‘Autonomy’ and its opposite ‘heteronomy’ derive from nomos the Greek for ‘law’, with the prefixes ‘auto’ and ‘hetero’ again from Greek terms meaning ‘self’ and ‘other’ respectively. Thus someone, or some entity that is autonomous is self-governing, while that which is heteronomous is ruled by someone or something else. Particularly since the eighteenth-century autonomy has come to be seen as a desirable status reflecting a subject’s capacity for, and right of self-direction. In the case of morality this is connected to notions of self-worth and rational agency; in the case of politics to the idea of independent nationhood or statehood. Put another way autonomy is viewed as freedom from control or servitude. While there are few outright critics of autonomy some philosophers regard an emphasis on it as overlooking or denying the extent of dependence on others, which they argue is not an obstacle but a means to self-development and well-being as we are social animals whose flourishing is in communities.
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— Stephen Darwall, The Value of Autonomy and Autonomy of the Will, Ethics, Vol. 116, No. 2 (January 2006), pp. 263-284
— Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy - October 2018
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Menu Browse Table of Contents What's New Random Entry Chronological Archives About Editorial Information About the SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Contact Support SEP Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries Entry Navigation Entry Contents Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy First published Mon Jul 28, 2003; substantive revision Mon Jun 29, 2020 Individual autonomy is an idea that is generally understood to refer to the capacity to be one’s own person, to live one’s life according to reasons and motives that are taken as one’s own and not the product of manipulative or distorting external forces, to be in this way independent. It is a central value in the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy but it is also given fundamental status in John Stuart Mill’s version of utilitarian liberalism (Kant 1785/1983, Mill 1859/1975, ch. III). Examination of the concept of autonomy also figures centrally in debates over education policy, biomedical ethics, various legal freedoms and rights (such as freedom of speech and the right to privacy), as well as moral and political theory more broadly. In the realm of moral theory, seeing autonomy as a central value can be contrasted with alternative frameworks such an ethic of care, utilitarianism of some kinds, and an ethic of virtue. Autonomy has traditionally been thought to connote independence and hence to reflect assumptions of individualism in both moral thinking and designations of political status. For this reason, certain philosophical movements, such as certain strains of feminism, have resisted seeing autonomy as a value (Jaggar 1983, chap. 3). However, in recent decades, theorists have increasingly tried to structure the concept so as to sever its ties to this brand of individualism. In all such discussions the concept of autonomy is the focus of much controversy and debate, disputes which focus attention on the fundamentals of moral and political philosophy and the Enlightenment conception of the person more generally. 1. The Concept of Autonomy 1.1 Basic Distinctions 1.2 Conceptual Variations 2. Autonomy in Moral Philosophy 2.1 Autonomy as an Object of Value 2.2 Autonomy and Paternalism 3. Autonomy in Social and Political Philosophy 3.1 Autonomy and the Foundations of Liberalism 3.2 Identity and Conceptions of the Self 3.3 Relational Autonomy 3.4 Autonomy, Liberalism and Perfectionism 3.5 Autonomy and Political Liberalism 3.6 Autonomy, Justice and Democracy Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. The Concept of Autonomy In the western tradition, the view that individual autonomy is a basic moral and political value is very much a modern development. Putting moral weight on an individual’s ability to govern herself, independent of her place in a metaphysical order or her role in social structures and political institutions is very much the product of the modernist humanism of which much contemporary moral and political philosophy is an offshoot. (For historical discussions of autonomy, see Schneewind 1988, Swain 2016 and Rosich 2019). As such, it bears the weight of the controversies that this legacy has attracted. The idea that moral principles and obligations, as well as the legitimacy of political authority, should be grounded in the self-governing individual, considered apart from various contingencies of place, culture, and social relations, invites skeptics from several quarters. Autonomy, then, is very much at the vortex of the complex (re)consideration of modernity. Put most simply, to be autonomous is to govern oneself, to be directed by considerations, desires, conditions, and characteristics that are not simply imposed externally upon one, but are part of what can somehow be considered one’s authentic self. Autonomy in this sense seems an irrefutable value, especially since its opposite — being guided by forces external to the self and which one cannot authentically embrace — seems to mark the height of oppression. But specifying more precisely the conditions of autonomy inevitably sparks controversy and invites skepticism about the claim that autonomy is an unqualified value for all people. Autonomy plays various roles in theoretical accounts of persons, conceptions of moral obligation and responsibility, the justification of social policies and in numerous aspects of political theory. It forms the core of the Kantian conception of practical reason (see, e.g, Korsgaard 1996, Hill 1989) and, relatedly, connects to questions of moral responsibility (see Wolff 1970, 12–19). It is also seen as the aspect of persons that prevents or ought to prevent paternalistic interventions in their lives (Dworkin 1988, 121–29). It plays a role in education theory and policy, on some views specifying the core goal of liberal education generally (Gutmann 1987, Cuypers and Haji 2008; for discussion, see Brighouse 2000, 65–111). Also, despite many feminists’ reservations concerning the ideal of autonomy, it is sometimes seen as a valuable conceptual element in some feminist ideals, such as the identification and elimination of social conditions that victimize women and other (potentially) vulnerable people (Friedman 1997, Meyers 1987, Christman 1995. Veltman and Piper 2014)). 1.1 Basic Distinctions Several distinctions must be made to zero in on the kind of autonomy that is of greatest interest to moral and political theory. “Moral autonomy” refers to the capacity to impose the (putatively objective) moral law on oneself, and, following Kant, it is claimed as a fundamental organizing principle of all morality (Hill 1989). On the other hand, what can be called “personal autonomy” is meant as a trait that individuals can exhibit relative to any aspects of their lives, not limited to questions of moral obligation (Dworkin 1988, 34–47). Personal (or individual) autonomy should also be distinguished from freedom, although again, there are many renderings of these concepts, and certainly some conceptions of positive freedom will be equivalent to what is often meant by autonomy (Berlin 1969, 131–34). Generally, one can distinguish autonomy from freedom in that the latter concerns the ability to act, without external or internal constraints and also (on some conceptions) with sufficient resources and power to make one’s desires effective (Berlin 1969, Crocker 1980, MacCallum 1967). Autonomy concerns the independence and authenticity of the desires (values, emotions, etc.) that move one to act in the first place. Some distinguish autonomy from freedom by insisting that freedom concerns particular acts while autonomy is a more global notion, referring to states of a person (Dworkin 1988, 13–15, 19–20). But autonomy can be used to refer both to the global condition (autonomous personhood) and as a more local notion (autonomous relative to a particular trait, motive, value, or social condition). Addicted smokers for example are autonomous persons in a general sense but (for some) helplessly unable to control their behavior regarding this one activity (Christman 1989, 13–14; cf. Meyers 1987, 66–67). In addition, we must keep separate the idea of basic autonomy, the minimal status of being responsible, independent and able to speak for oneself, from ideal autonomy, an achievement that serves as a goal to which we might aspire and according to which a person is maximally authentic and free of manipulative, self-distorting influences. Any plausible conceptualization of basic autonomy must, among other things, imply that most adults who are not suffering from debilitating pathologies or are under oppressive and constricting conditions count as autonomous. Autonomy as an ideal, on the other hand, may well be enjoyed by very few if any individuals, for it functions as a goal to be attained. The reason to construe basic autonomy broadly enough to include most adults is that autonomy connects with other status designators which apply (or, it is claimed, should apply) in this sweeping manner. Autonomy is connected, for example, to moral and legal responsibility, on some views (e.g., Ripstein 1999); autonomous agency is seen as necessary (and for some sufficient) for the condition of equal political standing; moreover, being autonomous stands as a barrier to unchecked paternalism, both in the personal, informal spheres and in legal arenas (Feinberg 1986). Lacking autonomy, as young children do, is a condition which allows or invites sympathy, care, paternalism and possibly pity. Therefore, a guiding consideration in evaluating particular conceptions of autonomy (though hardly a hard and fast test) will be whether it connects properly to these ancillary judgments (for discussion of “formal conditions” of a concept of autonomy, see Dworkin 1988, 7–10). 1.2 Conceptual Variations The variety of contexts in which the concept of autonomy functions has suggested to many that there are simply a number of different conceptions, and that the word simply refers to different elements in each of those contexts (Arpaly 2004). Others have claimed that while there may be a single over-arching concept of autonomy, we should think in terms of separable dimensions of it rather than an all or nothing idea (Mackenzei 2014 and Killmister 2017). Feinberg has claimed that there are at least four different meanings of “autonomy” in moral and political philosophy: the capacity to govern oneself, the actual condition of self-government, a personal ideal, and a set of rights expressive of one’s sovereignty over oneself (Feinberg 1989). One might argue that central to all of these uses is a conception of the person able to act, reflect, and choose on the basis of factors that are somehow her own (authentic in some sense). Nevertheless, it is clear that formulating a “theory” of the concept will involve more than merely uncovering the obscure details of the idea’s essence, for autonomy, like many concepts central to contentious moral or political debate is itself essentially contested. So a theory of autonomy is simply a conceptual model aimed at capturing the general sense of “self-rule” or “self-government” (ideas which obviously admit of their own vagaries) and which can be used to support principles or policies the theory attempts to justify. The idea of self-rule contains two components: the independence of one’s deliberation and choice from manipulation by others, and the capacity to rule oneself (see Dworkin 1989, 61f and Arneson 1991). However, the ability to rule oneself will lie at the core of the concept, since a full account of that capability will surely entail the freedom from external manipulation characteristic of independence. Indeed, it could be claimed that independence per se has no fixed meaning or necessary connection with self-government unless we know what kinds of independence is required for self-rule (cf., however Raz 1986, 373–78). Focusing, then, on the requirements of self rule, it can be claimed that to govern oneself one must be in a position to act competently based on desires (values, conditions, etc.) that are in some sense one’s own. This picks out the two families of conditions often proffered in conceptions of autonomy: competency conditions and authenticity conditions. Competency includes various capacities for rational thought, self-control, and freedom from debilitating pathologies, systematic self-deception, and so on. (Different accounts include different conditions: see, for example, Berofsky 1995, R. Young 1991, Haworth 1986, Meyers 1989.) Authenticity conditions often include the capacity to reflect upon and endorse (or identify with) one’s desires, values, and so on. The most influential models of authenticity in this vein claim that autonomy requires second-order identification with first order desires. For Frankfurt, for instance, such second-order desires must actually have the structure of a volition: wanting that the first order desires issue in action, that they comprise one’s will. Moreover, such identification, on his view, must be “wholehearted” for the resulting action to count as free (autonomous).