Revelatory Autonomy

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I was just trying to help. We all were. We wanted to protect her. She is nearly 83. She laughs that she is pigeoned-toed and only found out in her 60s (really), and now understands why she falls over the dishwasher door and trips up the stairs and slams into table legs and gets caught in throw rugs. Good, I thought. Always super to know why about things. Whenever.

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It’s the what that gets me. I’d been ‘trying to help’ my belovéd big sister for so many decades it had become my fingerprint response to her every injury, illness or whammy. It also had justified my judgement when in the middle of any of those she would decide to keep going, accommodating them as if they had not happened. Sure, she saw her doctors for some of them, and her brilliant osteopath and her very own physical workout expert. But mostly, vastly mostly, she just went on with her extremely active life.

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‘Self-care, where are youuuuuu’? I want to shout.

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And sometimes I came close. I certainly huffed – self-righteous, definite. Right. And I advised. With a vengeance. For me advising is like flooring the accelerator and hoping the cops are on their break. I know it is wrong, okay, I really do. But with her I often override it. Trying to help.

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Then last week, in the middle of one of my controlled advisory tirades of helping, I heard her say, ‘I love my life as I have never loved it’. She started to cry. ‘I could never have imagined', she said, ‘that I would be doing what I am doing now. I am becoming acquainted with a part of me I did not even know existed, not in this particular way. I am feeling up to going to all my things today, but all of you think that is stupid, that I am wrong for being so active after experiencing pain like that.’ She paused. ‘And I don’t want to risk alienating you,’ she said.

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I don’t want to risk alienating you. Jeepers. God, I thought. In fact, it must have been ‘God’ who right then in that very second descended into my dumbo, entitled brain and shook me and said, ‘She has a right to her own decisions no matter what the risk. She is not stupid. She is assessing the risk. She is being careful. She is different from you. But she is entirely equal to you.

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‘And she surpasses you in her knowledge of what she actually needs, in her soul, not just in her body. So buzz off'. (‘God’ is unlikely that rude,  but then again she/he might be, for cases like me.)

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Wondrously, I heard myself say, tenderly, ‘Merl, if you knew that, after getting as much accurate information as you can, you are the only one who can know what choice is best for you, and that being true to your core self is worth the risk of alienating us, what would you do today? And how would you feel?’

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She cried again. This time the blissful kind, the relieved, elegant kind of crying. The thank-you, thank-you, thank-you kind.

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The next day she said she felt ‘empowered’. She felt smart. She felt wonderful. And that she was being very careful, taking care, caring for herself. Caring.

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I got it. And I praised whatever had moved my mouth from injury to inquiry so that I could care, too. About her. About her.

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Then out of whatever that famous ‘blue’ is (providence: does it ever fatigue?) a dear friend sent me a link to a philosopher I had not heard of before, Farbod Akhlaghi. What he said was so exactly salient I’d thought he must have been listening in. He captured it. The thing in Merl I had suddenly honoured, the thing I have known and taught and researched in a different context with a different name for forty years, but had forgotten; the thing that mysteriously kicked in, so that I magically, unaccountably, instantly became my better self and could formulate that question for her. And shut up. So she could thrive. Akhlaghi captured it.

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He calls it, ‘revelatory autonomy ’. (Isn’t that beautiful?) He defines it as:

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‘The moral right to decide autonomously to discover how one’s life will go and who one will become by making a transformative choice.’

 

And as for us on the sidelines pretending to be the ever-ready medic team:

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'We have a ‘moral duty not to interfere in the autonomous self-making of others, through their choosing to undergo transformative experiences to discover who they will become’.

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Basically, Merl has the moral right to her own autonomy, to make her own choices that can reveal who she is and will become. We do not have the moral right to stop her. Or to judge her.

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 He goes on:

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‘It is not the value of making a choice as such but, rather, that of autonomously making choices to learn what our core preferences and values will become. For autonomously making transformative choices when facing them, deciding for ourselves to learn who we will become, gives us a degree of self-authorship. 

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‘And some degree of self-authorship in this sense is crucial for us and others to see ourselves as ourselves – selves we have become at least partly through transformative choices we have made. It is the value of autonomously self-making that grounds the right to revelatory autonomy.’

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And yes, he covers the ‘yes but’, the inevitable: ‘Isn’t it “permissible to interfere with another’s transformative choice when it is in the best interests of that person for you to do so”’?

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Nope. He says that the problem with that view is that:

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‘We can know what the interest of the future selves are and whether one’s present interests will be fulfilled only after a transformative choice has been made.’

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We cannot know that ahead of their choice. ‘It’s in your best interest’ just won’t cut it any more. Darn.

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Actually, yippee, hooray and hallelujah. Merl can choose. She must choose.

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‘But,’ you are about to ask, ‘what about murderers who want to hack up their neighbours to have the transformative experience of seeing what it is like to become a person who hacks up their neighbours?’

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That’s different. Akhlaghi says, even without rolling his eyes, that we do have a moral right to curtail a person’s autonomous choice-making if the choices will without question harm others.

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Good.

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Now what about the ‘after getting as much accurate information as you can’ part of my question for Merl? Is information necessary for revelatory autonomy to take place? I think so. We have to know what’s what before we can choose whatever. I think Akhlaghi would agree. Certainly he asserts that rational persuasion of just the Goldilocks kind – neither too soon nor too forceful nor too imperious – is not an inevitable interference with another’s autonomous choices. But Goldilocks, remember, was a paragon of pickiness. So I’d spend a lot of time with a good microscope at the first sign of a ‘rational persuasion’ urge.

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But, you may say if you have read Akhlaghi, he was talking about young adults, people just venturing into a grownup life, a life full of choices not yet made that will shape and reveal who they will become. And Merl, you will be thinking, is 83.

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I say fiercely, it doesn’t matter. In fact, they are the same thing. 18 is the same as 83. Both are moments – because every age, every second of life is such a moment – of starting. Every moment is brand new and the future beyond it is unknown. What comes next is tabula rasa, poised for the first pen stroke. There is no such thing as a written past preventing a fresh future. The future by definition is fresh, and that is that.

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So, why do we think that because someone is 83, they no longer have the moral right to make their own choices, they no longer get to find new dimensions of themselves, to transform themselves, to experience revelation about their core, about who they will become? Since when did an 83-year-old turn into a 3-year-old? Since when did any adult, because of age, lose their capacity for ‘transformative self-authorship’? And at what age would you start snatching away that right from a person? 80? 75? 69?

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Since when did it become certain that choice-making by old people is no longer worth the risk of harm? Who’s to say what revelatory dimension of one’s core self is not worth that risk?

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In fact, how much irreparable harm do we inflict when we claim to know better than someone else what self-authoring, revelatory autonomous choices they should make? When do people stop becoming?

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How do we measure harm to the soul?

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