The recent proposal to upgrade political goals from liberty to agency naturally invites potential critiques worth preemptively addressing. Here, I explicitly address these critiques with rigorous responses, clarifying and strengthening the agency-based framework.
Critique 1: Agency Maximization is Utilitarianism in Disguise
Argument:
The Δ Net Agency rule reduces complex ethical considerations to a simplistic utilitarian calculation, potentially justifying sacrificing individual autonomy for collective benefit.
Reply:
Agency explicitly differs from traditional utility or happiness calculations by focusing on measurable capabilities and opportunities rather than subjective preference satisfaction. It explicitly accounts for coercion as harm, thus strongly limiting ethically acceptable scenarios for overriding individual autonomy. Unlike utilitarianism, the agency framework prioritizes preserving individual choice capacities, especially against coercion.
Critique 2: This Framework Ignores Moral Rights
Argument:
Certain moral rights—such as bodily autonomy and property rights—are absolute and should never be overridden, regardless of aggregate agency calculations.
Reply:
Within this framework, rights are understood as preferences society enforces explicitly against coercion. While no right is absolute, the agency model places an exceptionally high burden of proof on any coercive intervention. This stringent criterion makes overriding rights exceedingly rare and justified only under clear, narrowly defined circumstances where overall agency significantly improves.
Critique 3: Quantifying Agency is Impossible or Arbitrary
Argument:
Agency, being multidimensional, resists objective quantification, making the framework’s apparent rigor illusory or arbitrary.
Reply:
Agency is defined objectively through capacities (physical, cognitive, and financial resources) and available meaningful choices (absence of coercion, availability of opportunities). While precise numerical quantification is challenging, relative comparisons of agency gains and losses remain practical and robust. The framework explicitly acknowledges epistemic uncertainty, requiring only clarity in directional effects rather than precise numerical values.
Critique 4: Agency-Maximization Enables Authoritarian Overreach
Argument:
Politicians or authorities could manipulate vague long-term agency benefits to justify authoritarian policies, expanding coercive powers under the guise of maximizing agency.
Reply:
By definition, coercion inherently reduces agency, so the agency framework inherently opposes authoritarianism. The built-in bias explicitly favors voluntary and minimally coercive interventions, requiring clear, concrete evidence of significant agency gains that strongly outweigh immediate coercive losses. Thus, the framework explicitly guards against authoritarian misuse through stringent standards and transparent evaluations.
Conclusion:
These replies demonstrate the agency framework’s philosophical rigor and practical resilience. Explicitly integrating coercion’s ethical cost and objective empirical measures, this approach robustly safeguards individual autonomy and clearly distinguishes justified from unjustified interventions.