[1] This overall approach to autonomy has been very influential, and several writers have developed variations of it and defended it against objections. The most prominent objections concern, on the one hand, the fatal ambiguities of the concept of “identification” and, on the other, the threat of an infinite regress of conditions. The first problem surrounds the different ways that one can be said to “identify” with a desire, each of which render the view conceptually suspect. Either one identifies with an aspect of oneself in the sense of simply acknowledging it (without judgment) or one identifies with a desire in an aspirational, approving sense of that term. In the first case, however, identification would clearly not be a consistent mark of autonomy, for one could easily identify as part of oneself any manner of addictive, constricting, or imposed aspects of one’s make-up. But approving of a trait is also problematic as a requirement of autonomy, for there are many perfectly authentic aspects of myself (ones for which I can and should be held fully responsible for example) which I do not fully approve of. I’m not perfect, but does that mean that I am thereby not autonomous? (Cf. Watson 1989, Berofsky 1995, 99–102).[2] This model stresses internal self-reflection and procedural independence. However, the view includes no stipulations about the content of the desires, values, and so on, in virtue of which one is considered autonomous, specifically there is no requirement that one act from desires independently of others. Were there to be such a requirement, it would involve what is called “substantive independence”. Some writers have insisted that the autonomous person must enjoy substantive independence as well as procedural independence (e.g., Stoljar 2000, Benson 1987, 2005, Oshana 2006). The motivation for such a position is the idea a person under constrained life situations should not be considered autonomous no matter how “voluntary” (or autonomous) was the choice that put her in that position (cf. Meyers 2000). This claim, however, threatens to rob the attribution of autonomy of any claim to value neutrality it may otherwise carry, for if, conceptually, one is not autonomous when one (freely, rationally, without manipulation) chooses to enter conditions of severely limited choice, then the concept is reserved to only those lifestyles and value pursuits that are seen as acceptable from a particular political or theoretical point of view. I will return to this line of thought in a moment. In rejoinder, it has been claimed that such procedural neutrality could not capture the value autonomy has for people, and moreover, a “weakly substantive” view can be compatible with a political form of liberalism as long as the values inherent in the concept could be accepted by reasonable persons in an overlapping consensus (see Freyenhagen 2017). One variation on the internal self-reflection model focuses on the importance of the personal history of the agent as an element of her autonomy (Christman 1991, Mele 1993; cf. Fisher & Ravizza 1998; cf. also Raz 1986, 371). On these views, the question of whether a person is autonomous at a time depends on the processes by which she came to be the way she is. It is not clear that such a focus will be able to avoid the problems raised about internal reflection models (see Mele 1991, Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000b, 16–17), but such a move attempts to embrace a conception of the self of self-government which is not only social but diachronically structured (see, e.g., Cuypers 2001). For those who are wary of the postulate of reflective self endorsement, an alternative approach is to equate autonomy with simply a set of competences, such as the capacity to choose deliberatively, rationally, and, as Berofsky claims, “objectively” (see Berofsky 1995, Meyers 1989). This locates autonomy in the general capacity to respond to reasons, and not, for example, in acts of internal self-identification. However, even in these accounts, the capacity to think critically and reflectively is necessary for autonomy as one of the competences in question, even though the reflective thought required need not refer to external values or ideals (Berofsky 1995, ch. 5). Further difficulties have been raised with the requirement of second order self-appraisal for autonomy. For it is unclear that such higher level judgments have any greater claim to authenticity than their first order cousins. Clearly if a person is manipulated or oppressed (and hence non-autonomous), it could well be that the reflective judgments she makes about herself are just as tainted by that oppression as are her ground-level decisions (Thalberg 1989, Friedman 1986, Meyers 1989, 25–41, Noggle 2005), and often our second order reflective voices are merely rationalizations and acts of self-deception rather than true and settled aspects of our character (for general discussion see the essays in Veltman and Piper 2014). This has led to the charge that models of autonomy which demand second-order endorsement merely introduce an infinite regress: for second-level judgments must be tested for their authenticity in the same way as first order desires are, but if that is so, then ever higher levels of endorsement would be called for. Various responses to this problem have been made, for the most part involving the addition of conditions concerning the manner in which such reflection must be made, for example that it must be free of certain distorting factors itself, it must reflect an adequate causal history, and the like (Christman 1991, Mele 1995). Other aspects of the inner reflection model should be noted. As just mentioned, this view of autonomy is often stated as requiring critical self reflection (see, e.g., Haworth 1986). This has been understood as involving a rational appraisal of one’s desires, testing them for internal consistency, their relation to reliable beliefs, and the like. But an overly narrow concentration on rational assessment exposes such conceptions to charges of hyper intellectualism, painting a picture of the autonomous person as a cold, detached calculator (see Meyers 2004, 111–37). Connections to values, desires, and personal traits are often grounded in emotional and affective responses, ones connected with care, commitment, and relations to others (see Friedman 1998, MacKenzie & Stoljar 2000b, Meyers 1989, de Calleja, Mirja Perez 2019). For parallel reasons, some theorists have noted that concentration on only desires as the focal point of autonomy is overly narrow, as people can (fail to) exhibit self-government relative to a wide range of personal characteristics, such as values, physical traits, relations to others, and so on (see Double 1992, 66). 2. Autonomy in Moral Philosophy Autonomy is central in certain moral frameworks, both as a model of the moral person — the feature of the person by virtue of which she is morally obligated — and as the aspect of persons which grounds others’ obligations to her or him. For Kant, the self-imposition of universal moral law is the ground of both moral obligation generally and the respect others owe to us (and we owe ourselves). In short, practical reason — our ability to use reasons to choose our own actions — presupposes that we understand ourselves as free. Freedom means lacking barriers to our action that are in any way external to our will, though it also requires that we utilize a law to guide our decisions, a law that can come to us only by an act of our own will (for further discussion see Hill 1989; for doubts about this reading, see Kleingeld and Willaschek 2019). This self-imposition of the moral law is autonomy. And since this law must have no content provided by sense or desire, or any other contingent aspect of our situation, it must be universal. Hence we have the (first formulation of the) Categorical Imperative, that by virtue of our being autonomous we must act only on those maxims that we can consistently will as a universal law. The story continues, however: for the claim is that this capacity (to impose upon ourselves the moral law) is the ultimate source of all moral value — for to value anything (instrumentally or intrinsically) implies the ability to make value judgments generally, the most fundamental of which is the determination of what is morally valuable. Some theorists who are not (self-described) Kantians have made this inference central to their views of autonomy. Paul Benson, for example, has argued that being autonomous implies a measure of self-worth in that we must be in a position to trust our decision-making capacities to put ourselves in a position of responsibility (Benson 1994; cf. also Grovier 1993, Lehrer 1997, and Westlund 2014). But the Kantian position is that such self-regard is not a contingent psychological fact about us, but an unavoidable implication of the exercise of practical reason (cf. Taylor 2005). So we owe to ourselves moral respect in virtue of our autonomy. But insofar as this capacity depends in no way on anything particular or contingent about ourselves, we owe similar respect to all other persons in virtue of their capacity. Hence (via the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative), we are obliged to act out of fundamental respect for other persons in virtue of their autonomy. In this way, autonomy serves as both a model of practical reason in the determination of moral obligation and as the feature of other persons deserving moral respect from us. (For further discussion, see Immanual Kant and moral philosophy.) Recent discussions of Kantian autonomy have downplayed the transcendental nature of practical reason in this account (see, for example, Herman 1993 and Hill 1991). For example, Christine Korsgaard follows Kant in seeing our capacity for self-reflection as both the object of respect and the seat of normativity generally. On her view, we are all guided by what she calls a “practical identity”, a point of view which orients reflection on values and manifests an aspect of our self concept. But unlike Kant, Korsgaard argues that we have different practical identities that are the source of our normative commitments, and not all of them are of fundamental moral worth. But the most general of such identities — that which makes us members of a kingdom of ends — is our moral identity, which yields universal duties and obligations independent of contingent factors. Autonomy is the source of all obligations, whether moral or non-moral, since it is the capacity to impose upon ourselves, by virtue of our practical identities, obligations to act (Korsgaard 1996). Traditional critiques of autonomy-based moral views, and Kant’s in particular, have been mounted along various lines. I mention two here, as they connect with issues concerning autonomy in social and political theory. The first concerns the way in which autonomy-based moral theory grounds obligation in our cognitive abilities rather than in our emotions and affective connections (see, e.g., Williams 1985, Stocker 1976). The claim is that Kantian morality leaves too little room for the kinds of emotional reactions that are constitutive of moral response in many situations: the obligations of parents for example concern not only what they do but the passions and care they bring forth in doing it. To view obligation as arising from autonomy but understanding autonomy in a purely cognitive manner makes such an account vulnerable to this kind of charge. The difficulty this criticism points to resides in the ambiguities of the self-description that we might utilize in valuing our “humanity” — our capacity to obligate ourselves. For we can reflect upon our decision-making capacities and value this positively (and fundamentally) but regard that “self” engaging the capacity in different ways. The Kantian model of such a self is of a pure cognizer — a reflective agent engaged in practical reason. But also involved in decision-making are our passions — emotions, desires, felt commitments, senses of attraction and aversion, alienation and comfort. These are both the objects of our judgement and partly constitutive of them — to passionately embrace an option is different from cooly determining it to be best. Judgment is involved with all such passions when decisions are made. And it (judgment) need not be understood apart from them, but as an ability to engage in those actions whose passionate and reasoned support we muster up. So when the optimal decision for me is an impassioned one, I must value my ability to engage in the right passions, not merely in the ability to cold-heartedly reflect and choose. Putting the passions outside the scope of reasoned reflection, as merely an ancillary quality of the action — to consider how to do something not merely what we are doing — is to make one kind of decision. Putting passions inside that scope — saying that what it is right to do now is to act with a certain affect or passion — is another. When we generalize from our ability to make the latter sort of decisions, we must value not only the ability to weigh options and universalize them but also the ability to engage the right affect, emotion, etc. Therefore, we value ourselves and others as passionate reasoners not merely reasoners per se. The implication of this observation is that in generalizing our judgments in the manner Korsgaard (following Kant) says we must, we need not commit ourselves to valuing only the cognitive capacities of humanity but also its (relatively) subjective elements. A second question is this: since the reflection that is involved in autonomy (and which, according to this view, is the source of normativity) need only be hypothetical reflection upon one’s desires and mental capacities, then the question arises: under what conditions is this hypothetical reflection meant to take place? If the capacity for reflection