Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays available in Hardcover, Paperback
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays
- ISBN-10:
- 0521839513
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521839518
- Pub. Date:
- 02/07/2005
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521839513
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521839518
- Pub. Date:
- 02/07/2005
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays
Buy New
$126.00Buy Used
$101.31-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521839518 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2005 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.18(d) |
About the Author
John Christman is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University.
Joel Anderson is Research Lecturer in Philosophical Anthropology, Department of Philosophy, at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Read an Excerpt
Cambridge University Press
0521839513 - Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism - New Essays - Edited by John Christman and Joel Anderson
Excerpt
1
Introduction
John Christman and Joel Anderson
Recent theoretical debates over political liberalism address a wide variety of issues, from citizenship and minority rights to the role of constitutional foundations and democratic deliberation. At stake in virtually all of these discussions, however, is the nature of the autonomous agent, whose perspective and interests are fundamental for the derivation of liberal principles. The autonomous citizen acts as a model for the basic interests protected by liberal principles of justice as well as the representative rational agent whose hypothetical or actual choices serve to legitimize those principles. Whether implicitly or explicitly, then, crucial questions raised about the acceptability of the liberal project hinge on questions about the meaning and representative authority of the autonomous agent. Similarly, in the extensive recent philosophical literature on the nature of autonomy, debates over the content-neutrality of autonomy or the social conditions necessary for its exercise ultimately turn on issues of the scope of privacy, the nature of rights, the scope of our obligation to others, claims to welfare, and so on - the very issues that are at the heart of discussions of liberalism regarding the legitimate political, social, and legal order.
Despite the conceptual and practical interdependence of liberalism and autonomy, however, the recent literature on liberalism has developed without much engagement with the parallel boom in philosophical work on autonomy, and vice versa. This book serves as a point of intersection for these parallel paths. The chapters connect the lines of inquiry centering on the concept of autonomy and the self found in relatively less "political" areas of thought with the debates over the plausibility of liberalism that have dominated political philosophy in the Euro-American tradition for some time. While the main focus of the collection is to explore the intersection we are describing, the chapters also represent efforts to make free-standing contributions to debates about autonomy as well as to the foundations and operations of liberal justice itself.
In what follows, we begin by outlining the recent debates over autonomy, before noting some of the challenges to liberalism that have motivated current rethinking within political theory. We then discuss four key themes at issue in both the debates over autonomy and the debates over liberalism: value neutrality, justificatory regresses, the role of integration and agreement, and the value of individualism. This is followed, by a summary of each of the chapters, with a brief discussion of how the individual essays create a dialogue among themselves concerning these broad and fundamental issues of political philosophy.
I An Initial Characterization of Autonomy
As we map the terrain of these controversies, it will be helpful to spell out the central features of the conception of autonomy, and some key distinctions relating to it, that predominate in discussions of autonomy and autonomy-based liberalism.
Three terminological distinctions are central here. First is that between moral and personal autonomy. "Moral autonomy" refers to the capacity to subject oneself to (objective) moral principles. Following Kant, "giving the law to oneself " in this way represents the fundamental organizing principle of all morality.1 "Personal autonomy," by contrast, is meant as a morally neutral (or allegedly neutral) trait that individuals can exhibit relative to any aspects of their lives, not limited to questions of moral obligation.2 Under some understandings of the term, for example, one can exhibit personal autonomy but reject or ignore various of one's moral obligations. The chapters by Forst ( 10 ), Gaus ( 12 ), and Waldron ( 13 ) specifically address this distinction.3 Second, the autonomy of persons can, in principle, be separated from local autonomy - autonomy relative to particular aspects of the person, say, her desires. Though the question of whether these ideas can and should be separated is an issue that theorists have directly debated in the literature.4 Finally, we can distinguish between "basic" autonomy - a certain level of self-government necessary to secure one's status as a moral agent or political subject - and "ideal" autonomy - the level or kind of self-direction that serves as a regulative idea but not (or not necessarily) a set of requirements we must meet to secure our rights, be held morally responsible, and enjoy other status designators that basic autonomy mobilizes.
These distinctions are important, but the notion of autonomy still finds its core meaning in the idea of being one's own person, directed by considerations, desires, conditions, and characteristics that are not simply imposed externally on one, but are part of what can somehow be considered one's authentic self.5 There is disagreement about whether the concept should rest on reference to a "true" self (see, for example, the chapters in Part Ⅰ), but in general the focus is on the person's competent self-direction free of manipulative and "external" forces - in a word, "self-government."
