Associate Professor Neil Pickering1
1University Of Otago
In a 2015 case in the UK, C&V, MacDonald J said that the harm a decision might lead to was irrelevant to the question of whether a person was competent to make the decision. Nonetheless, he ruled that C was competent. MacDonald J’s position is an example of ‘internalism’ in relation to competence judgements.
But what is the internalist’s basis for competence judgements? What criteria for competence can the internalist produce? These are the questions we consider.
We propose that the internalist might appeal to a well-established cognitivist description of decision-making, which is multi-dimensional, referring to such capacities as understanding and reasoning. On this basis the internalist can propose that a person is competent to make a decision if they are able to understand and reason about it.
We propose to raise some difficulties with this approach – and ultimately to argue that it cannot underpin competence assessments. This is because a decision cannot be described in such a way as to reveal the level of competence required to make it, and so cannot provide criteria for competence.
Biography:
Neil has been at the Bioethics Centre Te Pokapu Matatika Koiora since 1999. His primary interests are conceptual, and recently the focus of his research has been the concepts of decision-making competence and capacity.