is the seat of obligation, then we must ask if the conditions under which such hypothetical reflection takes place are idealized in any sense — if they are assumed to be reasonable for example. Are we considering merely the reflections the (actual) person would make were she to turn her attention to the question, no matter how unreasonable such reflections might be? If so, why should we think this grounds obligations? If we assume they are reasonable, then under some conditions moral obligations are not imposed by the actual self but rather by an idealized, more rational self. This implies that morality is not literally self-imposed if by “self” one means the actual set of judgments made by the agent in question. Indeed, a Platonist/realist about moral value could claim that the objective values which (according to the theory) apply to all agents independent of choice are in fact “self-imposed” in this idealized sense: they would be imposed were the person to reflect on the matter, acting as a perfectly reasonable agent. This shows the complex and potentially problematic implications of this ambiguity. This points to the question of whether autonomy can be the seat of moral obligation and respect if autonomy is conceived in a purely procedural manner. If no substantive commitments or value orientations are included in the conceptual specification of autonomy, then it is unclear how this capacity grounds any particular substantive value commitments. On the other hand, if autonomy includes a specification of particular values in its conditions — that the autonomous person must value her own freedom for example — then it turns out that moral obligation (and respect) attaches only to those already committed in this way, and not more generally to all rational agents as such (as traditionally advertised by the view). This echoes, of course, Hegel’s critique of Kant. These difficulties point to ambiguities in autonomy-based moral views, ones which may well be clarified in further developments of those theories. They also pick up on traditional problems with Kantian ethics (though there are many other such difficulties not mentioned here). Before leaving moral philosophy, we should consider ethical views which focus on autonomy but which do not depend directly on a Kantian framework. 2.1 Autonomy as an Object of Value Autonomy can play a role in moral theory without that theory being fully Kantian in structure. For example, it is possible to argue that personal autonomy has intrinsic value independent of a fully worked out view of practical reason. Following John Stuart Mill, for example, one can claim that autonomy is “one of the elements of well-being” (Mill 1859/1975, ch. III). Viewing autonomy as an intrinsic value or as a constitutive element in personal well-being in this way opens the door to a generally consequentialist moral framework while paying heed to the importance of self-government to a fulfilling life (for discussion see Sumner 1996). It may also be unclear why autonomy — viewed here as the capacity to reflect on and endorse one’s values, character and commitments — should have value independent of the results of exercising that capacity. Why is one person’s autonomy intrinsically valuable when she uses it to, say, harm herself or make rash or morally skewed choices? More generally, how can we take account of the systematic biases and distortions that plague typical human reasoning in valuing people’s capacity to make decisions for themselves (see, e.g., Conly 2013)? This question becomes more acute as we consider ways that autonomy can obtain in degrees, for then it is unclear why personal autonomy should be seen as equally valuable in persons who display different levels of it (or different levels of those abilities that are its conditions, such as rationality). Indeed, autonomy is often cited as the ground of treating all individuals equally from a moral point of view. But if autonomy is not an all-or-nothing characteristic, this commitment to moral equality becomes problematic (Arneson 1999). It can be argued that insofar as the abilities required for autonomy, such as rational reflectiveness, competences in carrying out one’s decisions, and the like, vary across individuals (within or between species as well), then it is difficult to maintain that all autonomous beings have equal moral status or that their interests deserve the same weight in considering decisions that affect them. The move that must be made here, I think, picks up on Korsgaard’s gloss on Kantianism and the argument that our reflective capacities ultimately ground our obligations to others and, in turn, others’ obligations to regard us as moral equals. Arneson argues, however, that people surely vary in this capacity as well — the ability to reflectively consider options and choose sensibly from among them. Recall what we said above concerning the ambiguities of Korsgaard’s account concerning the degree to which the self-reflection that grounds obligation is idealized at all. If it is, then it is not the everyday capacity to look within ourselves and make a choice that gives us moral status but the more rarified ability to do so rationally, in some full sense. But we surely vary in our ability to reach that ideal, so why should our autonomy be regarded as equally worthy? The answer may be that our normative commitments do not arise from our actual capacities to reflect and to choose (though we must have such capacities to some minimal degree), but rather from the way in which we must view ourselves as having these capacities. We give special weight to our own present and past decisions, so that we continue on with projects and plans we make because (all other things being equal) we made them, they are ours, at least when we do them after some reflective deliberation. The pull that our own decisions have on our ongoing projects and actions can only be explained by the assumption that we confer status and value on decisions simply because we reflectively made them (perhaps, though, in light of external, objective considerations). This is an all-or-nothing capacity and hence may be enough to ground our equal status even if perhaps, in real life, we exercise this capacity to varying degrees.[3] Much has been written about conceptions of well being that rehearse these worries (see Sumner 1996, Griffin 1988). Such a view might be buttressed with the idea that the attribution of autonomous agency, and the respect that purportedly goes with it, is itself a normative stance, not a mere observation of how a person actually thinks and acts (for discussion of this position see Christman 2009, chap. 10 and Korsgaard 2014) 2.2 Autonomy and Paternalism Autonomy is the aspect of persons that undue paternalism offends against. Paternalistic interventions can be both interpersonal (governed by social and moral norms) and a matter of policy (mediated by formal or legal rules). Such interventions are identified not by the kind of acts they involve but by the justification given for them, so that paternalism involves interference with a person’s actions or knowledge against that person’s will for the purpose of advancing that person’s good. Respect for autonomy is meant to prohibit such interventions because they involve a judgment that the person is not able to decide for herself how best to pursue her own good. Autonomy is the ability to so decide, so for the autonomous subject of such interventions paternalism involves a lack of respect for autonomy. See also Paternalism. But as our discussion of the nature of autonomy indicated, it is often unclear exactly what that characteristic involves. Important in this context is whether autonomy can be manifested in degrees — whether the abilities and capacities that constitute autonomy obtain all at once or progressively, or I can enjoy sufficient autonomy in some areas of my life but not in others. If autonomy is a matter of degree in any of these ways, then it is unclear that a blanket prohibition against paternalism is warranted. Some people will be less able to judge for themselves what their own good is and hence be more susceptible to (justified) paternalistic intervention (Conly 2013; see also Killmister 2017, chap. 7). Often such an obligation toward another person requires us to treat her as autonomous, independent of the extent to which she is so concerning the choice in question. At least this is the case when a person is autonomous above a certain threshold: she is an adult, not under the influence of debilitating factors, and so on. I might know that a person is to some degree under the sway of external pressures that are severely limiting her ability to govern her life and make independent choices. But as long as she has not lost the basic ability to reflectively consider her options and make choices, if I intervene against her will (for her own good), I show less respect for her as a person than if I allow her to make her own mistakes. (Which is not to say, of course, that intervention in such cases might not, in the end, be justified; only that something is lost when it is engaged in, and what is lost is a degree of interpersonal respect we owe each other.) However, as we saw in the last section, this move depends on the determination of basic autonomy and an argument that such a threshold is non-arbitrary. Also relevant here is the question of procedural versus substantive autonomy as the ground of the prohibition of paternalism. For if by “autonomy” we mean the ability to govern oneself no matter how depraved or morally worthless are the options being exercised, it is unclear that the bar to paternalism (and respect for persons generally) retains its normative force. 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. This is merely a sampling of some of the central ways that the idea of autonomy figures in moral philosophy. Not discussed here are areas of applied ethics, for example in medical ethics, where respect for autonomy grounds such principles as that of informed consent. Such contexts illustrate the fundamental value that autonomy generally is thought to represent as expressive of one of the fundamentals of moral personhood. 3. Autonomy in Social and Political Philosophy 3.1 Autonomy and the Foundations of Liberalism The conception of the autonomous person plays a variety of roles in various constructions of liberal political theory (for recent discussion, see, e.g., Coburn 2010, Christman 2015 and the essays in Christman and Anderson, eds. 2005). Principally, it serves as the model of the person whose perspective is used to formulate and justify political principles, as in social contract models of principles of justice (Rawls 1971). Also (and correspondingly) it serves as the model of the citizen whose basic interests are reflected in those principles, such as in the claim that basic liberties, opportunities, and other primary goods are fundamental to flourishing lives no matter what moral commitments, life plans, or other particulars of the person might obtain (Kymlicka 1989, 10–19, Waldron 1993: 155–6).[4] Moreover, autonomy is ascribed to persons (or projected as an ideal) in order to delineate and critique oppressive social conditions, liberation from which is considered a fundamental goal of justice (whether or not those critiques are described as within the liberal tradition or as a specific alternative to it) (cf. Keornahan 1999, Cornell 1998, Young 1990, Gould 1988; cf. also Hirschmann 2002, 1–29). For our purposes here, liberalism refers generally to that approach to political power and social justice that determines principles of right (justice) prior to, and largely independent of, determination of conceptions of the good (though see Liberalism; see also Christman 2017, ch. 4). This implies that the liberal conception of justice, and the legitimation of political power more generally, can be specified and justified without crucial reference to controversial conceptions of value and moral principles (what Rawls calls “comprehensive moral conceptions” (Rawls 1993, 13–15). The fact of permanent pluralism of such moral conceptions is therefore central to liberalism.[5] One manner in which debates concerning autonomy directly connect to controversies within and about liberalism concerns the role that state neutrality is to play in the justification and application of principles of justice. Neutrality is a controversial standard, of course, and the precise way in which liberal theory is committed to a requirement of neutrality is complex and controversial (see Raz 1986, 110–64, Waldron 1993, 143–67). The question to be asked here is whether the conception of autonomy utilized in liberal theories must itself attempt to be neutral concerning various conceptions of morality and value, or, alternatively, does the reliance on autonomy in the justification and specification of liberal theories of justice render them non-neutral simply because of this reliance (no matter how “neutral” the conception of autonomy utilized turns out to be) (Christman 2015). Let us consider this first question and in so doing revisit the issue of whether the independence implicit in autonomy should best be conceived in a purely “procedural” manner or more substantively. Recall that some theorists view autonomy as requiring minimal competence (or rationality) along with authenticity, where the latter condition is fleshed out in terms of the capacity to
— Autonomy and free will are essential conditions for moral agency: we aren’t responsible for effects we couldn’t choose or avert. Skeptics argue that the experience of free will is illusory; those def...
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Menu Browse Table of Contents What's New Random Entry Chronological Archives About Editorial Information About the SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Contact Support SEP Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries Entry Navigation Entry Contents Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top Personal Autonomy First published Tue May 28, 2002; substantive revision Thu Feb 15, 2018 Autonomous agents are self-governing agents. But what is a self-governing agent? Governing oneself is no guarantee that one will have a greater range of options in the future, or the sort of opportunities one most wants to have. Since, moreover, a person can govern herself without being able to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, it seems that an autonomous agent can do something wrong without being to blame for her action. What, then, are the necessary and sufficient features of this self-relation? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question. 1. Introduction 2. Four More or Less Overlapping Accounts of Personal Autonomy 3. Challenges to Identifying the Minimal Conditions of Personal Autonomy 4. Agents as Causes and the Practical Point of View 5. Conclusion Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. Introduction When people living in some region of the world declare that their group has the right to live autonomously, they are saying that they ought to be allowed to govern themselves. In making this claim, they are, in essence, rejecting the political and legal authority of those not in their group. They are insisting that whatever power these outsiders may have over them, this power is illegitimate; they, and they alone, have the authority to determine and enforce the rules and policies that govern their lives. When an individual makes a similar declaration about some sphere of her own life, she, too, is denying that anyone else has the authority to control her activity within this sphere; she is saying that any exercise of power over this activity is illegitimate unless she authorizes it herself. Most of the reasons that can be offered in support of this claim have correlates in the case of demands for group autonomy. But there is one very important exception: a reason that takes us beyond politics, to the metaphysics of agency. An agent is one who acts. In order to act, one must initiate one’s action. And one cannot initiate one’s action without exercising one’s power to do so. Since nothing and no one has the power to act except the agent herself, she alone is entitled to exercise this power, if she is entitled to act. This means that insofar as someone is an agent, i.e., insofar as she is one who acts—she is correct to regard her own commitments to acting, her own judgments and decisions about how she should act, as authoritative. Indeed, if she were to challenge the authority that is an essential feature of her judgments and decisions, then they would cease to be her own practical conclusions. Their power to move her would cease to be a manifestation of her power to move herself; it would not be the power of her own agency. In short, every agent has an authority over herself that is grounded, not in her political or social role, nor in any law or custom, but in the simple fact that she alone can initiate her actions. To be sure, it might be unwise for someone to follow the commands she gives to herself when she “makes up her mind.” The point, however, is that she has no conceivable option. In order to form an intention to do one thing rather than another, an agent must regard her own judgment about how to act as authoritative—even if it is only the judgment that she should follow the command or advice of someone else. This tight connection between being an agent and having authority has no correlate in cases where the authority at issue is political. Anyone can coherently (and often plausibly) challenge the political authority of some individual or group. Even a political leader herself can with good reason believe that her political power is illegitimate, and that exercising this power is unjustified. Despite the special inalienable nature of our authority over ourselves, it is possible for us to fail to govern ourselves, just as it is possible for a political leader to fail to govern those who fall within her domain. Indeed, precisely because our authority over our own actions is an intrinsic feature of our agency, our deference to this authority is but the form of self-government. It is no guarantee that whenever we act, the forces that move us owe their power to our power to decide what to do. Just as a political leader’s official status is compatible with her having no real power to call the shots, so too, a person can have an authoritative status with respect to her motives without having any real power over them. Though it is an agent’s job to determine how she will act, she can do this job without really being in control. Of course, no one can govern herself without being subject to influences whose power does not derive from her own authority: everything we do is a response to past and present circumstances over which we have no control. But some of the forces that move us to act do not merely affect which actions we choose to perform, nor how we govern ourselves in making these choices. They influence us in a way that makes a mockery of our authority to determine our own actions. They undermine our autonomy. What distinguishes autonomy-undermining influences on a person’s decision, intention, or will from those motivating forces that merely play a role in the self-governing process? This is the question that all accounts of autonomy try to answer. As the number and variety of these accounts indicate, the distinction is extremely elusive. There is certainly widespread agreement about the paradigm threats to personal autonomy: brainwashing and addiction are the favorite examples in the philosophical literature. But philosophers seem unable to reach a consensus about the precise nature of these threats. They cannot agree about how it is that certain influences on our behavior prevent us from governing ourselves. This disagreement about the defining characteristics of autonomous agency reflects the fact that even as concrete examples appear to call attention to a very real difference between those who govern themselves and those who do not, there are significant conceptual obstacles to making sense of this distinction. These obstacles are tied to the very feature of agency mentioned above—the feature that appears to support the demand that individuals be granted considerable political and legal power. If an agent fails to govern herself when she acts, this must be because what she does is independent of her power to determine how she will act. But if she necessarily has the authority to determine how she will act, and if this essential feature of agency is inseparable from the fact that she necessarily defers to herself whenever she initiates her action, then how can her behavior possibly escape her control? Intuitively, an agent can fall under the sway of desires, or urges, or compulsions whose power is at odds with her own power as an agent; she can be moved by such impulses “in spite of herself.” But in what sense, exactly, are such motives “external” to the agent herself? How can their power to move her fail to be a manifestation of her power to act? How can their power reduce her authorization of her action to a mere formality? It is difficult to answer these questions when the governing agent and the agent she governs are one and the same. (Again, the perplexity to which these questions give voice does not have a correlate in the political case. We can easily grasp the idea of a country’s army (or legislative body, or cabinet ministers) dictating to the president what legislation he must approve; for in this case there are (at least) two independently identifiable decision-makers—each with its own point of view, each with its own power. The difficulty in the case where the relevant powers are all within the psyche of a single individual agent is that there is no such independently identifiable pair of standpoints in terms of which we can distinguish the powers that bully this agent from the powers that can be attributed to the agent herself. An account of the conditions under which an individual agent is bullied by her motives is, at the same time, an account of what makes a motive external to the agent’s own standpoint.) 2. Four More or Less Overlapping Accounts of Personal Autonomy Philosophers have proposed many different accounts of the autonomous agent’s special relation to her own motives. According to one prominent conception, which one might call “coherentist,” an agent governs her own action if and only if she is motivated to act as she does because this motivation coheres with (is in harmony with) some mental state that represents her point of view on the action. The relevant mental state varies from account to account. According to one popular story, an agent’s point of view is constituted by her highest-order desires regarding which of her first-order desires moves her to act. (Frankfurt 1988c)[1] According to another story, her point of view is constituted by her (contemporaneous or long-term) evaluative judgments regarding which actions are (most) worth performing. (Watson 1975)[2] Still another account adds that there must also be harmony between what the agent does and her more or less long-term plans (Bratman 1979 and 2007). And others appeal to the relatively stable network of emotional states constitutive of “caring” (Frankfurt 1988f and 1999d, Jaworska, Shoemaker 2003)[3] or to the agent’s character traits (Dworkin, R.), or to her most thoroughly “integrated” psychological states (Arpaly and Schroeder). All these accounts reflect the intuition that an action cannot be attributed to the agent herself if, even as she performs this action, she occupies a point of view from which she repudiates what she is doing. More carefully, such an action cannot be the agent’s doing in the way that it must be if it is to qualify as an instance of self-government. According to this intuition, if someone repudiates, or in some other way dissociates herself from, the causal efficacy of her own motives, then the power of these motives is independent of her authority. If, on the other hand, she endorses these motives, whether implicitly or explicitly, then her actions occur with her permission, if not necessarily at her command. Under what conditions does someone count as endorsing or repudiating her motives? Each account offers a different answer to this question. Not only does there appear to be a tight conceptual connection between self-governing agency and synchronic psychic unity; there also appears to be a connection between self-governing agency and the diachronic unity of one’s later self with one’s earlier self. This is the connection central to accounts that identify self-governing agents with agents constrained by plans, or by well-integrated emotions, or traits of character. Agents persist through time; and so, these accounts stress, an agent’s point of view is not simply a function of whatever mental state(s) she happens to be in at some point in time. Because an agent’s plans play a crucial role in ensuring that she is more than a mere collection or sequence of mental states, it is reasonable to think that whether her motives have her support depends on whether they are constrained by these plans. So, too, it is reasonable to think that her stance toward her motives is determined by her long-term values and/or her relatively stable commitments and cares. On a strict coherentist conception of autonomy, autonomous agents can be moved by desires they are helpless to resist: though an addict fails to govern herself if she would rather resist her irresistible urge to take drugs, she is an autonomous agent if she has no objection to her addiction and its motivational effects. According to the coherentist, moreover, both the origin and the content of a person’s higher-order attitudes (evaluative judgments, plans) are irrelevant to whether she is an autonomous agent. She need have done nothing to bring it about that she has these attitudes; and the attitudes need not be especially rational or well-informed. Coherentist accounts are thus doubly internalist. They express the intuition that whether we govern ourselves depends on neither how we came to be who we are (a fact that is prior to (and in this sense external to) the action itself) nor how our beliefs and attitudes relate to reality (a fact that is independent of (and in this sense external to) the beliefs and attitudes themselves). In other words, on these accounts, there need be no special relation between our autonomy-constituting attitudes and either the past circumstances that caused these attitudes or the present circumstances in response to which they move us to act. Other accounts of autonomy introduce conditions that are externalist in one or both of these ways. According to those who advocate a reasons-responsive conception of autonomous agency, an agent does not really govern herself unless her motives, or the mental processes that produce them, are responsive to a sufficiently wide range of reasons for and against behaving as she does. (Fischer and Ravizza, Nelkin, Wolf)[4] On accounts of this type, an agent who is unresponsive to the reasons for “standing behind,” or “backing up,” certain motives and not others is not in the proper position to authorize her own actions. Whether the relevant reasons are grounded in facts about her own desires and interests, or whether they have some independent source, the idea is that someone is not qualified to govern herself if she cannot understand what she (really) has reason to do, or (if this is a distinct handicap) is incapable of being moved by these reasons. In effect, her exercise of authority is so ill-conceived that it is powerless to confer legitimacy on her motives. The feature of these accounts that most distinguishes them from coherentist accounts is the importance they attribute to an agent’s ability to appreciate the reasons she has. (Once she appreciates these reasons, her inability to act accordingly is, essentially, the inability to conform her act to her own judgment, and to her corresponding (higher-order) desire.) What, exactly, is the connection supposed to be between being out of touch with (evaluative and/or nonevaluative) reality and failing to govern oneself? Clearly, a person who fails to appreciate a wide range of reasons for action is unlikely to govern herself well: she is likely to do things that will, in the long run, thwart her own purposes and interests. The reasons-responsiveness conception of autonomy thus appears to reflect the intuition that when we do something very poorly, we do not really do it at all. There is, however, another possible underlying rationale for regarding ignorance as a threat to self-government. If doing Y is constitutive of doing Z, then if I authorize myself to be moved by the desire to do Y because I mistakenly believe that doing Y is a way of not doing Z, then there is an obvious sense in which I have not authorized myself to do what I am now doing when I am moved by the desire to do Y. So, if I have a general desire to do what is right and prudent, or, even more generally, a desire to do what I can justify to myself (and others), or, more generally still, a desire to be responsive to reasons, then insofar as I am moved to act in ways that are, in fact, incompatible with satisfying these desires, there is a sense in which I—who am committed to doing only what I have good (enough) reason to do—have not really authorized my action. Alternatively, we could say that, under these circumstances, something external to my power to guide myself by reasons has prevented me from exercising this power, and so has prevented me from governing myself.