To govern oneself, one must be in a position to act competently and from desires (values, conditions, and so on) that are in some sense one's own.6 This delineates the two families of conditions that have played central roles in recent debates over autonomy: authenticity conditions and competency conditions. Authenticity conditions are typically built on the capacity to reflect on and endorse (or identify with) one's desires, values, and so on. The most influential model - that developed by Gerald Dworkin and Harry Frankfurt7 - views autonomy as requiring second-order identification with first-order desires. Competency conditions specify that agents must have various capacities for rational thought, self-control, self-understanding, and so on - and that they must be free to exercise those capacities, without internal or external coercion.8 Dworkin sums up this hierarchical account by saying that autonomy involves second-order identification with first-order desires under conditions of "procedural independence" - that is, conditions under which the higher-order identification was not influenced by processes that subvert reflective and critical capacities.9
This standard conception of autonomy fits well with standard accounts of political liberalism - and not by accident. In particular, the notion of "procedural independence" is meant to specify in a non-substantive way the conditions under which individual choice would count as authoritative - that is, in a way that makes no reference to constraints on the content of a person's choices or the reasons he or she has for them. In a thoroughly liberal manner, this shift to formal, procedural conditions allows this model to accommodate a diversity of desires and ways of life as autonomous.
II Challenges to Liberalism's Reliance on the Autonomous Individual
Within recent discussions of liberalism, debates over the nature of autonomy have emerged from a slightly different viewpoint. Liberalism can be characterized in a number of ways, a point addressed in several of the chapters here, but it generally involves the approach to the justification of political power emerging from the social contract tradition of the European Enlightenment, where the authority of the state is seen to rest exclusively on the will of a free and independent citizenry.10 Justice, defined with reference to basic freedoms and rights, is thought to be realized in constitutional structures that constrain the individual and collective pursuit of the good. Central to the specification of justice in this tradition are the interests and choices of the independent, self-governing citizen, whose voice lends legitimacy to the power structures that enact and constitute justice in this sense.11
The multivocal contestation of this tradition has often centered on the conception of the person that functions as both sovereign and subject of principles of justice. In particular, the conception of the person as an autonomous, self-determining and independent agent has come under fire from various sources. Communitarians and defenders of identity politics point to the hyper-individualism of such a view - the manner in which the autonomous person is seen as existing prior to the formulation of ends and identities that constitute her value orientation and identity. Feminists point up the gender bias implicit in the valorization of the independent "man" devoid of family ties and caring relations; communitarians note the inability of such a view to make full sense of the social embeddedness of persons; and various postmodernists decry assumptions of a stable and transparent "self " whose rational choices, guided by objective principles of morality, define autonomous agency. From these various directions, the model of the autonomous person has drawn powerful calls for reconsideration.
What has emerged from recent discussions of both liberalism and the nature of the autonomous self is a set of controversies that mirror each other in provocative and constructive ways. Amidst the wide range of such controversies, four stand out as particularly relevant for our purposes: the question of value-neutrality, the problem of foundations, the questionable emphasis placed on unity and agreement, and the allegedly hyper-individualism of both autonomy-based liberalism and standard accounts of the autonomous self.
IIa Value Neutrality
One of the major disagreements in the philosophical literature is over whether autonomy should be understood in a "procedural" - and hence "value-neutral" - manner, or whether it is better understood in a "substantive" way. The latter view is defended for example, by Marina Oshana and Paul Benson in their chapters (4 and 5). On this view, autonomy must include conditions that refer to substantive value commitments, both by the autonomous person herself and by those around her - conditions concerning her own self-worth, the constraints others set, and the like. A driving force behind the call for substantive conceptions is, among other things, the claim that autonomy should not be seen as compatible with certain constrained life situations - such as positions of social domination and self-abnegation - no matter how "voluntarily" the person came to choose or accept that situation.12
Correspondingly, critics of liberalism have claimed that "procedural" liberalism fails to take account of the way in which fundamental value commitments constitute the identities and motivational structures of those citizens expected to accept and endorse principles of justice.13 Like the defenders of substantive accounts of autonomy, "perfectionist" critics of liberalism claim that mechanisms of liberal legitimacy cannot demand of citizens that they bracket from deliberation of political principles those commitments that constitute their very identities.14 These critics charge that "neutralist" liberalism removes from the political process the motivational anchor of these deep commitments, without which it is difficult to stave off political apathy and maintain civic engagement.15 And strict value-neutrality requirements even threaten to "gag" citizens from expressing their most heartfelt concerns within the political process. With regard to both autonomy and liberalism, then, critics have raised the question of how one can ground political legitimacy in a conception of autonomous choice without allowing substantive values (communitarian or perfectionist) to play some role in the conception of autonomy utilized.
