The Place of Autonomy Within Liberalism

2011

Political liberals argue that the classical conception of autonomy must be discarded because it is sectarian and metaphysical. This article rejects that a commitment to autonomy necessarily leads to sectarianism and questions the notion that respect for persons is separable from the commitment to autonomy.

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

This paper is inspired by, and substantially draws on, the work of Eli Friedlander and Steven Affeldt. In their Doctoral dissertations they appropriate Cavell's criticisms of Rawls and incorporate other Cavellian themes in developing their respective, original interpretations of Rousseau (Friedlander Eli, Expressions of Judgment, Harvard University Dissertation (UMI), 1992 esp. chapter 3 "Before the Law," 225-68; Affeldt Steven, Constituting Mutuality, Harvard University Dissertation (UMI), 1996 esp. chapter 1, "The Citizen as Legislator," 1-178). I thank Eli Friedlander in particular for showing me the way to and around Cavell. I am also indebted to Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Lear, whose insights into Kantian Ethics and its difficulties inform this paper to a great extent. 1 According to Christine Korsgaard, one very important merit of the constitutive move is that it meets skeptical challenges "with ease." 1 She thinks Rawls enacts such a move: And [The principles of Justice], Rawls might say, just are the principles of justice for a liberal society. To see why, we need only compare the problem faced by a liberal society with the content of Rawls's two principles of justice. Echoing Rousseau, we might say that the problem faced in the original position is this: to find a conception of justice which enables every member of society to pursue his or her conception of the good as effectively as possible while leaving each member as free as he or she was before. The content of Rawls's two principles simply reflects this conception of the problem. So Rawls's two principles simply describe what a liberal society must do in order to be a liberal society... Rawls's principles are derived from the idea of liberalism itself... The normative force of the conception is established in this way. If you recognize the problem to be real, to be yours, to be one you have to solve, and the solution to be the only or the best one, then the solution is binding upon you. 2 2 The constitutive move takes on the challenge of a practical skeptic. The skeptic undertakes a certain activity but rejects a guiding principle of that activity, a principle

The Routledge Handbook of Autonomy

This chapter sets out John Rawls’s conception of autonomy and considers the role that it plays in his thought across A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. I suggest that one distinctive but overlooked feature of this conception is that it takes seriously the threat to autonomy that arises from how individuals are shaped by their social and political institutions. After setting out this conception and tracing its connections to wider discussions of autonomy, I argue for two main conclusions. First, that despite appearances to the contrary, Rawls’s autonomy-based commitments are broadly speaking consistent across his two main works. Second, that these autonomy-based commitments are not in fact disbarred from playing a grounding role in Political Liberalism. On the contrary, I suggest that Rawls’s conception of autonomy motivates his aim of finding principles of justice that can be stable, and that this in turn illuminates his later commitment to a political liberalism.

Stanford Law Review, 1996

In this article, Professor Gardbaum presents an account of liberalism in which a particular conception of the ideal of autonomy is an essential and constitutive value. This account, which distinguishes between the liberal state's relative indifference as to which substantial ways of life its citizens choose to adopt and its promotion of choice as the basis on which they are adopted, provides the basis for Professor Gardbaum's distinctively liberal critique of political liberalism and its requirement of state impartiality toward its citizens' conflicting ideals, including the ideal of autonomy. He argues that by taking the central task of political theory to be that of accommodating the "problem" of moral conflict in society, political liberalism misconceives the essential nature of the liberal enterprise. Such dissensus should be understood less as the problem to which liberalism is the solution than as the characteristic product of the liberal commitment to the ideal of autonomy. Accordingly, he contends, political liberalism s attempt to justify liberal political principles without relying on controversial ideals fails. Professor Gardbaum claims that freeing the liberal state from the false constraint of impartiality permits it to take its duty to enhance choice seriously, which means that autonomy should be promoted as a substantive rather than only as a formal value.

In this article, I argue that autonomy has to be conceived substantively in order to serve as the qualifying condition for receiving the full set of individual liberal rights. I show that the common distinction between content-neutral and substantive accounts of autonomy is riddled with confusion and ambiguities, and provide a clear alternative taxonomy. At least insofar as we are concerned with liberal settings, the real question is whether or not the value(s) and norm(s) implied by an account of autonomy are acceptable to reasonable people, not whether these accounts are content-neutral, procedural or input-focused. Finally, I demonstrate how substantive constraints are compatible with, or even implied in, the notion of autonomy at play in (Rawls's) political liberalism. Overall, I present a normative reconstruction, clarification, and internal critique of liberalism, drawing on case law and statutes from England and Wales.

The Review of Politics, 1993

Polish Political Science Yearbook

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2013

The Kantian view on the contemporary understanding of autonomy is ambivalent. This ambivalence arises because, in the contemporary literature, a strong distinction is often made between personal autonomy and moral autonomy, with Kant associated only with the latter. Joseph Raz, for example, writes: "Personal autonomy, which is a particular ideal of individual well-being, should not be confused with the only very indirectly related notion of moral autonomy. The latter originates with the Kantian idea that morality consists of self-enacted principles". 2 Personal autonomy, in the contemporary sense, involves (roughly) governing yourself in the pursuit of your own conception of the good, a conception that is usually stated in morally neutral terms. Personal autonomy does not, however, "(merely) [involve] unconstrained ... choice", since personal autonomy can be absent even when unconstrained choice is present. 3 For example, a woman who consents to a cosmetic medical procedure as the result of brainwashing may not be exercising her personal autonomy, even though her choice is unconstrained. 4 A focus on personal autonomy therefore leads to important questions about when it counts as really you doing the governing of yourself in terms of your own conception of the good. In contrast, moral autonomy involves (roughly) legislating the moral law for yourself. This leads to important, but different, questions about moral obligations and how morality limits the pursuit of the good.

Ethics, Politics & Society, 2021

Book Symposium on "Dealing with Diversity: A Study in Contemporary Liberalism" by D. Melidoro: comments and replies.