[5] An additional source of support for the reasons-responsive conception of autonomy comes from the thought that someone who cannot respond to the reasons there are must have a limited ability to reason. This brings us to a third popular approach to autonomous agency—an approach that stresses the importance of the reasoning process itself (Christman 1991, 1993 and Mele 1993, 1995).[6] According to responsiveness-to-reasoning accounts, the essence of self-government is the capacity to evaluate one’s motives on the basis of whatever else one believes and desires, and to adjust these motives in response to one’s evaluations. It is the capacity to discern what “follows from” one’s beliefs and desires, and to act accordingly. One can exercise this capacity despite holding false beliefs of all kinds about what one has reason to do. Accordingly, on these accounts, being autonomous is not the same thing as being guided by correct evaluative and normative judgments. The emphasis on an autonomous agent’s responsiveness to her own reasoning reflects the intuition that someone whose education consisted of a method of indoctrination that deprived her of the ability to call her own attitudes into question would, in effect, be governed by her “programmers,” not by herself. So, too, someone whose practical reasoning was directly manipulated by others would not govern herself by means of this reasoning. And so, it seems, she would have no power over the motives that this reasoning produced. Like the coherentists, advocates of responsiveness-to-reasoning accounts believe that the key to autonomous agency is the ability to distance oneself from one’s attitudes and beliefs—to occupy a standpoint that is not constituted by whatever mental states are moving one to act. They agree that motives authorized from this reflective standpoint are internal to the agent herself in a way that her other motives are not. Unlike the coherentists, however, the reasoning-responsive theorists believe that there is more to the capacity for self-reflection than the capacity to hold higher-order attitudes. The authority of our higher-order attitudes is grounded, they claim, in the authority of the practical reasoning that supports these attitudes. So a self-governing agent does not merely endorse her motives: her endorsements are implicit claims about which motives have the support of her reason. This fact is closely tied to another. Like many accounts that stress an autonomous agent’s responsiveness to reasons, responsiveness- to-reasoning accounts often suggest that self-government requires the capacity for self-transformation. On this assumption, an autonomous agent is someone who can change her mind when she discovers good reason to do so.[7] In contrast, strict coherentists insist that it is possible to act autonomously while being moved by desires that are not only irresistible when they produce their effects, but so integral to one’s identity that one could not possibly will to resist them.[8] The conception of autonomous agency as responsiveness to reasoning clearly has a more internalist character than the conception of autonomous agency as responsiveness to reasons: according to those who stress the autonomous agent’s ability to evaluate her own motives, what counts is not the relation between the agent’s attitudes and external reality, but her ability to draw inferences from what she wants and believes, and by so doing, to reconsider—to rationally reflect upon—her other desires and beliefs. Insofar, however, as a responsiveness-to-reasoning account presupposes a particular conception of practical reasoning, it appeals to standards, or principles, that the agent herself might misapply, or fail to recognize altogether. Moreover, even if advocates of autonomy as responsiveness-to-reasoning have nothing in particular in mind when they speak of the process of “reflection,” “rational evaluation,” etc., reasoning is a norm-governed process that an agent might reject for reasons of her own. Responsiveness to reasoning accounts thus contain an externalist element that is absent from strict coherentist accounts. They imply that an agent can be mistaken about whether she is really reasoning—and so can be mistaken about whether the power of her motives reflects the fact that she has the authority to determine her own actions. This weak externalism naturally expands into more robust varieties. In particular, it supports the idea that whether an agent’s reasoning is really her way of governing her actions depends on which forces exert a nonrational influence on this reasoning. Even when indoctrination and other more or less imaginary forms of “mind control” do not prevent a person from reaching evaluative conclusions about her own motives, they can prevent her from thinking for herself. So, too, it seems, someone in the grip of compulsion or addiction can be so dominated by this condition that whatever facts she considers, and whatever conclusions she draws, cannot legitimately be attributed to her. One way to interpret these cases is to say that the person’s reasoning falls so far short of the norms of “rational reflection” that she is not really reasoning at all. Alternatively, one can say that her reasoning does not guarantee her autonomy because it is under the control of external forces. Insofar as accounts of autonomy simply stipulate that certain influences on an agent’s intention-forming process “interfere with,” or “pervert,” this process, these accounts are incomplete. For they leave it mysterious why certain influences, and not others, are a threat to self-government. One response to this challenge is offered by reasons-responsive accounts: according to this response, the autonomy-undermining influences are the ones that prevent the reasoning process from being sufficiently sensitive to the reasons there are.[9] Another – compatible – response appeals to the “relational” aspects of autonomy: other agents can prevent someone’s reasoning from qualifying as a mode of self-government by preventing the reasoner from developing the self-respect and/or self-trust necessary for forming a point of view that is truly her own (Benson 1994, 2000, Mackenzie and Stoljar, Anderson and Honneth)[10]. If an agent’s point of view does not reflect her respect for herself and for her ability to set her own ends and assess the reasons relevant to pursuing some ends and not others, then the direction her reasoning takes cannot be attributed to her. (Though relational accounts of autonomy highlight the extent to which an agent’s capacity to govern herself depends on her interactions with other agents, it is important to note that self-respect and self-trust can also be undermined by experiences or psychological conditions that do not involve the actions of anyone else.) A fourth conception of personal autonomy offers a very different response to the challenge of distinguishing (i) the determining causes that prevent an agent from governing herself when she employs her reason from (ii) the causes that determine how an agent governs herself when she reasons. According to this incompatibilist conception, each of these influences undermines the agent’s autonomy; cases of mind control simply call our attention to the fact that whenever our motives are causally determined by events over which we have no control, their power does not reflect our authority. (Pereboom) According to incompatibilists, if our actions can be fully explained as the effects of causal powers that are independent of us, then even if our beliefs and attitudes are among these effects, we do not govern them, and so we do not govern ourselves. (Kane 1996 and van Inwagen 1983)[11] Incompatibilist accounts of autonomy take many subtly different forms. So do the three other (compatibilist) accounts mentioned here. Some of the differences reflect disagreements over the extent to which the relevant conditions—coherence among higher- and lower-order attitudes, responsiveness to reasons, responsiveness to reasoning, freedom from determination by external causes—must actually obtain when an agent determines her will, or whether it is enough that under certain specified circumstances the agent would relate to her motives in the stipulated manner. There is also a difference of opinion about the scope of the relevant capacities: Must an autonomous agent be capable of responding to a wide range of reasons for and against her action? or is it enough that her motives are responsive to the “strongest,” “most compelling” reasons? and can these reasons include the sort of credible threats that figure in cases of coercion? What range of attitudes must an autonomous agent be capable of calling into question? How well must she be capable of reasoning? Does it matter whether she is guided by certain principles of rationality? Must it be possible for her to draw different conclusions on the basis of the reasons she considers? Is it essential that she could have considered a different set of reasons instead? There are even disagreements over whether the reasons to which self-governing agents respond are, as most assume, practical considerations concerning what to do, or what is worth doing. It has been suggested that agents govern their actions by engaging in theoretical reasoning to the end of forming beliefs about which modes of behavior they could explain, given their desires. (Velleman) This suggestion stresses the extent to which governing oneself involves deferring to psychic demands whose power is independent of one’s authority. On this picture, an agent exercises authority over what she does only once she is faced with a set of possible actions, whose possibility reflects their compatibility with the causal power of her desires: in predicting that she will perform one of these actions, she authorizes this action, and thereby strengthens her motives for performing it.[12] This way of interpreting the link between autonomous agency and responsiveness to reasons raises larger questions about the relationship between our practical impulses and our reason. The answers to these questions, and to those mentioned above can be combined in many different ways. Not only, moreover, can each approach thus take a wide variety of forms, but the approaches themselves can (and often do) figure together as necessary or sufficient conditions in a single complex account. 3. Challenges to Identifying the Minimal Conditions of Personal Autonomy All the proposals just considered contribute to our understanding of the various roles that agents can play in their own actions. They articulate various ideals that agents can realize to various degrees when they act. In so doing, they shed light on how, with the proper training, a very young child, whose deference to the authority of her own judgments is little more than the form of self-government, can develop into an exemplary self-governing agent. This is a very important contribution. Nonetheless, it falls short of giving us everything we have reason to expect from an account of personal autonomy. In particular, challenges to the different approaches sketched above suggest that they do not spell out the minimal conditions under which a person’s exercise of authority over how she behaves reflects her own power to determine how she exercises this authority. Minimal self-government seems to require nothing more nor less than being the power behind whatever reasoning directly gives rise to one’s behavior. Yet none of the accounts we have canvassed here seems to capture this important, most basic, form of self-government. Nor, it seems, does any combination of these accounts. The worry that the coherence of one’s contemporaneous attitudes does not suffice for even minimal self-government is grounded in the apparent possibility that a person could be brainwashed, or otherwise compelled, to endorse a given motive. Indeed, her brain could be manipulated in such a way that each of her endorsements is highly responsive to reasons. This has led some philosophers to supplement coherentist accounts of autonomy with additional conditions that place constraints on the causal history of an agent’s endorsements, constraints of the very sort singled out in the responsiveness-to-reasoning accounts. These supplements face a significant challenge, however: it is very difficult to spell out the distinction between autonomy-conferring reasoning and autonomy-undermining reasoning without implicitly appealing to the very phenomenon one is trying to explain. Even if historical approaches to autonomy can successfully overcome this difficulty, they do nothing to address the fact that coherence is not even necessary for autonomous agency. An agent need not sacrifice her autonomy in order to decide to act contrary to her long-term commitments and concerns; acting “out of character” is not a sufficient condition for failing to govern oneself. Though a “weak-willed” agent is hardly a paradigm example of someone who governs herself when she acts, she too plays a decisive role in the relative power of her own motives; she authorizes her behavior, even though she believes that she has good reason to act otherwise. It is notoriously difficult to make sense of such an exercise of authority.