The Scope of the Right Against Mental Interference

Abstract In this chapter, Douglas further specifies the scope of the right against mental interference by developing two elements of the account of the right offered in Chapter 3: the significance condition and the insensitive process condition. The significance condition picks out mental interferences whose magnitude crosses some threshold. Douglas does not attempt to specify the location of this threshold, but does identify a range of factors that plausibly affect the magnitude of a mental interference and thus whether the threshold is crossed: the importance of the mental states affected, the number of mental states affected, and the magnitude of the alterations made to them. The insensitive process condition picks out mental influences in which the mediating process—the process within the influencee via which the mental alteration is produced—is insensitive to the reasons that bear on the alteration. While seeking to remain neutral on the main theoretical disputes concerning reasons-sensitivity, Douglas offers a sufficient condition for a mediating process to qualify as reasons-insensitive. On this condition, a mediating process is reasons-insensitive if either (i) reasons did not significantly causally contribute, via that process, to the resulting alteration, or (ii) the process was not of a reasons-tracking type.