If I was reasonably confident I knew better than you, how you should live, under what basis do I have the obligation to take away your agency to elect override your own preferences? Or the new set of preference makers in any society? Even if I think I could do both better?
My answer is, if both: 1. I am reasonably confident I know better than you how you should live. 2. I am not sure that you are not someone with the intelligence and capability to make your own evaluations of what is good and bad for you and act accordingly (not a baby or a cat or someone of extremely low mental capacity who we would say for example can’t sign contracts on their own behalf because they don’t understand what’s happening well enough).
Then I should try to convince you I’m right, rather than imposing the outcomes on you that I think are best for you. If I am right, and you have decision-making capacity, you will be convinced. If I am wrong or you are someone who lacks decision-making capacity, I will find that out. I’m only in the clear to “take away your agency” if I have a good faith belief that you’re something like a baby or a cat or someone without the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves (for certain scopes of decisions—even a cat can decide whether it wants to eat food a or food b, and various other things). And I’d better be pretty sure of that, because if I turn out to have been wrong about it and treated you as someone with less agency than you deserve, that’s real bad. And honestly, even with my dog, who is not a smart dog, I try asking nicely and persuasion and positive reward for desired behaviour, before coercion, and coercion is rarely required. Even granting that the colonizers had thought of the people they were colonizing as moral patients rather than people, if they had treated them as well as I treat my none-too-bright dog, history would have been different.
My answer is, if both:
1. I am reasonably confident I know better than you how you should live.
2. I am not sure that you are not someone with the intelligence and capability to make your own evaluations of what is good and bad for you and act accordingly (not a baby or a cat or someone of extremely low mental capacity who we would say for example can’t sign contracts on their own behalf because they don’t understand what’s happening well enough).
Then I should try to convince you I’m right, rather than imposing the outcomes on you that I think are best for you. If I am right, and you have decision-making capacity, you will be convinced. If I am wrong or you are someone who lacks decision-making capacity, I will find that out. I’m only in the clear to “take away your agency” if I have a good faith belief that you’re something like a baby or a cat or someone without the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves (for certain scopes of decisions—even a cat can decide whether it wants to eat food a or food b, and various other things). And I’d better be pretty sure of that, because if I turn out to have been wrong about it and treated you as someone with less agency than you deserve, that’s real bad. And honestly, even with my dog, who is not a smart dog, I try asking nicely and persuasion and positive reward for desired behaviour, before coercion, and coercion is rarely required. Even granting that the colonizers had thought of the people they were colonizing as moral patients rather than people, if they had treated them as well as I treat my none-too-bright dog, history would have been different.