[13] For our purposes here, however, it suffices to note that if weakness of will is a genuine phenomenon, then human agents have the capacity to govern themselves in a way that they themselves take to be unjustified. They can assert an authority over themselves that challenges the authority of their very own reason. Of course, someone whose action is caused in this way does not govern herself as thoroughly as someone whose will is “strong”; she acts for a reason that she herself deems inadequate; and so she is not (adequately) governed by the norms of her own thought. Nonetheless, even under these conditions, the desires that move her to act do so on her own authority. To use what is perhaps the most important metaphor in the literature on personal autonomy, the weak-willed agent “identifies with” her motives in whatever way she must in order to be accountable for their effects. It is not simply that what she does is the result of an earlier autonomous action. Rather, her accountability is grounded in her contemporaneous relation to what she is doing. The possibility of weakness of will points to the more general fact that an agent’s authorization of her own motives need not take the form of the judgment that it would not be better to act otherwise. Various forms of perversity are perfectly compatible with autonomous agency. Some philosophers believe that it is also possible for agents to defy their own contemporaneous normative verdicts without defying anything very deep about themselves. A woman, for example, may conclude that even though she has an overriding reason to give up her child for adoption, she cannot recognize herself in this action, and so cannot identify with the desire to perform it.[14] Reasonable people will surely disagree about how best to interpret any particular example. But human experience does seem to support the general point: the human capacity for self-reflection enables human agents to distance themselves in thought from every aspect of their own psyches—even their rational reflections. Given this possibility, a person’s identification with her motives cannot be cashed out in terms of higher-order attitudes of approval and disapproval, or in terms of the rational reflections that typically ground these attitudes. Similar concerns are raised by the appeal to plans. Though plans often enable a person to exercise some measure of control over her life as a whole, a person can govern herself at a particular time even while defying her earlier attempts to place constraints on how she will govern herself at this time. She can take it upon herself to abandon her plans, or to modify them in ways she did not anticipate when she first made them. She can even reject the counsel of the long-term values that provide the underlying rationale for these plans. Reflections along these lines have led some to conclude that we are bound to come up empty-handed as long as we think of an agent’s identification with her motives as a self-relation she is responsible for securing. For, as long as we take this approach, we appear to be stuck with the question: under what conditions does the agent govern her identification with some motive? what conditions must she satisfy in order to identify with the motives that move her to identify with some of her motives and not others? under what conditions does she authorize the attitudes and/or mental activities that issue in a given lower-order authorization? If we are to escape the regress such questions evoke, it seems that there must be an attitude that can be identified with the agent’s point of view simply by virtue of being the attitude it is; there must be an attitude from which no agent can possibly be alienated. To be sure, if—like most animals—rational agents could not distance themselves from their own motives, then they would be incapable of governing themselves. Self-government requires two points of view: that of the governing authority, and that of the governed. Nonetheless, if there is to be an end to the potential regress of identifications, it seems that there must also be a limit to the capacity for self-alienation. As we have seen, no such limitation seems to apply where the mental state at stake is an agent’s highest-order desire, evaluative judgment, or plan, or even an integrated combination of such attitudes. The only attitude from which it seems that no agent can be alienated is the desire to have sufficient power to determine one’s own motives—the desire to be a self-governing agent.[15] Even if, however, we leave to one side the question of whether this desire can really be attributed to every potentially self-governing agent, it does not seem to be an adequate basis for distinguishing motives whose power can be attributed to the agent herself from motives that are not in this sense internal. For if a desire underlies every action performed by a potentially self-governing agent, then it plays a causal role even when an agent fails to govern her motives in the minimal way necessary to be accountable for them. It thus cannot be the key to any account of what is special about self-governing agency[16]. Perhaps there is no attitude to which we can point in order to distinguish between cases in which the power of an agent’s motives can be directly attributed to her and cases in which her authority over her motives is a mere formality. If so, then this might seem to be a reason to favor accounts that tie autonomous agency to the agent’s responsiveness to reasons. Unfortunately, however, these accounts have problems of their own. Most importantly, it seems as though a person can govern herself even if she does not understand the significance of what she is doing. To be sure, if someone’s ignorance is perfectly reasonable, then she may not be to blame if she does something wrong. But under such circumstances, what frees her from blame is the fact that she has good reason to be ignorant. There appears to be no basis for assuming that, in addition to lacking certain relevant information, she is not really the (ill-informed) power behind her authorization of her action. In killing Desdemona, Othello fails to accomplish his aim of doing what he has good reason to do. But this does not prevent him from being the author of his own actions. Nor would he necessarily have been prevented from governing himself if, given his character and circumstances, he had been unable to “track” the evaluative and nonevaluative facts: he would still have been accountable for what he did if his reason for doing it had been that he was too jealous, or too stubborn, or too vain, or too hot-tempered to be capable of responding to the wide range of reasons against believing that his wife was unfaithful to him—and the wide range of reasons against killing her even if she was unfaithful.[17] More carefully, to insist that he would not have been accountable under these circumstances, we must abandon the assumption that autonomous agency is possible even if all actions can, in principle, be explained in terms of deterministic laws of nature. In other words, we must accept the incompatibilist thesis that if a person’s character is the product of forces over which he never had any control, and if his character traits determine his choices, then even if his motives are responsive to reasons, he is not responsible for their motivating force. The preceding reflections call attention to how difficult it is to distinguish the conditions of ideal self-government from the conditions under which one is sufficiently self-governing to be responsible for the motivating power of one’s desires. The difficulty is manifested in the fact that as soon as we try to pin down the minimal, threshold conditions of autonomous agency, we seem to come up against the conditions necessary for agency itself. Consider, for example, an alleged paradigm case of an agent who fails to govern herself: a person who takes drugs even though she would rather resist the motivating force of her addiction. It is widely agreed that, even if many people who fit this description are merely weak-willed, not all of them are: some unwilling addicts are not self-governing in even the minimal sense. According to coherentist and responsiveness-to-reasoning accounts, this is because such addicts are, in effect, “passive bystanders” to their own motives. But even if we could find a satisfactory account of the relevant passivity, this diagnosis would be problematic. For it assimilates the addict to someone whose behavior does not even qualify as an action—someone, e.g., with Tourette’s Syndrome, whose verbal outbursts and bodily movements are not even voluntary. It thus fails to shed light on the conditions under which someone acts—intentionally, even deliberately—without being accountable for what she does. (The same problem arises for the proposal that autonomous agents differ from other agents in virtue of their special way of understanding what they are up to. Regardless of whether someone governs her intentional actions, she knows what she is doing without having to observe her behavior. If someone had to observe her own behavior in order to discover what she was up to, then this behavior would not qualify as her action.) If someone’s motives directly defy her attempt to exercise authority over her actions, then their power is not only independent of her authority; they bypass her agency altogether. Even if under these conditions a person can acknowledge that there is something to be said for behaving as she does, she is as alienated from the power of her own motives as she is from the power of the physiological states that produce her reflex movements. She is not an autonomous agent because she is not an agent at all[18]. Of course, there is a sense in which the addict, but not the victim of Tourette’s, is responsive to reasons. But even if we could spell out this distinction in a satisfactory way, we still face the problem of explaining why an agent’s capacity to respond to external reality is relevant to her capacity to govern herself. And there are other problems too. If, for example, nonaction differs from action in virtue of being unresponsive to reasons, then it follows that nonrational animals never really act, or that acting from instinct is acting for reasons. It is not clear what considerations could overcome the implausibility of these implications. 4. Agents as Causes and the Practical Point of View Even
— Export BibTeX EndNote RefWorks CC0 version of this metadata Journal article Autonomy's suicide Publication status: Published Peer review status: Peer reviewed Actions Email Email this record × Send the bibliographic details of this record to your email address. Your Email Please enter the email address that the record information will be sent to. - Your message (optional) Please add any additional information to be included within the email. Send Cite Cite this record × APA Style Biggar, N. (2016). Autonomy's suicide. Newman Rambler, 12, 27–33. Copy APA Style MLA Style Biggar, N. “Autonomy's Suicide.” Newman Rambler, vol. 12, Newman Association of Montreal Inc., 2016, pp. 27–33. Copy MLA Style Chicago Style Biggar, N. 2016. “Autonomy's Suicide.” Newman Rambler 12: 27–33. Copy Chicago Style Tweet Print Access Document Files: Autonomy's Suicide 1 s... (Accepted manuscript, pdf, 43.5KB) Why is the content I wish to access not available via ORA? × Bibliographic data (the information relating to research outputs) and full-text items (e.g. articles, theses, reports, etc.) arrive in ORA from several different sources. Unfortunately we are not able to make available the full-text for every research output. Please contact the ORA team if you have queries regarding unavailable content OR if you are aware of a full-text copy we can make available. Content may be unavailable for the following four reasons Version unsuitable We have not obtained a suitable full-text for a given research output. See the versions advice for more information. Recently completed Sometimes content is held in ORA but is unavailable for a fixed period of time to comply with the policies and wishes of rights holders. Permissions All content made available in ORA should comply with relevant rights, such as copyright. See the copyright guide for more information. Clearance Some thesis volumes scanned as part of the digitisation scheme funded by Dr Leonard Polonsky are currently unavailable due to sensitive material or uncleared third-party copyright content. We are attempting to contact authors whose theses are affected. Alternative access to the full-text You may be able to access the full-text directly from the publisher's website using the 'Publisher Copy' link in the 'Links & Downloads' box from a research output's ORA record page. This method may require an institutional or individual subscription to the journal/resource. Request a Copy × The file(s) for this record are currently under an embargo. If you complete the attached form, we can attempt to contact the author and ask if they are willing to let us send you a copy for your personal research use only. We will then pass this form and your request on to the author and let you know their response. Your name Your email We require your email address in order to let you know the outcome of your request. Bodleian Card Number (optional) - Request details Provide a statement outlining the basis of your request for the information of the author. Submit request Please note any files released to you as part of your request are subject to the terms and conditions of use for the Oxford University Research Archive unless explicitly stated otherwise by the author. Authors + Biggar, N More by this author Institution: University of Oxford Division: HUMS Department: Theology Faculty Sub department: Theology and Religion Faculty Role: Author Bibliographic Details Publisher: Newman Association of Montreal Inc. Journal: Newman Rambler More from this journal Volume: 12 Pages: 27-33 Publication date: 2016-01-01 Acceptance date: 2015-10-09 Item Description Keywords: SBTMR Pubs id: pubs:620261 UUID: uuid:c62f732a-9366-4818-86bd-1588c77e94dc Local pid: pubs:620261 Source identifiers: 620261 Deposit date: 2016-05-11 Terms of use Copyright holder: Newman Centre Copyright date: 2016 Notes: This is the accepted manuscript of a journal article published by The Newman Association of Montreal Inc. in The Newman Rambler in Winter 2015, available online: http://newmancentre.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Nigel-Biggar.pdf Licence: Terms and Conditions of Use for Oxford University Research Archive Metrics Views and Downloads About views and downloads Altmetrics Dimensions If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record Report an update × Your name Your Email We require your email address in order to let you know the outcome of your enquiry. - Reason for update PDF can now be made available Paper now published Error in record Other Update details Please add any additional information to be included within the email. Request update
— Autonomy is arguably the central concept of a distinctively modern understanding of the dignity of the person, and it is considered to be a core principle in all domains of applied ethics. Autonomy i...
