Expressive Action, Meaning, and a New Threat to Deliberative Autonomy

ABSTRACT

This article identifies a novel threat to deliberative autonomy— a kind of control one has over one’s deliberative process—arising from the way agents express themselves through action. Drawing on T.M. Scanlon’s account of an action’s meaning, we argue that many actions bear expressive significance in virtue of the motivating reasons behind them. Because deliberative autonomy partly consists in one’s ability to shape a meaningful life through control over such expressions, we have a moral interest in maintaining opportunities for expressive action. We show that these opportunities can be undermined by well-meaning interventions that change the justificatory context in which others act, thereby altering the possible meanings their actions can bear. This has a surprising upshot. We sometimes act wrongly in giving someone new reasons to do what they were going to do anyway. We conclude with some brief thoughts about what this possibility means for individual morality as well as for political philosophy.