Autonomy. Beate Roessler

societies, the value of autonomy has by now become so self-evident that Joseph Raz calls it a fact of life: “The value of personal autonomy is a fact of life. Since we live in a society whose social forms are to a considerable extent based on individual choice, and since our options are limited by what is available in our society, we can prosper in it only if we can be successfully autonomous.”³ Autonomy is thus a fact of life because since the Enlightenment this idea has become more and more established as a fundamental value and civil liberty in, as well as a basic precondition or even value of, liberal-democratic societies. Raz’s argument is that we can only lead a well-lived life when we also lead an autonomous life. For a life well lived can only be a life that we ourselves want to live, that we ourselves determine, that we have made our own. Robert Pippin makes a similar argument, namely that a direct connection can be drawn between individual autonomy and the meaning of life – people evidently experience their lives as meaningful when they are able to determine their own lives themselves as much as possible and in fundamental ways. This seems to me to be an essential argument for the idea and the value of autonomy, hence I will discuss this connection in greater detail in a separate chapter.⁴ Autonomy is thus evidently a value that has also been established as a right in liberal-democratic societies. We value autonomy – but what actually is it that we value?

      In a general sense, individual autonomy means our ability or capacity to make the laws according to which we act and that we ourselves consider correct. This idea famously goes back to Kant,⁵ and ever since autonomy has played a central role in ethics and political philosophy. In Kant’s practical philosophy, autonomy as self-legislation means that the will itself creates the moral law according to which human beings are to conduct themselves. Hence the autonomy of the moral law is an expression of practical reason, which categorically dictates behavior and thus places full responsibility for an individual action on the individual herself. Accordingly, for Kant, autonomy is essentially not only a rational but first and foremost a moral concept: we are autonomous and free if, and only if, we are moral and act morally.⁶

Autonomy is also a categorical concept for Kant because all people possess autonomy by virtue of their reason; differences of degree are neither necessary nor possible here. The concept of autonomy corresponds to that of the individual’s dignity, which must be respected – no less categorically – in every person. Now there are two histories to be written of the concept of autonomy since Kant: one in which Hegel, as he himself claims, was the first to do justice to the idea of autonomy and free it of the paradoxes in which it remained entangled in Kant; and one which leads from Kant to Mill and on up to more recent debates, particularly in analytic philosophy.⁷ In terms of content, there are a number of points of contact between these two traditions, and I will come back to them repeatedly throughout this book. The analytic tradition, however, is often seen as being more detailed and less abstract, and so I will take my bearings primarily from this one, although without losing sight of the other.

      Since Mill, the concept of autonomy, or in his work especially that of individuality, has aimed no longer exclusively at moral autonomy but in a broader sense at individual liberty, personal autonomy.⁸ While positions that draw principally on Kant, e.g. those of Christine Korsgaard, do continue to play an important role in contemporary debates, most current conceptions of autonomy proceed from a general idea of personal rather than only or fundamentally from a concept of moral autonomy. Incidentally, Korsgaard also wants to do justice to the idea that we always possess a variety of practical identities – i.e. that we have personal as well as moral autonomy – which must be understood as being specific to individual roles and always embedded in social contexts. However, she argues that the most fundamental of all these practical identities remains our moral identity, which serves as the basis and the source of our normative obligations.

      This distinction between personal and moral autonomy has rightly become well established. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see that we can find a concept of personal autonomy even in Kant and, conversely, that contemporary ideas of personal autonomy draw upon the same qualities and abilities that form the essence of Kantian moral autonomy. Kant himself, with a view to the duty of human beings to “increase” both their physical and spiritual perfections, argues in The Metaphysics of Morals:

      [w]hich of these natural perfections should take precedence, and in what proportion one against the other it may be a human being’s duty to himself to make these natural perfections his end, are matters left for him to choose in accordance with his own rational reflection about what sort of life he would like to lead and whether he has the powers necessary for it (e.g., whether it should be a trade, commerce, or a learned profession).⁹

This in fact sounds like one of the examples used in analytical debates about personal autonomy: What should I do with my life? What sort of life should I lead? Thus, in some respects, the difference between Kant’s concept of autonomy and contemporary notions of personal autonomy is not as clear as it initially seems.

      Now in recent years debates about personal autonomy have become highly differentiated and specialized. First, drawing on Kant (and as frequently and rightly found in the literature), it is reasonable to describe autonomy categorically as an attribute belonging to every person as a person. Beyond this, however, and contrary to Kant’s position, it also makes sense to describe autonomy as a capacity one may possess to varying degrees. Autonomy in a categorical sense, then, is attributable to individuals who in principle possess the unqualified ability to act autonomously and thus cannot be attributed to, say, small children or coma patients. Individuals are therefore considered to be autonomous above a certain threshold. Beyond this threshold, however, people may be capable of autonomy to greater or lesser degrees, i.e. we are speaking here of a graduated concept. In the first, categorical sense, autonomy serves as the basis of, for example, one’s right to defend oneself against paternalistic interventions by the state or other individuals, while debates surrounding the idea of personal autonomy in recent years have aimed to establish a concept of autonomy that can be attributed in varying degrees to autonomous individuals. I will return to this in greater detail below.

      Mill’s concern was that we should be able to lead our personal lives as we want, without hindrances or constraints, so long as we are not harming anyone else. “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.”¹⁰ Our own good in our own way – this is the hallmark of modern individual freedom, which when in doubt discards tradition and convention, asking only: How do I want to live? What kind of person do I want to be? Mill certainly saw himself as an opponent of Kant, arguing that if we did not wish to choose and live our lives ourselves – freely – then we would have

      no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. [. . .] A person whose desires and impulses are his own – are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture – is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character.¹¹

Therefore only people who are free, who “choose for themselves,” who need and make use of all of their abilities and thus have character, truly do justice to human possibilities. This is a concept of personal liberty that clearly goes far beyond the idea of moral autonomy.¹² Mill speaks here primarily of individual liberty, and only rarely of autonomy, but current theories that draw on Mill frequently use the term autonomy in this context.

Negative freedom, positive freedom, autonomy

      What, then, is the connection between freedom and autonomy? Philosophical usage of these two terms is not always clear, and the relation between them is disputed. Some authors identify liberty with autonomy, while others maintain that there is an important difference. As I would now like to show, autonomy should be conceived of as the concretization of a properly understood concept of freedom.¹³

      The conceptual distinction between negative and positive freedom is famously found in an extraordinarily influential