In this ‘in conversation’ with Dr Joe Gough, we discuss some of the fruits of his British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford looking at legal and medical assessments of decision-making capacity, how they misfire for the neurodivergent and cognitively disabled, and how this should inform philosophical accounts of agency and autonomy. In this conversation, we look in particular at the assessment of capacity in the context of anorexia, the challenges that anorexia poses to the very concept of capacity, and how to think about justifications for intervention without falling into ‘outcome’ based assessments of capacity.

The papers we refer to in the discussion are.

Affect, Autonomy, Authenticity, and the Assessment of Decision‐Making Capacity: The Problem of Tyrannical Coherence

Decisional capacity, Cartesianism, the CRPD and obfuscating paternalism: substituting ‘supported’ for ‘substitute’

Race and mental capacity: no panacea

Best interest and family compromise

Joe also has a book forthcoming from Oxford University Press, After Mind: Myths of Mind and Mechanism in Philosophy, Science, Medicine, and Law, developing these arguments in a broader context.

For the original video, see here.