IIb The Regress Problem and the Foundations of Liberal Legitimacy
In another complex discussion concerning the conceptual conditions of autonomy, the issue has been raised as to whether reflective endorsement of first-order desires (or other aspects of the personality) is necessary or sufficient for the authenticity required of autonomy. Commentators have pointed out that such a condition invites a regress, since the question is left open as to whether any given act of endorsement (and the desires and values it rests on) merits the authenticity that it itself bestows on first-order aspects of the self. If so, and if authenticity is established through critical reflection, then a third-order desire must be postulated to ground an endorsement of the second-order desire in order to retain the first. But this merely raises the same question once again concerning that third-order desire, and so on. Yet, if even the second-order appraisal is not tested for its authenticity, the question is left open as to whether a person thoroughly manipulated in her desires and values (hypnotized, brain-washed, etc.) would be called autonomous if those second-order attitudes were themselves manipulated by her captors.16
Critics of "hierarchicalist" conceptions of autonomy have also raised the question of why intrasubjective endorsement confers normative authority on first-order wants and values in the first place. What is special about the higher-order voices that render other aspects of the self so (metaphysically) special? We can certainly imagine cases where a person's first-order drives and motives are better reflections of their independent and self-governing natures (their "true selves," if you wish) than second-order reflections, which may themselves simply mirror relentless conditioning and inauthentic responses to social pressures. This point is touched on in the chapters by Meyers (2), Benson (5), and Christman (14). Meyers and Benson both express skepticism, for example, that higher-order reflective endorsement is the core element of autonomy in all its important guises, while Christman claims that in the context of liberal political theory, seeing autonomy as including self-reflection of this sort is crucial, despite difficulties with that process.17
In the political realm, a similar issue arises with regard to the traditional liberal assumption that citizens' choice is sufficient to legitimize political principles and policies. Critics have long been skeptical of the claim that mere public acclamation of some issue, even if such approval has been reflected on and consciously endorsed with reasons, reflects unmanipulated and independent voices when there exists pervasive ideological and other social pressures working to undermine such independent reflection.18 These discussions parallel questions about a regress of conditions for autonomy in asking whether political legitimacy requires something more than the collective endorsement of political preferences. Similarly, it can be asked of procedural liberalism why plebescitary endorsement by legislative bodies (the element of government corresponding to "higher-order" reflection) should automatically render the judgments they produce legitimate. One of the challenges that democratic liberalism has always faced stems from cases in which formally valid procedures lead to abhorrent results, results that may even threaten the very foundations of liberalism. Is democracy its own justification, or must there be "extra-legislative" constitutional checks to ensure free, independent debate in the public sphere and ground legitimacy?19
IIc The Problematic Emphasis on Integration, Unity, and Agreement
Whereas the previous two challenges to standard approaches to autonomy and liberalism suggest the need for a more substantive approach, two other lines of critique accuse such approaches of unduly substantive (and contestable) value commitments. These critics charge that standard accounts of autonomy and liberalism are less value-neutral and pluralist than they claim, for they actually presuppose, for example, values of personal integration, or egoistic individualism. And the problems this raises concern not only theoretical coherence but also the inclusiveness of social and political application of principles centering on autonomy so conceived.
Various writers focusing on the standard conception of the autonomous person have raised trenchant questions about the degree to which such conceptions problematically assume a unified, self-transparent consciousness lurking in all of us and representing our most settled selves. These commentators point to the ways in which conflict and irresolvable ambivalence characterize the modern personality. They emphasize that our motivational lives must be understood as containing various elements that are hidden from reflective view and disguised or distorted in consciousness (as Meyers, and Anderson and Honneth, discuss in their chapters, 2 and 6). The idea of unified, transparent selves being a mark of autonomy has thus come to be seen as suspect.
In a parallel manner, critical analyses of political liberalism have centered on the desirability and coherence of demanding full collective endorsement by the governed in order to establish legitimacy. As van den Brink ( 11 ) suggests in his chapter, liberalism without agreement may well suit the deep and abiding conflicts (as well as multiple identities) characteristic of modern societies. Additionally, there has been much discussion among (especially) Marxist and other radical writers of the way in which liberalism's pretensions of deliberative transparency ignore or suppress what truly drives the social and political movements in a society - the dynamics of economic and social power and its often hierarchical distribution and exercise.20
IId Individualism
Also prominent in recent literature on both autonomy and liberalism are discussions of the alleged hyper-individualism of the liberal conception of the autonomous person. Feminists have developed extensive critiques of the overly masculine emphasis on separated, atomistic decisions operating in this conception. Communitarians have famously claimed that the liberal emphasis on autonomy has obscured the socially embedded nature of identity and value.21 Motivated by these and related critiques, calls have been made to reconfigure the idea of autonomy in ways that take more direct account of the social nature of the self and the relational dynamics that define the value structure of most people. "Relational" and "social" accounts of autonomy have been developed to respond to such calls, defining the autonomous person in ways that make direct reference to the social components of our identities and value commitments.22 The chapters by Meyers (2), Benson (5), Oshana (4), and Anderson and Honneth (6) all touch on this issue.
