Me neither, but if you make up such a right, The Guardian will write about it. It does seem a bit odd to think friends and family act wrongfully by offering advice about major decisions in life, but the ever-evolving etiquette manual of academic philosophers is full of surprises!
UPDATE: Philosopher Farbod Akhlaghi, whose work was being discussed in The Guardian, kindly shared a clarification about his views:
It has been an amazing experience having some of my work discussed in the Guardian and other media. I am very grateful to them and others for thinking it worth doing so! But it has also been sad to see that some of this coverage suggests that neither the paper nor the abstract have been read. For a view that I've been repeatedly attributed – that it is immoral to give advice to our loved ones when they face transformative choices – is something I have never said, and which many of you will know I do not believe. My paper does not even talk about solicited advice giving.
The paper being reported on asks when if ever, it is *permissible to try to stop adult friends, family, or beloved from making certain transformative choices.* I argue that it is permissible to do so if and only if a particular right we have is outweighed. My view is therefore not that it is always wrong to give solicited advice to your friends, family, or beloved – that would be a silly view. This is an easy misunderstanding to correct, and it is one a cursory reading of the paper would dispel. I was only talking about the moral situation when we consider unsolicited attempts to try to stop other adults close to us from making transformative choices.
I and many others often give solicited advice to our loved ones. And I hope we always will! All I want to say about that is that how and when we do so should be carefully done so as to not disrespect their right to make such decisions, and where we do so, to not pretend we know things that we cannot. When giving such advice, we should consider, I think, whether they would in principle be able to look back on such decisions and see them as ones they ultimately made, and can see the person that they’ve become as one that is, as much as it could be, a product of transformative choices they’ve made. That's all.
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