In terms of this neutral conception, as long as the counterpart theorist and the transworld identity theorist agree that Bertrand Russell could have been a playwright instead of a philosopher, they must agree that Russell exists according to more than one world.
However, on content-neutral conceptions, there is no value or set of preferences that an autonomous person must endorse.
This section outlines two versions of procedural and content-neutral conceptions that are well-known in the feminist literature: those of Marilyn Friedman and Diana Tietjens Meyers.
As I mentioned above, the response to this challenge must be that the decision making capacity itself is of non-derivative value, independent of the content of those decisions, at least if one wishes to avoid the difficulties of positing a substantive (and hence non-neutral) conception of autonomy as the basis for interpersonal respect.
As the historian Andrew Jewett details in a brilliant recasting of the political and cultural history of science, Science, Democracy, and the American University, since the 1960s the main trends in humanities and humanistic social sciences have come to "validate the narrow, value-neutral conception of science" crafted by positivists.
(A similar objection holds that such policies violate commonly accepted requirements of "liberal neutrality," according to which policy must be neutral among conceptions of the good.
7. It is common to mention the view that the consequences of state action should be neutral between conceptions of the good.
The second objection here questions whether the liberal conception of impartiality can remain genuinely neutral between competing conceptions of the good.
This conception of autonomy is adopted, according to its defenders, because doing so is the only way to ensure that autonomy is neutral toward all conceptions of value and the good that reasonable adults may come to internalize (Dworkin 1989).
This means allowing others to choose in ways that we ourselves would not, in the interest of preserving a liberal society that is neutral about particular conceptions of the good.
In short, the worry is that the capabilities approach will either be too abstract to be of any use, or else will be insufficiently neutral as between different reasonable ethical conceptions (conceptions, that is, of what gives value and meaning to life).
