Abstract
Especially during the last three decades, there has been a fine-grained debate on the notion of personal autonomy. This article will suggest taking one important distinction within this debate more seriously: the differentiation between (a) “personal autonomy” designating a family of ideal, gradual, and hence at least moderately perfectionist conceptions about what an autonomous person is and (b) what is called “autonomy as right” (Feinberg. 1986. 47). These are not different dimensions of one concept, but independent concepts with disparate, even conflicting normative functions and should be kept clearly separate from each other. Treating these two concepts merely as different aspects of one and the same notion of personal autonomy, as done by most authors, is severely misleading. For clarity, we will ultimately need different words for divergent concepts. It will be suggested that “autonomy as (moral or legal) right” should no longer be called “autonomy”, but forthrightly the “right to self-determination” or, in accordance with Thomas Hobbes, “authority”.
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Notes
- 1.
The metaphor of space was always crucial for the notion of autonomy rights, see e.g. Feinberg 1986, 28, speaking of the “sovereign authority to govern oneself, which is absolute within one’s own moral boundaries (one’s ‘territory’, ‘realm’, ‘sphere’, or ‘domain’)”; Wellmann 1985, 95 (“dominion”) and Steiner 1994, 90 (“domain”). The metaphor goes back at least to von Savigny 1867, 6, who (in this regard following) Immanuel Kant’s notion of right) defines “the right in a subjective sense” as “a territory in which his will rules and rules with our consent”. It was taken up in consequentialist accounts of (quasi-) rights to self-determination, see Mill 1992, Ch. I, IV (“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”).
- 2.
Autonomy as right does not have to be exclusively a negative right. It may also generate reasons for others to assist or to promote the autonomy competence of others as well, cf. Beauchamp , Childress 2013, 101 et seq., and Mackenzie 2008. See for the needs of vulnerable persons who are attempting to reconstruct a sense of practical identity required for their autonomy, Christman 2014.
- 3.
Quante , in order to avoid a utopian ideal of autonomy that is unattainable for mortals, convincingly introduces a capacity for critical self-evaluation which contains a counterfactual: “a person has personal autonomy with respect to a first-order-attitude if she would be able to exercise the capacities necessary for personal autonomy if she noticed this first-order-attitude (or if someone asked her to critically reflect her first-order attitude).” Thus, permanent critical reflection and identification is not required for personal autonomy. Cf. Quante 2017, 119, 131, and also Christman’s (2009, 155) hypothetical reflection condition for the authenticity element of autonomy.
- 4.
Although, strictly speaking, some aspects of such a notion of “relational autonomy” (cf. Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000a) are no longer a concept of autonomy at all, but of aspects of human flourishing that should be clearly distinguished from personal autonomy.
- 5.
We can also skip the question here of whether “the ideal of personal autonomy […] requires not merely the presence of options, but of acceptable ones” (Raz 1986, 205) or “calls for positive freedom”, “de facto power”, and the social, political, and economically means to realize one’s choices (Oshana 2006a, 101 et seq.; id. 2006b, 2; id. 1998; Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000a; Mackenzie 2014, 25).
- 6.
In a wider sense, personal autonomy in this sense is also one of the elements of well-being (cf. Mill 1992, Ch. III).
- 7.
Cf. Darwall’s (1977) notion of “recognition respect”, which is neither context dependent nor a matter of degree.
- 8.
- 9.
Of course, some authors in the debate about autonomyi see this point clearly , e.g. Christman 2015, Sub 1.1., and Beauchamp. 2005, 319 (We need “a way to ensure that ordinary choices qualify as autonomous even when persons have not reflected on their preferences at a higher level and even when they are hesitant to identify with one type of desire rather than another”).
- 10.
It is only through such a low threshold concept of autonomy that the fundamentally egalitarian, as well as the inclusive character of the concept (or regime) of autonomy can be ensured. It is not until this is accomplished that it makes sense to think about autonomy-enabling policies in order to address Joel Anderson’s critique that the focus on low threshold conditions fails to protect less-competent groups in society because “the central fact about individual autonomy is how limited the competence of many individuals is and how vulnerable groups are significantly disadvantaged by arrangements in which benefits are distributed in part on the basis of the autonomy-competence that individuals develop ‘naturally’” (Anderson 2004).
- 11.
The very idea of rights involves a commitment to equality, cf. Waldron 2007, 752.
- 12.
“Having rights enables us to ‘stand up like men’, to look others in the eye, and to feel in some fundamental way the equal of anyone [...] To respect a person then, or to think of him as possessed of human dignity , simply is to think of him as a potential maker of claims”. Self-respect (together with self-trust and self-esteem) serves as a necessary element of several thicker conceptions of autonomyi as well, cf. Honneth and Anderson 2005, 132–138; Mackenzie 2008, 525.
- 13.
Mackenzie sees that herself, in part, cf. Mackenzie 2008, 523 (“In the case of citizens’ rights to de jure political autonomy, the threshold level of competence required ought to be minimal. Agents who meet this minimal level of competence ought to be treated as politically autonomous and entitled to enjoy the rights and liberties that it guarantees, including freedom from the unwarranted paternalistic intervention of the state. To characterize an agent as personally autonomous, however, involves attributing to her capacities that go well beyond this minimal threshold”). Mackenzie’s whole argument, however, seems to imply that in moral (as opposed to legal) theory, persons who are not autonomous in a ‘thick’ sense should not have “the capacity, the right and the responsibility to exercise […] the authority to make decisions of practical importance to one’s life, for one’s own reasons, whatever those reasons might be” (512).
- 14.
In some contexts, the stability of a decision might function as a place-holder for its voluntariness—something which is much less than authenticity.
- 15.
Although this is highly questionable. “It is one thing to publically criticize modes of social practice that denigrate their participants, but it is another to define autonomy in a way to claim that those participants are not fully functioning agents at all” (Christman 2004, 158).
- 16.
See Meyers 2004, 3–12, though.
- 17.
The justified claim that respect for agents whose autonomy is impaired would, as a matter of social justice, entail positive obligations of social institutions to promote the autonomy of these citizens by fostering the social conditions for autonomy (Mackenzie 2008; Honneth and Anderson 2005) would not change anything regarding the two class-system of persons that is created until full justice or recognition in this sense is achieved. Mackenzie’s approach does not overcome the correlation of protection and incapacitation that is typical of substantive notions of personal autonomy.
- 18.
In the final analysis the difference between the mildly perfectionist authenticity criterion e.g. Christman (2004, 2009) suggests on the one hand, and the strong perfectionist view of human values (i.e, the view that values and moral principles can be valid for a person independent of her judgment of those values and principles) that is imported into the account of autonomy by some relational concepts of autonomy on the other hand (see Christman 2004, 146) is also not crucial in this regard. Both conceptions see autonomy as a matter of degree and do not clearly take into account the normative structure of rights that defines the concept of autonomyr as an ontic status.
- 19.
“[T]he right of doing any action is called authority ”, Hobbes 1651, Ch. XVI.
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Gutmann, T. (2022). Is “Autonomy Talk” Misleading?. In: Childress, J.F., Quante, M. (eds) Thick (Concepts of) Autonomy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 146. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80991-1_8
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