A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning.This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.
Continuity Is Not Identity
You are not who you were â you are what youâve become
âA river doesnât remember yesterdayâs curve. But we point to it and say: âLook, itâs still the same.ââ
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The compatibilist move here is subtler â less grandiose than autonomy, more domesticated than sovereignty. It says: Even if you didnât choose your traits, your past, your preferences â youâre still you. That self has endured. And moral responsibility flows from that continuity.
But this, too, is sleight of hand.
Because continuity is a pattern, not a person. And a pattern that evolves without origin is not accountable. Itâs just happening.
A River Is Not a Moral Agent
Yes, you are still âyouâ â but only in the loosest, most cosmetic sense. The fact that your behaviour follows a recognisable pattern does not imply authorship. It merely confirms that systems tend toward stability, or path dependence, or neural canalisation.
You can be stable. You can even be consistent. But that doesnât mean youâre choosing anything.
Continuity is not control. Itâs inertia dressed up as identity.
Predictability Is Not Ownership
We mistake persistence for personhood. If someone acts one way for long enough, we assume that behaviour is theirs â that it reflects their values, their self. But all it really reflects is probability.
âYouâre still you,â we say. But which you?
The one shaped by sleep deprivation?
The one under hormonal flux?
The one shaped by language, trauma, and cultural myopia?
Every iteration of âyouâ is a snapshot â a chemical event disguised as character.
Youâre Not Rebuilding â Youâre Accreting
The recursive defence â âI can change who I amâ â also crumbles here. Because you donât change yourself from nowhere. You change because something changed you. And that change, too, emerges from your condition.
Growth, reflection, habit formation â these arenât proofs of freedom. Theyâre signs that adaptive systems accumulate structure.
You are not shaping clay. You are sediment, layered by time.
Character Is Compulsion in Costume
We love stories about people who âshowed their true colours.â But this is narrative bias â we flatten a lifeâs complexity into a myth of revelation.
Yet even our finest moments â courage, restraint, sacrifice â may be nothing more than compulsions coded as character. You didnât choose to be brave. You just were.
The brave person says: âI had no choice.â The coward says the same.
Who gets the medal is irrelevant to the question of freedom.
TL;DR: Continuity Doesnât Mean You Own It
The self is a pattern of events, not a stable agent.
Continuity is not agency â itâs habit.
Predictability doesnât prove ownership.
Even your finest moments might be involuntary.
And if youâre not choosing your changes, youâre just being changed.
So, no â you are not who you were. You are what youâve become. And what youâve become was never yours to shape freely.
đ Coming Tomorrow:
Manipulability as Disproof
If your will can be altered without your knowledge, was it ever truly yours?
A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning.This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.
Constraint Is Not Freedom
The ergonomic cage of compatibilist comfort
âYou are not playing the piano. You are the piano, playing itself â then applauding.â
Compatibilists â those philosophical locksmiths determined to keep the myth of free will intact â love to say that constraint doesn’t contradict freedom. That a system can still be âfreeâ so long as it is coherent, self-reflective, and capable of recursive evaluation.
In this view, freedom doesn’t require being uncaused â it only requires being causally integrated. You donât need to be sovereign. You just need to be responsive.
âThe pianist may not have built the piano â but she still plays it.â
It sounds lovely.
Itâs also false.
You Are the Piano
This analogy fails for a simple reason: there is no pianist. No ghost in the gears. No homunculus seated behind the cortex, pulling levers and composing virtue. There is only the piano â complex, self-modulating, exquisitely tuned â but self-playing nonetheless.
The illusion of choice is merely the instrument responding to its state: to its internal wiring, environmental inputs, and the accumulated sediment of prior events. What feels like deliberation is often delay. What feels like freedom is often latency.
Recursive â Free
Ah, but what about reflection? Donât we revise ourselves over time?
We do. But that revision is itself conditioned. You didnât choose the capacity to reflect. You didnât choose your threshold for introspection. If you resist a bias, it’s because you were predisposed â by some cocktail of education, temperament, or trauma â to resist it.
A thermostat that updates its own algorithm is still a thermostat.
It doesnât become âfreeâ by being self-correcting. It becomes better adapted. Likewise, human introspection is just adaptive determinism wearing a philosophical hat.
