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7.6. Freedom and domination
7.6.1. Introduction
I have argued that a great part of our intuition about the impact of the God Machine
on freedom has to do with the inability of the agent, when subject to the God
Machine’s intervention, to form the will of their own. Others (Harris 2014a, 2014b;
Sparrow, 2014) highlight another reason why the God Machine scenario is
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troubling: the interference of the state or a powerful state-like entity. In this section,
I argue that Sparrow’s (2014) argument against the God Machine based on Pettit’s
(1997) account of non-domination is not convincing.
7.6.2. The God Machine impersonated
Sparrow argues that ‘Savulescu and Persson … underestimate the tension between
the power of some and the freedom of others’ (2014, p. 27). Sparrow attempts to
use the concept of freedom as non-domination to argue that the God Machine
undermines the political freedom of the members of the God Machine society. He
invites us to consider Pettit’s (1997) hypothetical case of a slave in the power of a
benevolent master:
‘If he wanted to, this slave-owner could intervene in every part of
his slave’s life and thwart all their plans and projects. Yet because
he happens to be (for the moment, at least) benevolent, he refrains
from exercising his power at all and permits his slave to go about
their life unconstrained. Pettit points out that we have a strong
intuition that slaves ruled over by such a master are not free
because they are subject to his power — regardless of whether or
not he exercises it.’ (Pettit, cf. Sparrow 2014 p. 27)
For Sparrow, the application of this case to the ethics of the God Machine scenario
is ‘obvious’ (2014, p. 27). Although the God Machine only acts to alter an
individual’s motivations for a narrow subset of intentions – intentions to commit
seriously immoral acts – the same power could be exercised to control individuals’
other motivations. Hence, Sparrow concludes, the God Machine ‘“dominates” its
subjects’ (2014, p.27).
However, the mere possibility of someone’s interference with the exercise of my
freedom is not sufficient for me to say that I live under their domination, at least not
according to the non-domination conception of freedom we are talking about. If it
was, than the mere possibility of me killing any person I meet would mean that I
dominate everyone I meet (and since the reverse is also true, that everyone I meet
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dominates me).
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Analogically, to say that the God Machine ‘dominates its
subjects’ is an overstatement and seems to be missing the point – the point made by
those putting forward the conception of freedom as non-domination.
The political idea of freedom as non-domination has been developed to describe
certain kinds of structural relations and to account for perceived limitations in the
interference view of freedom
. The actual exercise of power is not necessary as in
the case of the non-interference view, and in this sense the mere possibility is
sufficient. However, the non-domination view makes reference to the broader
configuration of laws, institutions, and norms that
effectively allow
masters to treat
their slaves however they please
. Moreover, it is not simply ‘power’ but rather
uncontrolled or arbitrary power that is at issue here
(Skinner 1998, 2008; Pettit,
1997). In the example referred to by Sparrow, the slave
master who has the
institutionally-unrestrained freedom to treat his slaves more or less as he pleases or
whose power remains ‘unchecked’, can be said to ‘dominate’ his slaves. In contrast,
a slave who has the practical ability to kill his master cannot be said to ‘dominate’
his master. Like non-interference, non-domination comes in degrees: in the
republican view of freedom, one is not either free or unfree, but rather more or less
free depending on the extent of non-domination one securely enjoys. Citizens in the
God Machine society are unfree only to the extent that they are
structurally
vulnerable
to the exercise of
arbitrary
power.
Is the God Machine a master over the citizens? Contrary to Sparrow’s claim, the
application of the non-domination view of freedom to the God Machine is far from
straight forward. In so far as domination is seen as the presence of a structural
relation in which there is an arbitrary power of the God Machine over citizens, the
God Machine does not ‘dominate’ in the Savulescu and Persson (2012)
scenario for
two reasons. First, in Savulescu and Persson’s (2012a) description of the scenario
its power is neither ‘arbitrary’ nor ‘unchecked’ (although the latter is less clear in
Savulescu and Persson’s setup, as I will soon demonstrate). Second, it is a stretch to
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This is the difference between the use of ‘domination’ in which anyone can be dominated
by another or a group (See Hobbs’ discussion of the status of woman in Leviathan) and the
more narrow technical use of ‘domination’ in the republican conception of freedom as non-
domination, which typically refers to a structural relation in which one is vulnerable to
others’ exercise of arbitrary or unchecked power
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consider the God Machine as the kind of entity that can dominate in the sense
required by Pettit’s non-domination view. A more promising critique rests on the
same kind of scrutiny that other instruments of the state would merit and so the God
Machine should be seen as the analogy for the law.
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