Autonomy
Many debates will raise the issue of autonomy. For instance, in a debate about euthanasia, an obvious consideration is the extent to which legalising euthanasia would or would not maximise the autonomy of the patient. It’s obviously useful, therefore, to have a decent grasp of the idea. As you read through, you’ll see that there are obvious links to liberty. In many respects, they’re two sides of the same coin. Both typically (though not always) take individual flourishing as their main objective. Freedom of choice seeks the absence of coercive restrictions upon individuals.
Autonomy seeks the positive capacity to develop and pursue a conception of the good. Both are essential in the pursuit of a flourishing life.
At a more philosophical level, a good way of thinking about the dichotomy of freedom of choice and autonomy is in terms of the strength of the concepts. Freedom of choice is a relatively weak concept – it basically implies a right to be free from interference in one’s pursuit of particular choices in life. It’s obviously possible to make it a thicker concept if you want (e.g. that if we care about freedom of choice we ought obviously also care about the quality of the choices in question and therefore favour choice-maximising social programmes like education etc…) but the heart of the concept will always be negative – that we ought to be free to pursue our choices. Autonomy, however, is a stronger concept. Though definitions are myriad, a popular liberal one is that autonomy the capacity to rationally develop and pursue a conception of the good. This implies more than negative liberty. It implies a positive right to actually achieve rational reflection and one’s conception of the good – to make and enact “laws” for oneself. In many formulations it also places a heavy emphasis on reason (this is particularly true of the Kantian account). Choices made on impulse aren’t truly autonomous choices because there’s no element of deliberation involved; no concsious decision to make a particular choice. As such, we’re effectively not making a law for ourselves, we’re just responding to impulses over which we have no control. True autonomy requires deliberation concerning what we want for ourselves at a rational level, not what we want on impulse. This is in contrast to freedom of choice, which can be defended without any appeal to the rational basis for the choices in question.
The importance of autonomy is not settled. A good general idea though is that;
Autonomy is the capacity for self-government. That is, autonomy is the capacity to rationally develop and pursue a conception of the good.
One important thing to note is that autonomy is not a binary state – one is not either fully autonomous or entirely non-autonomous. See below for more.
That’s obviously of central concern for all moral theories. It is an incontrovertible moral good that individuals grow to lead flourishing lives. Lives that flourish are lives that are chosen freely and independently by the individual who leads the life in the first place and lived in accordance with that individual’s wishes. Autonomy is the capacity to reason with oneself to make those choices and to pursue them in the world.
The only reasonable basis for a government to exist is if it maximises the chances of the individuals within it leading good lives, relative to the possibility of having no government. If autonomy is central to leading a good life, government ought therefore maximise the autonomy of individuals, within the bounds of the rules of justice (e.g. you can freely think what you like about your neighbours and, indeed, orient your entire life around a hatred of them, provided that you don’t violate any duties that you owe them [i.e. don’t harm them]).
Thus, governments ought to maximise autonomy. Governments guided by liberal principles typically do so in a number of ways;
Instigating and enforcing a regime of personal moral rights (e.g. the right to life) to protect the basic preconditions of negative liberty required for an individual to pursue their conception of the good.
E.g. if we were all subject to random violence regularly, we’d all be to scared to go out and pursue our conceptions of the good. Therefore, the state protects a right to bodily integrity to guarantee that we’re not hampered by the illegitimate desires in our own pursuit of the good.
Instigating particular autonomy-maximising social programmes such as public education. The reason we like autonomy is so that individuals can choose a life pattern that best reflect their preferences. However, if those preferences are informed only by very limited information, or if the person in question has only a limited competency to evaluate those preferences, it’s unlikely that they will in fact choose a life pattern that truly maximises their preferences. They’ll fail either through ignorance or lack of skill and choose less well than they might have had they been better informed or more competent. Public education, along with other programmes, maximise autonomy. When people make informed choices, they are more autonomous; both in the sense that they have a greater capacity to critique different moral and practical ideas, and in the sense that they are more informed when they act. They are therefore likely to exercise their autonomy in a fashion ultimately more in line with their preferences. They can thus be said to be more autonomous.
Maintaining particular social safety nets like public health. Individuals would be unlikely to consider particular conceptions of the good, or try and pursue them, if they thought that if they suffered harm in doing so, it would vitiate all their future prospects in life. They would thus be unable to develop a conception of the good truly in line with their preferences and lead a more impoverished life as a result. Social safety nets like public health intercede by guaranteeing that if individuals suffer harm during their lives, such harm is likely to be temporary and won’t ruin their prospects in life. They’ll then be able to develop and pursue a conception of the good more freely and therefore, be more autonomous.