Compatibilists smuggle in a quieter, defanged version of freedom: not the ability to do otherwise, but the ability to behave âlike yourself.â
But this is freedom in retrospect, not in action. If all freedom means is âacting in accordance with oneâs programming,â then Roombas have free will.
If we stretch the term that far, it breaks â not loudly, but with the sad elasticity of a word losing its shape.
TL;DR: The Pianist Was Always a Myth
You didnât design your mental architecture.
You didnât select your desires or dispositions.
You didnât choose the you that chooses.
So no â youâre not playing the piano. You are the piano â reverberating, perhaps beautifully, to stimuli you didnât summon and cannot evade.
Why the cherished myth of human autonomy dissolves under the weight of our own biology
We cling to free will like a comfort blanketâthe reassuring belief that our actions spring from deliberation, character, and autonomous choice. This narrative has powered everything from our justice systems to our sense of personal achievement. It feels good, even necessary, to believe we author our own stories.
But what if this cornerstone of human self-conception is merely a useful fiction? What if, with each advance in neuroscience, our cherished notion of autonomy becomes increasingly untenable?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I. The Myth of Autonomy: A Beautiful Delusion
Free will requires that weâsome essential, decision-making “self”âstand somehow separate from the causal chains of biology and physics. But where exactly would this magical pocket of causation exist? And what evidence do we have for it?
Your preferences, values, and impulses emerge from a complex interplay of factors you never chose:
The genetic lottery determined your baseline neurochemistry and cognitive architecture before your first breath. You didn’t select your dopamine sensitivity, your amygdala reactivity, or your executive function capacity.
The hormonal symphony that controls your emotional responses operates largely beneath conscious awareness. These chemical messengersâtestosterone, oxytocin, and cortisolâdon’t ask permission before altering your perceptions and priorities.
Environmental exposuresâfrom lead in your childhood drinking water to the specific traumas of your upbringingâhave sculpted neural pathways you didn’t design and can’t easily rewire.
Developmental contingencies have shaped your moral reasoning, impulse control, and capacity for empathy through processes invisible to conscious inspection.
Your prized ability to weigh options, inhibit impulses, and make “rational” choices depends entirely on specific brain structuresâparticularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)âoperating within a neurochemical environment you inherited rather than created.
You occupy this biological machinery; you do not transcend it. Yet, society holds you responsible for its outputs as if you stood separate from these deterministic processes.
transcranial direct current stimulation over the DLPFC alters moral reasoning, especially regarding personal moral dilemmas. The subject experiences these externally induced judgments as entirely their own, with no sense that their moral compass has been hijacked
II. The DLPFC: Puppet Master of Moral Choice
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex serves as command central for what we proudly call executive functionâour capacity to plan, inhibit, decide, and morally judge. We experience its operations as deliberation, as the weighing of options, as the essence of choice itself.
And yet this supposed seat of autonomy can be manipulated with disturbing ease.
When researchers apply transcranial magnetic stimulation to inhibit DLPFC function, test subjects make dramatically different moral judgments about identical scenarios. Under different stimulation protocols, the same person arrives at contradictory conclusions about right and wrong without any awareness of the external influence.
Similarly, transcranial direct current stimulation over the DLPFC alters moral reasoning, especially regarding personal moral dilemmas. The subject experiences these externally induced judgments as entirely their own, with no sense that their moral compass has been hijacked.
If our most cherished moral deliberations can be redirected through simple electromagnetic manipulation, what does this reveal about the nature of “choice”? If will can be so easily influenced, how free could it possibly be?
III. Hormonal Puppetmasters: The Will in Your Bloodstream
Your decision-making machinery doesn’t stop at neural architecture. Your hormonal profile actively shapes what you perceive as your autonomous choices.
Consider oxytocin, popularly known as the “love hormone.” Research demonstrates that elevated oxytocin levels enhance feelings of guilt and shame while reducing willingness to harm others. This isn’t a subtle effectâit’s a direct biological override of what you might otherwise “choose.”
Testosterone tells an equally compelling story. Administration of this hormone increases utilitarian moral judgments, particularly when such decisions involve aggression or social dominance. The subject doesn’t experience this as a foreign influence but as their own authentic reasoning.
