Autonomy

An Essay on the Life Well-Lived

Beate Roessler, James C. Wagner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509538003, 9781509537990
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In everyday life, we generally assume that we can make our own decisions on matters which concern our own lives. We assume that a life followed only according to decisions taken by other people, against our will, cannot be a well-lived life – we assume, in other words, that we are and should be autonomous. However, it is equally true that many aspects of our lives are not chosen freely: this is true of social relations and commitments but also of all those situations we simply seem to stumble into, situations which just seem to happen to us. The possibility of both the success of an autonomous life and its failure are part of our everyday experiences.

In this brilliant and illuminating book, Beate Roessler examines the tension between failing and succeeding to live an autonomous life and the obstacles we have to face when we try to live our life autonomously, obstacles within ourselves as well as those that stem from social and political conditions. She highlights the ambiguities we encounter, examines the roles of self-awareness and self-deception, explores the role of autonomy for the meaning of life, and maps out the social and political conditions necessary for autonomy. Informed by philosophical perspectives but also drawing on literary texts, such as those of Siri Hustvedt and Jane Austen, and diaries, including those of Franz Kafka and Sylvia Plath, Roessler develops a formidable defense of autonomy against excessive expectations and, above all, against overpowering skepticism.

1
What is Autonomy? A Conceptual Approach

Now it looks as if I am the victim of my own virtuosity. But then what? What would I have done? Become a flautist after all? How will I ever find out? No-one can start at the same point twice over. If an experiment can’t be replicated, it ceases to be an experiment. No-one can experiment with their life. No-one can be blamed for being in the dark.¹

That fall there had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Franklin being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.²

Autonomy is important to us because we can only take responsibility for our lives and for individual actions when we have determined them – mostly – ourselves, when it is emphatically our own actions that we perform, our own plans that we pursue, our own designs that we strive to implement. If we were manipulated or coerced, then we could not act on the basis of our own reasons. Then it would not be our own values and convictions that form the framework of our actions and intentions. What is more, we could not see ourselves as being responsible for our lives as our own, and we might then feel alienated from ourselves. Before examining all of these aspects more closely, I would first like to ask in a general sense: What is autonomy? The present chapter will briefly (1) situate the concept historically before (2) more precisely clarifying the relationship between autonomy and freedom. Drawing on this, and in light of recent debates around the concept of individual autonomy, I will then explain what “autonomy as a capability” means, thus (3) delineating the framework within which the idea of autonomy as it is discussed in this book can be more precisely located. Finally (4), I will offer a cursory description of the open questions that will have to be answered in the ensuing chapters.

Remarks on the history of the concept

In liberal-democratic 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 liv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Autonomy
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to the English edition
• Preface
• Introduction: Autonomy in Everyday Life
• 1 What is Autonomy? A Conceptual Approach
• 2 Ambivalences
• 3 Autonomy and the Meaning of Life
• 4 Autonomy, Self-Knowledge, and Self-Deception
• 5 Autonomy, Self-Thematization, Self-Examination: From Diaries to Blogs
• 6 Autonomous Choice and the Good Life
• 7 Private Life
• 8 Social Preconditions of Autonomy
• 9 The Reality of Autonomy
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement