Autonomy. Beate Roessler

even clearer in the case of a second objection to his theory, called the manipulation argument. According to Frankfurt, a person’s autonomy does not depend on how she has come to the desires with which she identifies. Even if they are the result of manipulation, a person can still possess autonomy if her will has the proper structure. This is why such theories are called internalist theories, as they argue that autonomy is determined not by the source of our desires and beliefs but solely by the internal structure of our will.

Even at an intuitive level, however, it seems decidedly implausible to define a person’s autonomy only in terms of the internal formation of her will, without also taking into consideration her social environment and the sources of her desires and beliefs. More appropriate, then, are what are called historical theories, which include the causes of the emergence of desires among the conditions for the attribution of autonomy. John Christman, for example, argues that a person can only be deemed autonomous if she is (in principle) capable of reflecting upon the causes of her desires and beliefs and then either critiquing them with reasons or accepting them regardless.²⁸ A person need not be substantively independent of external influences in order to be called autonomous, but she must be able to demonstrate procedural independence in her ability to reflect on the source of her desires and, as a result of this reflection, potentially reject her desires for good reasons. Thus acting autonomously means acting not simply on the basis of desires – however they may have arisen – but on the basis of reasons.

      In order to be autonomous, then, a person must be able to identify with her desires and beliefs in such a way that she acts on the basis of her own reasons. This is the aspect of autonomy that Christman and others rightly call authenticity, a concept that repeatedly plays an important role in discourses of autonomy. If autonomy means being able to live one’s own life in accordance with one’s own ideas, values, and commitments, then the failure of autonomy as a result of manipulation, (self-)deception, or alienation can be described as a lack of authenticity. A person’s beliefs or intentions become her own beliefs or preferences when she can accept and endorse them in light of what is important to her – her other plans, her obligations, and her conception of herself – and when she does not feel alienated, or at least not too alienated, from them.²⁹

      With this we have already taken a critical step beyond a theory of autonomy oriented solely toward the structure of the individual will. Consequently, for one thing, we have to look back in order to be able to see whether a person can act autonomously; at the same time, we also have to look into the future. Michael Bratman thus argues that a certain harmony must exist between the deliberations and actions a person intends to perform and her medium- and long-term plans, and that we only act autonomously when we conceive of ourselves as always being connected with these plans – what Bratman calls “temporally extended agency.”³⁰ As I will argue in the coming chapters, the criteria of rationality and coherence, as well as of stability, that the idea of plans introduces into autonomous considerations are not only sound but also intuitively adequate. In everyday life, too, we do not consider a person who fails to sufficiently adhere to her plans and intentions to be truly autonomous.

This brings us to our next problem: Can the question of which desires and attitudes ought to guide our actions and which reasons for acting are our own actually be answered without recourse to the content and quality of the options available to us? Substantive theories of autonomy – as opposed to the procedural theories just discussed – argue for an ethical or moral qualification. Susan Wolf contends that Frankfurt’s subjectivist and internalist conception of autonomy is incapable of accounting for the objectivity of reasons and values. Yet, she argues, we cannot plausibly and consistently conceive of autonomy if we do not establish the content of what we want and strive for with reference to what is actually and justifiably desirable, i.e. what is actually good or bad, right or wrong. From a different perspective, Joseph Raz argues that we are capable of acting autonomously only if we also have the right options available to us in society. Thus for Raz, as for Wolf, a person’s autonomy is tied to the question of what she actually chooses to do. This obviously goes well beyond procedural theories in which the important point is not what a person chooses but only how she chooses.

      I will discuss in greater detail below whether Susan Wolf’s substantive theory goes too far, as one could argue that whether we live a good or bad, meaningful or meaningless life is not necessarily related to the question of the concept of autonomy. In any case, it is difficult to say anything about this from a liberal viewpoint ‒ difficult, but not impossible, as I will show in the ensuing chapters, which are critical of Wolf but do not argue against all forms of perfectionism. I think that, at the least, a meaningful array of potential choices and decisions is necessary in order to be able to attribute autonomy to persons. This would be a weak form of perfectionism, one that I shall try to advocate from a variety of different perspectives.

      As a final step, let us now consider the autonomous person in her social relationships, both from the perspective of feminist critique of the concept of autonomy and from that of the general social and political conditions that are necessary for autonomy to succeed. Relational theories contend that the traditional concept of autonomy is overly rationalistic, individualistic (egoistic), relationless and oriented toward a masculine model of life. Hence they seek to defend a position that critically reformulates this concept of autonomy, arguing that subjects are dialogically constituted in their identity and in their autonomy. This is, first, a genealogical argument: we do not spring up out of the earth like mushrooms (as Hobbes claims) but rather are dependent on substantive social relationships if we are to be able to develop an autonomous personality at all. At the same time, it is also a constitutive argument: persons and their autonomy are constituted by social relationships.³¹ A further, systematic argument then makes it clear that social relationships are also necessary and constitutive of individual autonomy because persons consistently pose the practical question to themselves in commitments, in relationships, and in contexts of care. It is often in dialogue with others that we first become clearly aware of how we ourselves want to live. That is, we are always and only autonomous together with others, as I argued at the beginning. This also means, however, that we sometimes have to be able to decide against certain others, against their norms and aims, and that we have the freedom and the right to decide against our own family, against our own origins, and thus for other social contexts, if we think that we can live our life well only by making such a decision.³²

Considering the question of the social conditions of autonomy, however, we can actually go one step further here. To wit, being socially embedded also means being reliant on forms of social recognition. It is not possible to act autonomously without a certain sense of self-respect or self-worth. If what a person believes and considers valuable is not recognized, valued, or considered meaningful at least by certain others or certain groups in her social environment, if she cannot conceive of herself, at least in certain basic respects and vis-à-vis certain significant others, as a person who is capable of determining and explaining her own actions and pursuing her own projects; then she cannot act autonomously, on the basis of her own reasons.

      Self-respect is therefore a precondition of autonomy – and developing self-respect in turn depends on forms of life that at least in principle recognize the autonomy of persons. A number of authors have described this connection between autonomy and self-respect and its social preconditions.³³ Joel Anderson and Axel Honneth, for example, develop an understanding of autonomy based on different forms of recognition, without which the self-evaluative attitudes constitutive of autonomous persons are not possible. They further clarify the ways in which specific social conditions are necessary for cultivating and exercising autonomy. Not only do we require social conditions in order to learn autonomy, the social conditions of recognition also remain necessary for developing and carrying out autonomous projects. Relational theories, moreover, advocate for a richer understanding of agents as not only rational but also emotional, bodily, creative, imaginative.³⁴ This relational or social perspective on autonomy also embraces the idea that social contexts are necessarily always defined by substantive value judgments or ideals that shape the available options autonomous persons can choose from. Hence it is also interested in further external