These aren’t anomalies or edge cases. They represent the normal operation of the biological systems governing what we experience as choice. You aren’t choosing so much as regulating, responding, and rebalancing a biochemical economy you inherited rather than designed.
IV. The Accident of Will: Uncomfortable Conclusions
If the will can be manipulated through such straightforward biological interventions, was it ever truly “yours” to begin with?
Philosopher Galen Strawson’s causa sui argument becomes unavoidable here: To be morally responsible, one must be the cause of oneself, but no one creates their own neural and hormonal architecture. By extension, no one can be ultimately responsible for actions emerging from that architecture.
What we dignify as “will” may be nothing more than a fortunate (or unfortunate) biochemical accidentâthe particular configuration of neurons and neurochemicals you happened to inherit and develop.
This lens forces unsettling questions:
How many behaviours we praise or condemn are merely phenotypic expressions masquerading as choices? How many acts of cruelty or compassion reflect neurochemistry rather than character?
How many punishments and rewards are we assigning not to autonomous agents, but to biological processes operating beyond conscious control?
And perhaps most disturbingly: If we could perfect the moral self through direct biological interventionârewiring neural pathways or adjusting neurotransmitter levels to ensure “better” choicesâshould we?
Or would such manipulation, however well-intentioned, represent the final acknowledgement that what we’ve called free will was never free at all?
A Compatibilist Rebuttal? Not So Fast.
Some philosophers argue for compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will can coexist if we redefine free will as “uncoerced action aligned with one’s desires.” But this semantic shuffle doesn’t rescue moral responsibility.
If your desires themselves are products of biology and environmentâif even your capacity to evaluate those desires depends on inherited neural architectureâthen “acting according to your desires” just pushes the problem back a step. You’re still not the ultimate author of those desires or your response to them.
What’s Left?
Perhaps we need not a defence of free will but a new framework for understanding human behaviourâone that acknowledges our biological embeddedness while preserving meaningful concepts of agency and responsibility without magical thinking.
The evidence doesn’t suggest we are without agency; it suggests our agency operates within biological constraints we’re only beginning to understand. The question isn’t whether biology influences choiceâit’s whether anything else does.
For now, the neuroscientific evidence points in one direction: The will exists, but its freedom is the illusion.
I’ve read Part I of Hobbes’ Leviathan and wonder what it would have been like if he filtered his thoughts through Hume or Wittgenstein. Hobbes makes Dickens read like Pollyanna. It’s an interesting historical piece, worth reading on that basis alone. It reads as if the Christian Bible had to pass through a legal review before it had been published, sapped of vigour. As bad a rap as Schopenhauer seems to get, Hobbes is the consummate Ebenezer Scrooge. Bah, humbug â you nasty, brutish, filthy animals!*
Audio: NotebookLM podcast conversation on this topic.
In any case, it got me thinking of free will and, more to the point, of will itself.
A Brief History of Humanityâs Favourite Metaphysical Scapegoat
By the time Free Will turned up to the party, the real guest of honourâthe Willâhad already been drinking heavily, muttering incoherently in the corner, and starting fights with anyone who made eye contact. We like to pretend that the âwillâ is a noble concept: the engine of our autonomy, the core of our moral selves, the brave little metaphysical organ that lets us choose kale over crisps. But in truth, itâs a bloody messâphilosophyâs equivalent of a family heirloom that no one quite understands but refuses to throw away.
So, letâs rewind. Where did this thing come from? And why, after 2,500 years of name-dropping, finger-pointing, and metaphysical gymnastics, are we still not quite sure whether we have a will, are a will, or should be suing it for damages?
Plato: Soul, Reason, and That Poor Horse
In the beginning, there was Plato, whoâas with most thingsâhalf-invented the question and then wandered off before giving a straight answer. For him, the soul was a tripartite circus act: reason, spirit, and appetite. Will, as a term, didnât get top billingâit didnât even get its name on the poster. But the idea was there, muddling along somewhere between the charioteer (reason) and the unruly horses (desire and spiritedness).
No explicit will, mind you. Just a vague sense that the rational soul ought to be in charge, even if it had to beat the rest of itself into submission.
