Critique of Personal Autonomy

This chapter provides a detailed critique of personal autonomy. It distinguishes several hazards affecting agents who are personally autonomous, moving beyond received understandings and critiques. The chapter explains how personal autonomy offers normatively inadequate boundaries with respect to deliberation, volition, capabilities, and the generation of options, respectively. Included in this chapter is discussion of extreme actions, and of evil, to serve to establish the central points of argumentation. The critique presented here is robust even granting that theories of personal autonomy do not countenance immoral action, much less egregious law-breaking or terrible rights violations, on the part of personally autonomous agents.

Ethical Autonomy

This chapter expounds the idea of ethical autonomy. Ethical autonomy is personal autonomy modulated by moral character. It is different in kind from personal autonomy. Fusing personal autonomy with moral character alters the autonomous individual’s utilization of her rational and imaginative faculties, her will, her capabilities, and her options. Ethical autonomy is supportive of various kinds of social, political, and religious forms of difference. It is not a comprehensive doctrine. It is suitable for inclusion in educational spheres and it supports citizenship in free societies. Ethical autonomy strengthens reasonable pluralism and the cardinal principles of a liberalism of conscience. It holds special promise for liberalism and democratic life.

Conclusion

From its early emergence in the discourse of classical antiquity to its expression in contemporary democratic life, autonomy has proven to be a gripping and engaging prospect. But the expansion of personal autonomy casts a long shadow across democracies, fostering unhealthy, morally defective understandings of the nature and limits of individual self-rule. Vaunted in philosophical scholarship and celebrated in the democratic mind, personal autonomy proves excessively lax in a normative sense, faulty and unworthy of endorsement in its elemental form. That problem cannot be solved by ignoring autonomy’s sinister side or by imagining personal autonomy as a singularly positive condition. Autonomy for individual human persons requires qualification and tighter moral specification in order to be worthy of endorsement and allegiance....

The Evolution of Autonomy

This chapter examines the origins of autonomy and outlines the development of autonomy as a value in democratic societies. It is commonly believed that the idea of autonomy was originally restricted to the discourse of interstate relations in ancient Greece. However, early understandings of autonomia were applied to a wide variety of entities, including those of a nonpolitical nature. Individual-level discussion of autonomy emerged prior to the work of Immanuel Kant, furthermore, foreshadowing contemporary theories of personal autonomy and casting new light on the proliferation of autonomy in democracy. Autonomy has burgeoned into a widely endorsed value in free societies, and pejorative connotations of individual autonomy have vanished.

The Idea of Personal Autonomy

This chapter elaborates a conception of personal autonomy as individual self-rule. The conception fits with a more general understanding of autonomy as self-rule, and it is not heavily moralized. Autonomy as self-rule is preferable to alternative conceptualizations such as autonomy as self-governance or autonomy as living under one’s own laws. Personal autonomy is different from individual freedom, and it is not identical to the absence of social control. There are several notable grounds for valuing personal autonomy; this chapter describes them, giving a fuller sense of the significance and attractiveness of autonomy of the personal kind.