Awkwardness by Alexandra Plakias;

Author:Alexandra Plakias;
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2024-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.2.1 Objection 1: Reasons for Withholding Criticism

One might question whether there is a problem here at all: perhaps we actually do have good reasons for not criticizing in cases like the above. Some philosophers have invoked the value of autonomy in defense of the view that we should allow others to make moral mistakes or engage in moral wrongs (e.g., Waldron 1981; Doggett 2022). The thought could be that intervening curtails people’s autonomy in undesirable ways—that it infringes on their rights or self-determination. Alternatively, it might be that criticism should be avoided because any real change in moral attitude or behavior should come not from external social pressure, but from the agent herself.

While autonomy and moral intervention may sometimes conflict, this is more of a concern in cases where we’re considering intervening to prevent an action. Autonomy doesn’t require immunity from criticism. Respecting someone’s autonomy might require not preventing them from buying meat, or not demanding that they refrain from eating meat in your presence. But it doesn’t require refraining from criticizing them. Indeed, it might even require criticism: if my criticism involves pointing out moral considerations they’re overlooking, I may be enhancing their autonomy by ensuring that they make a fully informed decision. Criticism can be a way of showing respect for someone’s moral autonomy, by treating them as responsive to reasons.

Another concern is that criticizing others’ choices intrudes on their privacy by demanding reasons for their choices. Given that most people know about the environmental impacts of choices like single-use plastic or factory-farmed meat, one might argue that it’s intrusive to demand they justify those choices to us. Instead, we respect people by assuming they have reasons, and allowing those reasons to remain private. This line of thought seems particularly apt with respect to food, since our food choices often involve cultural, health, and economic considerations. We might also think that friendship imposes a special obligation here: part of what it is to be a friend is to respect someone’s decision-making, and to grant them a presumption of rationality, which we demonstrate by not demanding justification for their choices. Friendship involves trust and perhaps a kind of epistemic reliance:

When we depend on a friend to bear authentic and reliable witness to her moral experience, we are trusting . . . the quality of her sensitivity and insightfulness into her own life. We rely on the friend to have noticed what is significant about the circumstances which she faced, and we rely on her to have conceptualized that significance in appropriate terms. (Friedman 1989: 10)

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