Locke on Active Power, Freedom, and Moral Agency

Moral Enhancement and Freedom

This paper identifies human enhancement as one of the most significant areas of bioethical interest in the last twenty years. It discusses in more detail one area, namely moral enhancement, which is generating significant contemporary interest. The author argues that so far from being susceptible to new forms of high tech manipulation, either genetic, chemical, surgical or neurological, the onl...

Freedom and moral enhancement.

This issue of Journal of Medical Ethics includes a pair of papers debating the implications of moral bioenhancement for human freedom–and, especially, the question of whether moral enhancement should potentially be compulsory. In earlier writings Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu (P&S) argue that compulsory moral bioenhancement may be necessary to prevent against catastrophic harms that might...

Agency and Moral Realism

God, Freedom, and Human Agency

I argue that, contrary to the opinion of Wes Morriston, William Rowe, and others, a supremely perfect God, if one should exist, would be the freest of all beings and would represent the clearest example of what it means to act freely. I suggest further that, if we regard human freedom as a reflection of God’s ideal freedom, we can avoid some of the pitfalls in both the standard libertarian and ...

Freedom, Resistance, Agency

The aim of this article is to show (1) that freedom and agency are among Nietzsche’s central concerns, (2) that his much-discussed interest in power in fact originates in a first-person account of freedom, and (3) that this novel understanding of the phenomenon of freedom informs his ‘theory’ of agency. I will argue that while Nietzsche questions the weight philosophers have given to the first-...