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— FELLOWSHIP OF CATHOLIC SCHOLARS QUARTERLY 35 NUMBERS 3/4 FALL/WINTER 2012 ISSN 1084-3035 Fellowship of Catholic Scholars P.O. Box 495 Notre Dame, IN 46556 (574) 631-5825 catholicscholars.org J. Brian Benestad, Editor [email protected] THE PRESIDENT'S LETTER The Right to Be Wrong.. ARTICLES A Pope Resigns Benedict Our Teacher. The Professor Who Knows Our Names: A Tribute to the Man Who is Schall.. The Paradox of Persons Forty Years After Roe... Vatican II After Fifty Years: The Virtual Council versus the Real Council The Four Pillars of Vatican II and the Year of Faith Wisdom of the Church. Gerard V. Bradley . Rev. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. .Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. Rev. Matthew L. Lamb Robert Fastiggi Jude P. Dougherty Free Choice, Self-Determination and Contraceptive Acts .... E. Christian Brugger Clarifying Society's Allocation of Good and Evil: The Instructive Heart of Martyrdom.. ..J. Marianne Siegmund "Blessed are the Merciful": Saint Augustine on Capital Punishment….. Hugh O'Donnell The Science of Economics: An Ally and Servant to Social Justice.. Altera opinion de consuetudine BOOK REVIEWS Christianity, Islam, Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West by William Kilpatrick. Éducation et instruction selon Saint Thomas d'Aquin: Aspects philosophiques et théologiques by Leo J. Elders... Brian Jones Gerard V. Bradley EX CATHEDRA Ross Douthat's Bad Religion. .Joseph E. Dorner Edward N. Peters Jude P. Dougherty .Anne Gardiner Economic Foundations of International Law by Eric A. Posner and Alan O. Sykes Jude P. Dougherty Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate by Christine Overall.... Mary Shivanandan The Pope's Soldiers. A Military History of the Modern Vatican by David Alvarez.. .Anne Gardiner The Legacy of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S. J.-His Words and His Witness edited by Anne-Marie Kirmse, O.P. and Michael M. Canaris ....Clara Sorrocco Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization by Ralph Martin .….......... Rev. Andrew McLean Cummings Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York 1805-1915 by Robert Emmett Curran Thomas W. Jodziewicz BOOKS RECEIVED NOTICES APPLY FOR MEMBERSHIP OFFICERS AND DIRECTORS J. Brian Benestad 34€ Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Scholarship Inspired by the Holy Spirit, in Service to the Church CONTENTS THE PRESIDENT'S LETTER The Right to Be Wrong. ARTICLES A Pope Resigns Benedict Our Teacher A Tribute to the Man Who is Schall..... The Paradox of Persons Forty Years After Roe...... 9 Vatican II After Fifty Years. 14 The Four Pillars of Vatican II and the Year of Faith .. 19 Wisdom of the Church .22 Free Choice, Self-Determination and Contraceptive Acts .24 Clarifying Society's Allocation of Good and Evil ...29 "Blessed are the Merciful".. .37 .45 Economic Theory and Social Justice. Altera opinion de consuetudine. BOOK REVIEWS .49 2 Reminder: Membership dues will be mailed out the first of the year and are based on a calendar (not academic) year. Christianity, Islam, Atheism... Éducation et instruction selon Saint Thomas d'Aquin..51 Economic Foundations of International Law......... .52 Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate. .54 The Pope's Soldiers...... .55 .58 The Legacy of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.. Will Many Be Saved?.. .60 Shaping American Catholicism.... 62 BOOKS RECEIVED... 63 NOTICES 63 .63 APPLY FOR MEMBERSHIP. OFFICERS AND DIRECTORS. EX CATHEDRA.. .64 .65 2 5 6 .50 THE PRESIDENT's Letter The Right to Be Wrong by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. President, Fellowship of Catholic Scholars he outstanding work of the Becket Fund in defense of religious liberty gives good reason for genuine (albeit tempered) hope in one of the current battles of the culture war. As a sign of our appreciation for these labors, the Fellowship was pleased to present the Cardinal O'Boyle Award to Kevin Seamus Hasson at our 2012 convention in Washington, D.C. The Cardinal O'Boyle Award is not necessarily bestowed every year, but only by special vote of the Board of Directors, in order to honor "an individual whose actions demonstrate courage and witness for the Catholic Church, in light of dissenting pressures in our society." Mr. Hasson much deserves this recognition. At the awards banquet Mr. Hasson provided for those in at- tendance copies of his recent book The Right to Be Wrong.¹ De- spite my profound respect for the work of Mr. Hasson and his colleagues at the Becket Fund, it was with a certain skepticism that I approached a book with this title. Is there really a right to be wrong? Much, I suppose, depends on what one means by a right. Hasson's book shows us an interesting way forward. For those mindful of the history of Catholic teaching on the question of religious liberty, the topic brings to mind the Vatican II document Dignitatis humanae, with its declaration that religious freedom is a basic human right. But we also need to be alert to the teachings of such earlier papal encyclicals as Mirari vos (1832) and Quanta cura (1864), which criticized the notion of religious liberty when understood as part of the propaganda campaign then being undertaken for the promotion of religious indifferentism and atheism. If one read these condemnations of religious liberty by Pope Gregory XVI and Pope Pius IX in isolation, one might well suppose simply that error has no rights and thus that there is no right to be wrong. There appears to be a tension, if not an open contradiction, in these statements, and yet one can imagine various possible ways in which to handle the problem. (1) If the earlier docu- ments were to be read as making dogmatic statements, there would be a serious problem in suggesting that a later ecclesial statement could simply reverse them. (2) If all these documents are read as making only prudential judgments, there may be no problem, or at least one that is not as severe, for prudential judgments are related to changing circumstances in important FCS Quarterly ● Fall/Winter 2012 ways. It could also be the case (3) that despite the verbal similarity in using the term "religious liberty," the various documents do not use the phrase in the same sense, and thus the apparent contradiction could perhaps be resolved by distinguishing between the meanings assigned to the phrase. It might be (4) that all these documents use the term in the same meaning but that either (a) the earlier documents were mistaken but are now corrected by the later one, or (b) that the earlier documents were correct and that the later one is in error. Someone of an historicist mindset might well argue that the Church had shifted its position by 180 degrees when the Second Vatican Council's document affirmed religious liberty as a human right. If the earlier docu- ments unequivocally condemned the very same thing that a later council affirms as a fundamental right, the Church would certainly appear to be contradicting herself, but I do not think that this is the case, for I do not think that the phrase is being used in the same sense. In my analysis, the earlier documents contain a warning about a propaganda campaign, not a comment on the question of whether there is a fundamental duty to pur- sue the truth about God and religion, and thus whether there genuinely is a fundamental right to the religious liberty needed for that pursuit. Some might prefer to say that the Church is simply changing its mind about the proper stance needed for changed circumstances (for exmple, the shift from the juridical order of Christendom to the juridical order of secular states), and thus hold that the later document is simply taking a different stand on practical matters. It is not clear to me that this view gives proper weight to the affirmation of religious liberty as a basic human right, warranted by the natural law obligation to pursue the truth about God and religion. In my judgment, these documents (not to mention the many other ecclesial statements relevant to the is- sue) require a more deft interpretation. One of the most important aspects of the hermeneutics essential for such documents, in my view, is the distinction between prin- ciples and prudential judgments. Making such a dis- tinction not only helps with the proper understanding of the ecclesial texts but also with our assessment a claim like the one made by Hasson, that there is "a right to be wrong." Papal and conciliar texts issued in the areas of Cath- olic social doctrine and church-state relations offer any number of non-negotiable "first principles" as well as a variety of applications by way of prudential reasoning. Determining the proper articulation for basic principles FCS Quarterly Fall/Winter 2012 is an arduous task, but over the centuries the steady la- bors of popes and councils, with the aid of philosophers and theologians, have produced a solid body of teach- ings in this area, with such principles as the right to pri- vate property, and concomitantly, the universal destina- tion of the goods of this world³; the duty of obedience to legitimate authority, and with it, the double-edged principle of subsidiarity; the duty of governments to work for the common good, and correlatively the prin- ciple of solidarity and the right to authentic human development.7 When applying any such principle to specific cases there is need to consider the actual situation as fully as possible. One needs to be alert to the possibility of special cases, changing circumstances, and such like. Of course, the use of prudential reasoning in the application of principles to particular situations can easily result in certain differences of opinion among well-informed and well-meaning individuals, and on these topics reasonable people can respectfully disagree. Within any given eccle- sial document we can find numerous examples of the application of prudential reasoning to particular cases, and the fact that these applications are provided makes them worthy of our special reverence. Attending to this distinction in no way reduces the reverence and respect we owe to magisterial statements on any such topic. But the very nature of the contin- gencies involved requires that reasonable people affirm the non-negotiable principles that have been identified even when they disagree about whether a given ap- plication is correct. It seems to me, for instance, that we have seen a very tactful papal corrective of some earlier papal exercises in prudential reasoning in a case like the steady but firm correction of Populorum progressio by the likes of Sollicitudo rei socialis and more recently Caritas in veritate. Yet, even in the exercise of the papal correction of previous instances of prudential reasoning, there are clear affirmations of various non-negotiable moral prin- ciples about which there is and can be no reversal: in that case, the principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, and the primacy of the demands of charity. By staying alert to the distinction between principles and prudential judgments we gain, I think, a proper basis for appreciating the differences between the affirmation of a principle such as religious liberty as a fundamental human right in