The Argument from Recognition
Anderson and Honneth (see article referenced below; it’s a really great read if you’re interested!) make the interesting argument that whether someone is autonomous is not a binary question. One is not either autonomous or non-autonomous. Rather autonomy is an emergent property; a set of learned behaviours that, taken together, endow an individual to rationally develop and pursue a conception of the good.
They then go on to observe that some of the behaviours without which we cannot have autonomy (self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem) are deeply influenced by our relations with others.
Self-respect;
Self-respect is the capacity to make and defend claims about the world publicly. This can be seen both as the capacity to enter public discourse in a political sense to attempt to influence policy, and in a more personal sense. Pursuing a conception of the good will almost inevitably involve some sort of conduct in public. In being seen in public, one tacitly makes a statement about what one considers good or valuable in life through ones conduct etc…
Self-respect is thus central to autonomy because if we lack self-respect we’ll be totally unwilling to publicly pursue our conceptions of the good. It is of course possible to pursue a conception of the good completely privately, but it would a totally impoverished conception of the good and abhorrent to most people.
Self-respect is, in many respects, a function of our relations with others. If we live in a permissive society where individuals are willing to entertain different conceptions of the good and different political ideas, we’ll feel comfortable appearing in public and entering political discourse. If we live in a society that represses minorities and treats them with ridicule, those from beyond the majority will lack self-respect because they will feel unable to make and defend claims about the world, either in the political or personal sense. Their autonomy is thus impaired by the conduct of others.
Self-trust;
Self-trust is the capacity to trust one’s own intuitions and desires and incorporate them into one’s conception of the good.
The basic thought here is that we have to get our ideas about what kind of a life we want to lead from somewhere. Some of those ideas will come from reason, others will come simply from intuitions.
In order to lead an authentically autonomous life (a life that genuinely reflects our preferences) we need to be able to act on those intuitions.
In order to do so, we need to trust that those intuitions are both in our interests and are worth following.
Developing that self-trust is a matter of a supportive interpersonal environment, whereby the love and support of others empowers us to treat our intuitions with sufficient regard.
We need evidence, if you like, that our intuitions and thoughts are worthwhile. The only place we can get it is from others because they’re the only place that we can get “feedback” from.
Thus relationships are critical to self-trust and self-trust is critical to autonomy.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is about the extent to which we view our projects in life as valuable. A person who sees what they do as valuable is likely to commit to it to a far greater extent than a person who does not. That then means that that person is never likely to fully experience the life that they have chosen for themselves. In the process they will neither fulfil their rational preferences, nor know whether that life was truly the life that they would have chosen for themselves.
Our self-esteem is also largely a function of social relations. When we pursue our conceptions of the good, we do so in a public sphere where others inevitably evaluate our actions. The manner in which they choose to express their evaluation must necessarily impact upon our self esteem. If our projects are publicly ridiculed and denigrated, we’re likely to perceive our life choices as less valuable. Conversely, if society is supportive different life patterns, we are likely to feel as though our social roles are valuable and commit to them more wholeheartedly.
In this way, autonomy depends upon self-esteem and self-esteem depends upon the extent to which society treats our choices in life as valuable and protects our public dignity.
If we accept that autonomy ought to be maximised, and that autonomy depends at least in part upon our relations with others, it seems as though if it could be demonstrated that government intervention in interpersonal relations would secure conditions of maximal self-esteem, self-respect and self-trust, government is obligated to pursue those actions.
The Honneth and Anderson article concludes that a radical revision of rights-based justice is needed; we ought to supplement moral rights with a focus on improving intersubjective relations. That would be a difficult thesis to sustain in a debate and turns upon a quirky, Marxist critique of liberal rights so we won’t discuss it here. Debaterland conclusions that could be drawn from this analysis, however, include;
Free speech regulations, especially debates dealing with the protection of vulnerable groups like minorities and women.
State support for particular minority practices as a guarantor of individuals within that minority’s self esteem, trust and respect etc…
State neutrality in matters of the good (if the state intervenes in matters of the good, certain individuals will inevitably lose out as government lends legitimacy to certain practices and implicitly delegitimises others).
The importance of guaranteeing rights. We need rights like freedom of association to guarantee that everyone has the capacity to sustain the meaningful relationships essential to autonomy.
Note: it could also be interesting to try and dovetail this analysis with the speech act argument that particular acts of expression legitimate forms of discrimination and rank certain social groups as inferior (see Rights – Freedom of Speech – Speech Acts). In doing both those things, the relations between individuals must necessarily be affected, with adverse affects to their self-esteem, respect and trust. By extension, then, an adverse illocutionary act could be shown to limit the autonomy of particular agents.
Reference
Joel Anderson and Axel Honneth, ‘Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition, and Justice’ (2005), in Christman and Anderson (eds) Autonomy and the Challenges of Liberalism: New Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2005) 127.
Thanks!
Lachlan