CAD · Critiquing Assessements of Decision-Making Capacity

The focus of this project is what it is for an agent to be able to make a decision, and when we should count them as being able to do so. This is a question that has received sustained attention throughout the history of philosophy, and there are many different theories and models of decision-making on offer. Different views of decision-making can have huge practical impact: in various legal and medical contexts, decision-making capacity is assessed in order to determine how people are viewed and treated, including whether they are fit to stand trial, have the right to refuse medical treatment, or are viewed as criminally responsible.Drawing on a range of philosophical, psychological, cognitive scientific, and psychiatric literature, this project will aim to evaluate different philosophical theories of decision-making. The novel contribution of this project, and its particular methodological focus, will be to focus on assessing theories of decision-making by their practical impact - an important, but often-neglected metric for assessing philosophical theories and concepts.As well as further elucidating and clarifying the core question of the nature of decision-making, two key benefits of this project are envisaged. First, a substantive contribution to the question of how decision-making ought to be assessed in the relevant legal and medical contexts. For example, one key focus of the project will be the neglect of external influences (social and environmental) in facilitating decision-making, where currently in many contexts they are treated solely as potential hinderances. Secondly, the project will bring recent work in philosophy of science on 'pluralism' to bear on the question of how legal frameworks and decisions are and ought to be informed by relevant scientific and empirical research and expertise, given their different focuses, goals, and explanatory interests and the impact that this has on their conceptualizations of relevant phenomena.