Aristotle: Purpose Without Pathos
Aristotle, ever the tidy-minded taxonomist, introduced prohairesisâdeliberate choiceâas a sort of proto-will. But again, it was all about rational calculation toward an end. Ethics was teleological, goal-oriented. You chose what aligned with eudaimonia, that smug Greek term for flourishing. Will, if it existed at all, was just reason picking out dinner options based on your telos. No inner torment, no existential rebellionâjust logos in a toga.
Augustine: Sin, Suffering, and That Eternal No
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and along comes Saint Augustine, traumatised by his libido and determined to make the rest of us suffer for it. Enter voluntas: the will as the seat of choiceâand the scene of the crime. Augustine is the first to really make the will bleed. He discovers he can want two incompatible things at once and feels properly appalled about it.
From this comes the classic Christian cocktail: freedom plus failure equals guilt. The will is free, but broken. Itâs responsible for sin, for disobedience, for not loving God enough on Wednesdays. Thanks to Augustine, weâre stuck with the idea that the will is both the instrument of salvation and the reason weâre going to Hell.
Cheers.
Medievals: God’s Will or Yours, Pick One
The Scholastics, never ones to let an ambiguity pass unanalysed, promptly split into camps. Aquinas, ever the reasonable Dominican, says the will is subordinate to the intellect. God is rational, and so are we, mostly. But Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the original voluntarist hooligans, argue that the will is superiorâeven in God. God could have made murder a virtue, they claim, and youâd just have to live with it.
From this cheerful perspective, will becomes a force of arbitrary fiat, and humans, made in God’s image, inherit the same capacity for irrational choice. The will is now more than moral; it’s metaphysical. Less reasonâs servant, more chaos goblin.
Hobbes: Appetite with Delusions of Grandeur
Then along comes Thomas Hobbes, who looks at the soul and sees a wheezing machine of appetites. Will, in his famously cheery view, is simply âthe last appetite before action.â No higher calling, no spiritual struggleâjust the twitch that wins. Man is not a rational animal, but a selfish algorithm on legs. For Hobbes, will is where desire stumbles into motion, and morality is a polite euphemism for not getting stabbed.
Kant: The Will Gets a Makeover
Enter Immanuel Kant: powdered wig, pursed lips, and the moral rectitude of a man who scheduled his bowel movements. Kant gives us the âgood willâ, which acts from duty, not desire. Suddenly, the will is autonomous, rational, and morally legislativeâa one-man Parliament of inner law.
Itâs all terribly noble, terribly German, and entirely exhausting. For Kant, free will is not the ability to do whatever you likeâitâs the capacity to choose according to moral law, even when youâd rather be asleep. The will is finally heroicâbut only if it agrees to hate itself a little.
Schopenhauer: Cosmic Will, Cosmic Joke
And then the mood turns. Schopenhauer, worldâs grumpiest mystic, takes Kantâs sublime will and reveals it to be a blind, thrashing, cosmic force. Will, for him, isnât reasonâitâs suffering in motion. The entire universe is will-to-live: a desperate, pointless striving that dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction.
There is no freedom, no morality, no point. The only escape is to negate the will, preferably through aesthetic contemplation or Buddhist-like renunciation. In Schopenhauerâs world, the will is not what makes us humanâitâs what makes us miserable.
Nietzsche: Transvaluation and the Will to Shout Loudest
Cue Nietzsche, who takes Schopenhauerâs howling void and says: yes, but what if we made it fabulous? For him, the will is no longer to live, but to powerâto assert, to create, to impose value. âFree willâ is a theologianâs fantasy, a tool of priests and moral accountants. But will itself? Thatâs the fire in the forge. The Ăbermensch doesnât renounce the willâhe rides it like a stallion into the sunset of morality.
Nietzsche doesnât want to deny the abyss. He wants to waltz with it.
Today: Free Will and the Neuroscientific Hangover
And now? Now weâre left with compatibilists, libertarians, determinists, and neuroscientists all shouting past each other, armed with fMRI machines and TED talks. Some claim free will is an illusion, a post hoc rationalisation made by brains doing what they were always going to do. Others insist that moral responsibility requires it, even if we canât quite locate it between the neurons.
We talk about willpower, will-to-change, political will, and free will like they’re real things. But under the hood, weâre still wrestling with the same questions Augustine posed in a North African villa: Why do I do what I donât want to do? And more importantly, whoâs doing it?
