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Alicorn comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong
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Interesting exercise: going through your list of '''10 ways to treat a person as a thing''' and see how many of them the 'LW consensus' satisfies.
1) Instrumentality. The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes.
Well, we're mostly consequentialists.
2) Denial of autonomy. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination.
Are you claiming to have free will or something?
3) Inertness. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity.
See 2.
4) Fungibility. The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type and/or (b) with objects of other types.
Shut up and multiply!
5) Violability. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.
6) Ownership. The objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc.
Ok, we don't do these two.
7) Denial of subjectivity. The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.
Fortunately this isn't that common but there is an occasional tendency by some prominent commenters to dismiss personal experience as anecdotes.
8) Reduction to body: treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts.
What, are you claiming you have a soul or something?
9) Reduction to appearance: treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look.
Ok we generally avoid this.
10) Silencing: the treatment of a person as if they lack the capacity to speak.
There's a tendency to consider some people so hopelessly biased that one should disregard anything they say.
Taking Bayseanism and consequentialism seriously tends to reduce humans to the status of tools and victory points.
Regarding free will, the metaphysics of choice are not actually what is at issue when the list mentions "autonomy", "self-determination", "agency", and "activity". (I can't tell if you knew this, and were making a joke, or not.)
However, there doesn't appear to be a clear 'Schelling line' between the metaphysics of choice and what you do mean by those terms. Thus people and movements that start out arguing against free-will tend to end up arguing against "autonomy", "self-determination", and "agency" in the sense you mean.
Is it at all useful to think of the issue in terms of "treating people as if they had free will/autonomy/etc, as a reasonable way of dealing with the fact that we can't model each other to a consistently acceptable degree of accuracy"?
If we go with the assumption that humans are strictly deterministic machines, "autonomy" could be thought of as the degree to which it's easier to predict a human's future actions by looking at their internal state, rather than by looking at the orders they receive.