Personal Autonomy

To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents. Most of us want to be autonomous because we want to be accountable for what we do, and because it seems that if we are not the ones calling the shots, then we cannot be accountable. More importantly, perhaps, the value of autonomy is tied to the value of self-integration. We don't want to be alien to, or at war with, ourselves; and it seems that when our intentions are not under our own control, we suffer from self-alienation.

What conditions must be satisfied in order to ensure that we govern ourselves when we act?

Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question.

1. Introduction
2. Four More or Less Overlapping Approaches to Personal Autonomy
3. Challenges to Identifying the Minimal Conditions of Personal Autonomy
4. Agents as Causes and the Practical Point of View
5. Conclusion

We are back where we started. The demand to be permitted to govern ourselves reflects the conviction that we are, in essence, self-governors. In essence, but not always in fact. Sometimes our authority over our actions is nothing but the form of self-government. Sometimes we are not autonomous agents. If, then, the structure of rational agency justifies our conviction that we are capable of governing our own actions, it does not hold the key to the distinction between those cases in which we fail to exercise this capacity and those in which we succeed.

The conviction that there is such a distinction is grounded in the obvious fact that victims of brainwashing, compulsion, addiction, depression, anxiety, and many other conditions are prevented from governing themselves. If their lack of autonomy is not simply a function of the fact that their actions are causally determined by states of affairs over which they have no control, and if it is not equivalent to any fact about the considerations they are disposed to recognize and be moved by, then it would seem to be a more intrinsic feature of their agency.

No particular attitude seems to be essential to autonomous agency, however — except, of course, the attitude of authorization that is essential to all action for a reason. Nor is it necessary that any particular principles of reasoning serve the autonomous agent as guides — except, again, whatever principles must guide the action of even nonautonomous agents. The content of our desire to govern ourselves when we act thus remains obscure to us, even as the legitimacy of this desire is clear.