Conclusion: Where Thereâs a Will, Thereâs a Mess
From Platoâs silent horses to Nietzscheâs Dionysian pyrotechnics, the will has shape-shifted more times than a politician in an election year. It has been a rational chooser, a moral failure, a divine spark, a mechanical twitch, a cosmic torment, and an existential triumph.
Despite centuries of philosophical handwringing, what it has never been is settled.
So where thereâs a will, thereâs a way. But the way? Twisting, contradictory, and littered with the corpses of half-baked metaphysical systems.
Welcome to the labyrinth. Bring snacks.
* The solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short quote is forthcoming. Filthy animals is a nod to Home Alone.
The debate over free will often distils down to a question of determinismâindeterminism, hard or soft determinism, or something else. Poincare’s approach to the three-body problem is an apt metaphor to strengthen the deterministic side of the argument.
Quantum theory introduces aspects of indeterminism, but that doesn’t support the free will argument. Moreover, between quantum events, the universe is again deterministic. It’s simply been reset with the last exogenous quantum event.
Prima facia, Determinism and Chaos might seem strange bedfellows. And therein lies the rub. Chaos theory essentially tells us that even in a scenario of chaos, all possible outcomes can be calculated. They just must be calculated stepwise via numerical integration. Even this leaves us with estimations, as owing to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the infinitude of slicing space, we can’t actually calculate the precise answer, although one exists.
My point is that not knowing what is being determined doesn’t invalidate the deterministic nature or process.
Some people seem to need to find meaning, yet they arrive from different experiences. These days, many insecure Western males appear to meet in a particular place that leaves them to make a decision. Of course, there is no decision because, in a Freudian-Jungian way, they arrive with issues and baggage. This dictates which path will be chosenâAndrew Tate or Jordan Peterson. Why not both?
This is not a commentary on a lack of free will, though that may come into play. It’s more a general lack of degrees of freedom when one arrives from such a place and has these two characters (caricatures?) as options for role models. In each case, overcompensation is evident.
It’s a slow news day and I’ve been otherwise occupied. I don’t have much to add, but I felt sharing this meme would fill space and time.
I recently posted a YouTube Short video titled You Have No Free Will, but this is still debatable.
Video: You Have No Free Will
The premise of the belief in free-will is that human decisions are made approximately half a second before we are conscious of them, and then the conscious brain convinces itself that it just made a choice. This sounds pretty damning, but let’s step back for a moment.
Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content
If you’ve been following this blog these past few months, you’ll be aware that I feel the question of free will is a pseudo-question hinging primarily on semantics. As well, there’s the causa sui argument that I’d like to ignore for the purpose of this post.
There remains a semantic issue. The free will argument is centred around the notion that a person or agent has control or agency over their choices. This means that how we define the agent matters.
In the study this references, the authors define the agent as having conscious awareness. Since this occurs after the decision is made, then the person must have had no agency. But I think an argument can be made that the earlier decision gateway is formed through prior experience. Applying computer metaphors, we can say that this pre-consciousness is like embedded hardware or read-only logic. It’s like autopilot.
In business, there are various decision management schemes. In particular, the conscious but slow version is for a person to be notified to approve or deny a request. But some decisions are automatic. If a purchase is over, say 50,000 then a manager needs to sign off on the request. But if the purchase is under 50,000, then the request is made automatically and then the manager is notified for later review if so desired.
I am not saying that I buy into this definition, but I think the argument could be made.
You might not know it by the number of posts discussing it, but I am not really concerned about whether or not free will really exists. I don’t lose any sleep over it. At the same time, I tend to react to it. Since I feel it’s a pseudo-problem where tweaking the definition slightly can flip the answer on its head, it’s just not worth the effort. On to better things.
âWe knew that conscious processes were simply too slow to be actively involved in music, sports, and other activities where split-second reflexes are required. But if consciousness is not involved in such processes, then a better explanation of what consciousness does was needed,â
Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology, Boston University
Under this new theory, supported by recent studies, choices are made unconsciously and then we are made conscious of the choices after the fact. This tosses a spanner in the works of some proponents of free will. Some may still claim that it was uniquely ‘you’ who made this choiceâconscious or otherwiseâ, but others may not be so fanciful.