Dignitatis humanae and the prudential judgments involved in the condemnation of the propa- ganda campaign for atheism and religious indifferentism that are found in Mirari vos and Quanta cura. The appar- ent contradiction vanishes once one realizes that what 3 THE PRESIDENT's Letter is being condemned is not the right to religious liberty that is needed in order to do one's duty in regard to God. Rather, what the early documents assert is a prudential judgment about how best to protect that religious liberty for the Christian faithful in a particular context, espe- cially given the shift in social order then beginning with the dissolution of Christendom as a juridical order and its replacement by the juridical arrangements of various secular states. In the historical conditions that Gregory XVI and Pius IX addressed, the phrase "religious lib- erty" referred not to the fundamental right to the liberty needed to do one's duty regarding God, but to a slogan being used to champion a freedom from religion. One can see this point from the particular ways in which they inveigh against the term, for they argue that such indif- ferentism would undermine the coherence and consis- tency of the existing religious culture, which promoted the virtuous deeds of true religion and social charity, In The Right to Be Wrong Hasson's concern is with certain trends in American history, but his volume also gives some fine guidance about how to think and argue about the question of religious liberty in our situation. Using an engaging pair of symbolic terms to suggest two extreme positions, Hasson contrasts contemporary "Pilgrims"-whose historical forebears only wanted religious freedom for themselves and expected the state to coerce the religious consciences of those with whom they disagreed with contemporary "Park Rangers," who uphold the principle of religious freedom but who think that it requires that religion be confined to the realm of private activity. He illustrates the latter cat- egory by reference to a group of park rangers who paid no attention to an abandoned concrete roadway barrier until it became an object of worship by a curious group of hippies, and who then worked for its removal from the park because it violated the boundaries of church and state that protects religion by means of confining it to the private sphere. As his book makes clear by repeated lessons from American history, the names that Hasson assigns to these extreme positions are curiously fitting. While the Pilgrims came to these shores seeking religious liberty, they did not establish a polity that guaranteed religious liberty for everyone but only for themselves. They tol- erated difference of opinion on matters they considered small and unimportant, but not on matters of religion. They not only banned competing religious services but even forbade the public celebration of Christmas, which apparently they regarded as a papist invention. The situation described here is not entirely unlike a 4 certain point of view that is part of the history of some Catholic countries. It is understandable that some people, with the best of intentions, saw a need to establish legally what they understood to be the truth about the proper worship of God and the conduct that flows from that understanding. What Dignitatis humanae shows us, however, is a point of utmost importance about the inner logic of the relation between truth and freedom, especially regarding religion. This document of the Second Vatican Council is clear in its recognition that religious truth cannot be embraced authentically unless it is embraced freely. It is, I think, for this reason that Dignitatis humanae points us to the real principles that are at issue: (1) that there is a duty to worship the true God and to do his will in all things; (2) that in order to fulfill this obligation, there is need for society to respect the fundamental right to religious liberty. This right includes not only the liberty to pur- sue the quest to know the true God but also the liberty to live according to the duties of religion. These duties include not only the opportunities for believers to offer worship but also for religious communities to sponsor the institutions and practices by which they serve others in accord with God's commands. Seen in this perspective, the right to religious liberty, and with it such things as constitutional protection for the rights of conscience, the right of assembly, the right to organize ourselves for such common activities as charity, are not just abstract ideals popular in rhetoric but claims to fundamental rights needed for ordered liberty within secular society. There is a serious obligation, of course, to engage in discussion and dialogue with those who make claims about the true identity of God and about the con- duct of religion that are different and presumably incom- patible with our own. But, for the proper exercise of our duties in this sphere, the political arrangements that are required presumably include, as Hasson paradoxically states the point, the right to be wrong. ENDNOTES 1 Kevin Hasson, The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War over Religion in America (New York: Image, 2012). 2 See Rerum novarum, 4-8 (hereafter RN); Quadragesimo anno, 44-52; Mater et magistra, 109-112 (hereafter MM); Centesimus annus, 4-11, 30. 3 See RN, 19, MM, 119-122; Populorum progression, 22-24 (hereafter PP); Gaudi- um et spes, 69; CA, 30-43. 4 See QA, 80; Pacem in terris, 1963 (hereafter PT), 140; CA, 15. 5 See RN, 28-29; QA, 49; MM, 20; PT, 53-74. 6 See PT, 98ff; PP, 43ff; Laborem exercens, 8; Solicitudo rei socialis, 38-40 (hereaf- ter SRS). 7 See, e.g., PP, 12-21; SRS, 27-34. FCS Quarterly ● Fall/Winter 2012 A Pope Resigns by Gerard V. Bradley Gerard Bradley is Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. National Review Online, February 11, 2013 P ope Benedict's resignation raises a host of questions that the Church has not had to face in 600 years. Among them is whether renouncing the papal office (for the reasons Benedict cites for his decision, or for others) ought to become a custom. There are weighty reasons for and against. A long papacy is in itself nothing to criticize. But the job is obviously not one that is suited now (if it ever was) to a man in a certain stage of decline. Bene- dict's renunciation of the office may therefore trigger a needed discussion about the mental and physical stami- na that any pope should possess. Another new question is the role that a living ex- pope, or "pope emeritus," should play in Church affairs, not least in the selection of his own successor. No doubt some commentators will say that Benedict resigned now precisely in order have some say over who succeeds him. That is poppycock. But the natural tendencies of the papal electors might well conspire with their esteem for Ratzinger to make it difficult for Benedict not to have some effect on their deliberations. The next pope will in any event have to chart a new course for inte- grating his predecessor into the Church's life. The main question that Benedict's resignation rais- es, however, is not at all new. It is the central question faced by the Church, and in particular the cardinal elec- tors, whenever the Chair of Peter comes vacant. What sort of man, blessed with which ensemble of charisms, does the Church need now? One part of the answer depends on how the incumbent has understood what is often called, in this context, "the signs of the times." Where is the ministry of Peter right now? Should the next pope stay that course, or has there emerged a dif- ferent set of priorities, calling for a different focus of the papal ministry? It seems clear enough, for example, that Ratzinger's own election was due partly to the electors' desire to continue John Paul II's work, and to their belief that Ratzinger was the right man for that job. What then lies at the heart of Benedict's ministry? Here it seems that FCS Quarterly Fall/Winter 2012 we might compare him to John XXIII. Most people, I am sure, would regard them as being opposites-Ratz- inger was the Church's "doctrinal watchdog," while "good" Pope John wanted to "update" the Church, and all that. But, in fact, they are remarkably alike. Both were very aware that secularization has been a mount- ing tide. Both tried to shape the Church for dealing with it, not by focusing on its evils and condemning them, but by promoting a more effective proclamation of the gospel. In other words: The popes since the Second Vatican Council have tried to engage the secularized world with the gospel, and not to retreat from it in order to preserve the gospel intact, as if it were a scroll to be buried until a new age made its reappearance safe and sensible. This policy of energetic engagement with secularism has, according to the eminent Catholic theo- logian Germain Grisez, not obviously succeeded or clearly failed. It remains the basic challenge of the next papacy. (Islam might be a comparable challenge for the world's public authorities. But, for the Church's pastors, Islam is not, and should not be treated as, much more than a partner for respectful conversations and a mis- sionary opportunity.) One can see Pope John XXIII's deep faith and his desire to engage with modernity in Humanae salutis, the apostolic constitution by which he formally convoked Vatican II on Christmas Day 1961. These same concerns animated his interventions during the Council. In my judgment, the strategy evident in that document, which is so dependent on solid faith and hope, has been the strategy of the popes since John, perhaps especially of John Paul II but not least of all Benedict. In attempting to understand what has transpired since Vatican II, one should not confuse those who adopted Pope John's approach who could be called "progressives" with those who lacked the genuine faith and hope to proclaim the gospel more clearly, and who thought that compromising with secularism was the way to go. These latter folks were often among the "progressives" during Vatican II. But afterward they pur- sued the "spirit" of the Council, which set aside what it actually taught by advocating adaptation and syncre- tism all to make the Church and its teaching more "relevant" to modern society. Ratzinger bought into Pope John's approach as a
‘Autonomy’ and its opposite ‘heteronomy’ derive from nomos the Greek for ‘law’, with the prefixes ‘auto’ and ‘hetero’ again from Greek terms meaning ‘self’ and ‘other’ respectively. Thus someone, or some entity that is autonomous is self-governing, while that which is heteronomous is ruled by someone or something else. Particularly since the eighteenth-century autonomy has come to be seen as a desirable status reflecting a subject’s capacity for, and right of self-direction. In the case of morality this is connected to notions of self-worth and rational agency; in the case of politics to the idea of independent nationhood or statehood. Put another way autonomy is viewed as freedom from control or servitude. While there are few outright critics of autonomy some philosophers regard an emphasis on it as overlooking or denying the extent of dependence on others, which they argue is not an obstacle but a means to self-development and well-being as we are social animals whose flourishing is in communities.