market Set People Free?

Both Protestant theologians and “preference” economists believe that freedom is necessary for moral action, but such theologians and economists have seemingly irreconcilable accounts of freedom and, thus also, morality. Instead of learning from each other, they typically ignore each other or claim that one field reigns supreme over the other. This essay digs into the theological and economic traditions of each side to find points of similarity between them. It engages Adam Smith and Ernst Troeltsch to develop a view of “ethical freedom” that pulls together the “libertarian freedom” emphasized by preference economics and the “egalitarian freedom” emphasized in much Protestant theology. The three‐part view of freedom draws the disciplines together and opens possibilities for a more robust theory of moral action.     

Judgement of Authenticity of Smiles and Detection of Facial indexes]

The smile is one of the most often expressed emotions during social interactions. It can be authentic, that is, associated with a joyful emotional state in the person expressing it, but it can also be false, that is, deliberately produced in the absence of that emotional state in order to deceive one or more individuals (Ekman, 1993). Even though the fake smile very much resembles the authentic smile, it generally does not constitute the perfect simile. The fake smile more often has a certain degree of asymmetry than the authentic smile (Ekman, Hager, & Friesen, 1981) and it uses the cheek raiser action less often than with the authentic smile (Ekman, Friesen, & O'Sullivan, 1988; Frank, Ekman, & Friesen, 1993). This study looked at the knowledge that adults have of these differences as well as their perceptive ability to detect them. The visual stimuli presented to participants were prepared using the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen, 1978). Results show that participants detected the differences between the two types of smile and that detection was better using smile asymmetry than with the cheek raiser action. Analysis of the use of response categories in the detection task indicated that participants underestimated the differences between smiles when they were different and that this tendency was more apparent with the cheek raiser detection method than for asymmetry detection. Participants also demonstrated a better knowledge of smile asymmetry than cheek raiser action. The knowledge gathered suggests that the ability of the receptor to judge smile authenticity is limited by perceptive factors. However, the mediation analyses that we conducted show the judging smile authenticity is not limited to simple perceptive detection of facial clues. Detecting facial clues is a necessary condition for correctly assessing smile authenticity, but it does not explain the variance in these assessments. We believe that this variance would be due more to the importance that participants give to facial clues. Finally, our results show that the capacity to detect differences between authentic and fake smiles is not easy to change. Participants who received modified information on changes of appearance linked to the two facial parameters were not more likely to detect the differences than participants who did not receive information.     

Freedom, Preference and Autonomy

Philosophers have advocated different kinds of freedom, but each has value and none should be neglected in a complete theory of freedom and responsibility. There are three kinds of freedom of preference and action that should be distinguished. A person S may fully prefer to do A at every level, and that is one kind of freedom. A person S may autonomously prefer to do A when S has the preference structure concerning doing A because S prefers to have that very preference structure, and that is a second kind of freedom. A person S may prefer to do A when S could have preferred otherwise, and that is a third kind of freedom. These forms of freedom may be combined, but they are valuable and essentially independent. They all involve the metamental ascendence of preference over desire, but it is autonomous preference that makes a person the author of his or her preference. The responsibility a person has for what he or she does out of a preference for doing it depends on the kinds of freedom of preference the person has and must be ranked in terms of them.     

On some recent moves in defence of doxastic compatibilism

According to the doxastic compatibilist, compatibilist criteria with respect to the freedom of action rule-in our having free beliefs. In Booth (Philosophical Papers 38:1–12, 2009), I challenged the doxastic compatibilist to either come up with an account of how doxastic attitudes can be intentional in the face of it very much seeming to many of us that they cannot. Or else, in rejecting that doxastic attitudes need to be voluntary in order to be free, to come up with a principled account of how her criteria of doxastic freedom are criteria of freedom. In two recent papers, Steup (Synthese 188:145–163, 2012; Dialectica 65(4):559–576, 2011) takes up the first disjunct of the challenge by proposing that even though beliefs cannot be practically intentional, they can be epistemically intentional. McHugh (McHugh forthcoming) instead takes up the second disjunct by proposing that the freedom of belief be modelled not on the freedom of action but on the freedom of intention. I argue that both Steup’s and McHugh’s strategies are problematic.     

Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility: The Flicker of Freedom

Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a flicker of freedom -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-one's-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her.     

Restauration d’un contexte de libre choix et insertion professionnelle des allocataires du RMI

This study deals with the vocational rehabilitation of minimum wage integration beneficiaries (RMI) and their commitment with an assistance service of vocational rehabilitation. We postulate that these public is perceived like not very autonomous by the welfare workers and that their freedom of action is some reduced. So we studied the impact of a context of freedom on the course of these public. Two results appeared. Firstly, a high context of freedom increases the commitment of people towards the welfare workers. Secondly, we observed that context of freedom did not have impact on the vocational rehabilitation of the individuals recently registered in RMI device. Nevertheless, in a freedom context, people registered since longer had the same probability to success that people recently registered in RMI device.     

FREEDOM OF THE HEART

Philosophical accounts of freedom typically fail to capture an important kind of freedom—freedom to change what one cares about—that is central to our understanding of what it is to be a person. This paper articulates this kind of freedom more clearly, distinguishing it from freedom of action and freedom of the will, and gives an account of how it is possible. Central to this account is an understanding of the role of emotions in determining what we value, thus motivating a rethinking of the importance of emotions in the mental lives of persons.     

Present in Love: Rethinking Barth on the Divine Perfections

While Karl Barth's identification of love and freedom (in that order) as the fundamental divine perfections was intended to eliminate any gap between God as revealed and God's eternal being, Barth's equation of divine freedom with decision fatally compromises this aim by reintroducing the spectre of a ‘hidden God’ behind the God revealed in Jesus. Moreover, it exacerbates a worryingly anthropomorphic model of divine action, already pronounced in older orthodox theologies, that is ill‐suited to upholding the causal integrity of the created order. Substituting presence for freedom as the foundational perfection paired with (and used to interpret) divine love maintains the benefits of Barth's relative prioritization of love while avoiding the problems that accompany the interpretation of divine freedom as decision. Specifically, it provides a model of divine action in which permission rather than decision emerges as the fundamental mode of willing whereby by God brings the world into being and sustains it in existence.     

European citizenship

If the notion of European citizenship is present in the Maastricht Treaty, the reality of that citizenship among the young at present rests upon three elements: the freedom of circulation, the freedom to study and to work, the freedom of cultural exchanges. For today's youth, Europe is a reality, even if it needs to be anchored in action.     

Moral Enhancement and Mental Freedom

Promotion of pro‐social attitudes and moral behaviour is a crucial and challenging task for social orders. As traditional ways such as moral education have some, but apparently and unfortunately only limited effect, some authors have suggested employing biomedical means such as pharmaceuticals or electrical stimulation of the brain to alter individual psychologies in a more direct way — moral bioenhancement. One of the salient questions in the nascent ethical debate concerns the impact of such interventions on human freedom. Advocates argue that moral bioenhancements do not pose a serious threat to freedom. This contention, however, is based on an overly narrow, if not impoverished, sense of freedom, which comprises only freedom of action and freedom of will. Mind‐altering interventions primarily affect another sense of freedom: freedom of mind, a concept that has not received much attention although it should rank among the most important legal and political freedoms. The article introduces three senses of mental freedom potentially infringed upon by moral bioenhancement and places it in a broader perspective. Ignorance of mental freedom has far‐ranging consequences for the shape of the political and legal order at large. As many advocates are apparently not aware of the freedoms they seek to undermine, their calls for moral enhancement programmes are dangerously premature.