“According to the researchers, this theory is important because it explains that all our decisions and actions are actually made unconsciously, although we fool ourselves into believing that we consciously made them.”
âWhat is completely new about this theory is that it suggests we donât perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and thenâabout half a second laterâconsciously remember doing them.â
Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology, Boston University
And here we are again with more evidence that we are not consciously responsible for our choices, and yet the conscience has such a fragile ego, it needs to think it does.
The theme of this Institute of Art and Ideas video is ‘Should we move away from postmodernism?‘
Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content
EDIT: Find my version of this content on YouTube:
Video: Postmodern Defence
At the start, I feel as usual, that the definition of postmodernism is nebulous, and the fora agree, methinks. Toward the end, Hilary Lawson concedes that key actors tied to the early postmodern movement denied being postmoderns, singling out Foucault and Derrida. More on this. Keep reading.
Julian Baggini, the bloke sat on the left and whose positions I am only getting familiar with, starts off the clip. He makes some points, some of which I agree with and others not so much.
He makes a play at claiming that there is some objective truth to be attained, following on with the statement that without this notion, it’s anything goes. I disagree with both of these assertions. Then he cites Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere, wherein he posits that subjectivity and objectivity are extrema on a spectrum and that experience is somewhere in between. This conforms to my beliefs, but there are two provisos. First, the extremum of objective truth is unattainable, objectively speaking. Moreover, as I’ve written before, we have no way of adjudicating whether a given observation is truer than another. It seems that he leaves it that we don’t need to know the absolute truth to know “true enough”, but I think this is both a copout and wrongâbut not too wrong for pragmatism to operate.
For exampleânot mentioned in the clipâ, I can imagine that physicists feel that Einsteinian motion physics is truer than Newtonian physics, especially as we need to take measurements nearer to the speed of light. In my thinking, this might provide a better approximation of our notion of the world, but I can also conceive of an Ideal, non-materialistic perspective where both of these are rubbish from the perspective of truth. I feel that people tend to conflate truth with utility.
Julian makes an interesting point about semantics with the claim that “some people” define certain things in such a way as to not possibly be attainable and then claim victory. But what are his three examples? Free will, the self, and objectivity. If you’ve been following me, you’ll know that I might be in his crosshairs because I tend to be in the camp that sees these concepts as sketchy. And to be fair, his claim of defining something in a manner to keep a concept out of bounds is the other side of the same coin as defining something in such a way as to get it into bounds.
The self is different to free will insomuch as it’s a construction. As with any construction, it can exist, but it’s a fiction.
I’ve spoken at length about my position on free will, but I am fairly agnostic and don’t particularly care either way. I feel that the causa sui argument as it applies to human agency is more important in the end. The self is different to free will insomuch as it’s a construction. As with any construction, it can exist, but it’s a fiction. Without interacting with Julian or reading his published works on the self, if there are any, I don’t know how he defines it. And here we are discussing objectivity.
Given Nagel’s objective-subjective polarity, it seems they want to paint postmodernism as claiming that everything is subjective and that science (and religion) hold claims to objectivity. Hilary Lawson, the geezer on the right takes a position between extremes, but he denounces Julian’s claim about objective truth, noting that many people (especially of religious persuasions) make claims on Truth that are diametrically opposed, ostensibly labelling the same object simultaneously black and white. And the object for all intents and purposes is red.
I’ve gotten out of order, but Julie Bindel makes some good points on Feminism and suggests that the philosophical feministsâmay I call them pheminists? No? OK thenâsuch as Judith Butler have set women’s rights back by claiming that the category of ‘woman’ is invalid. Minni Salami defended Judith by noting that Butler has helped constructively in some ways and, citing Simone de Beauvoir, that woman is a category established by men to create The Other Sex. Still, Julieânot incorrectlyâstates that without a category, women (or whatever collective term one decides is representative) cannot be afforded legal protectionsâbecause law, as facile as it is, is all about categories and classes.
Hilary reenters the fray and states that it is not acceptable for one person to claim that their lived experience is all that is needed just because that is their truth. To be fair, this feels like a bit of a strawman argument. Perhaps I need to get out more, but I am not familiar with anyone credible making this claim.
I enjoyed watching this clip and processing the information. I hope you do as well. If you have any comments, I’d love to read them.
Philosophics 