Communitarians, feminists, defenders of identity politics, and others have long claimed that liberal political philosophy rests on an unacceptably individualist understanding of human value and choice.23 Some liberal theorists have insisted that the charge of hyper-individualism is overdrawn.24 Others, famously, have followed Rawls's "political" turn in claiming that models of personhood at work in political principles serve merely a representative function for the purposes of consensus and compromise, rather than claiming universalistic applicability or metaphysical truth.25 But other theorists have taken a second look at the idea of personhood at the center of liberalism, and adopted more socially embedded conceptions meant to be sensitive to charges of exclusionary individualism of this sort.26 However, in the chapters by Dagger (8), Forst (10), Heath (9), and Anderson and Honneth (6), the issue of the split between traditional liberal individualism and more social conceptions of the self (as, for example, in "republican" traditions) is examined in a manner that sheds new light on these conflicts.
As can be seen from this review of these four broad challenges, there are parallel implications for discussions of the conceptual structure of autonomy and for debates over the problems and promise of liberal political philosophy. There is thus much to be gained by bringing these discussions together. The chapters collected here represent just this kind of cross-pollenation. Although the discussions of liberalism and autonomy are interwoven throughout, we have arranged them thematically in a progression of sorts, tracing a spiral that moves from conceptions of the self and the individual (where autonomy has been conceptualized in seemingly less "political" ways) to the confrontation between self and other, to the role of autonomy in evaluative interpretations of social life and social policies, and then finally to the overt consideration of the political- theoretical importance of autonomy in the foundations of liberalism.
III The Self: Conceptions of the Autonomous Self (Part Ⅰ)
Since liberalism is centrally a view about the extent of legitimate interference with the wishes of the individual, it is not surprising that debates over liberalism have centered on the nature of the self. The respect that individuals claim for their preferences, commitments, goals, projects, desires, aspirations, and so on is ultimately to be grounded in their being the person's own. It is because those preferences, commitments, and so on are a person's own that disregarding them amounts to disregarding him or her qua that distinctive individual. By contrast, disregarding preferences, commitments, and so on that are the product of coercion or deception does not seem to involve a violation in the same sense, raising the vexing issue of what makes some preferences, commitments, and so on "one's own," and others not. Given the recent pressure on concepts of the true self, authenticity, or reflectively endorsed higher-order desires, further work is needed in order to clarify the grounds for treating individuals as the autonomous agents of their lives or the sovereign source of political authority. Central to this work are the questions - regarding the nature of the self - taken up in Part I by Diana Tietjens Meyers, David Velleman, and Marina Oshana.
In her chapter (2), "Decentralizing Autonomy: Five Faces of Selfhood," Meyers challenges the standard liberal assumption that autonomy is exclusively a matter of reflective self-definition and rational integration. She develops an account of autonomous agency as a matter of navigating a complex plurality of demands. Most fundamentally, she argues for the need to redress many theorists' overemphasis on self-definition to the neglect of self-discovery. Whereas self-definition is a matter of the self-analysis and inner endorsement so prominent in hierarchical accounts, self-discovery is more diffuse, and more a matter of sensitivity and openness. In order to clarify the skills needed for self-discovery - and to underscore their importance - Meyers develops a "five-dimensional account of the self ": the self as unitary, social, relational, divided, and embodied. Corresponding to each of these dimensions of the self, she suggests, are agentic skills that are crucial to autonomy. Capacities for critical reflection and ego-integration are among them, but they belong to only one of the registers in which we come to discover who we are or even exercise self-direction. For, as Meyers points out, autonomy often emerges in unexpected places: the unexpected smashing of dishes in the sink, the body's refusal to relinquish its hold on life, or even a revealing slip of the tongue. Meyers concludes that unless we have the skills to stay in touch with the non-unitary and non-individual components of the self, we lack what is needed for full autonomy, however good we might be at critical reflection.
Like Meyers, Velleman (Chapter 3) is concerned with the issue of how to understand autonomous agency once one has given up the idea that there is a "true self " to be discovered. If the self turns out not to be a fixed star to guide one's deliberations but rather a shifting, inchoate, plural, and perhaps even illusory point of reference, it becomes much harder to say what it is that makes some desires truly one's own and others not. Unlike Meyers, Velleman does see unification of the self as a central component of autonomous agency. Taking as his point of departure Daniel Dennett's idea that the self is no more real than a person's center of gravity - that the self is simply one's "narrative center of gravity" - Velleman argues that although our selves are indeed our narrative inventions, they are nonetheless real, because "we really are the characters whom we invent." Velleman is not, however, defending the view that anything goes, that there are no constraints on that narrative. But neither are these constraints external to the self. His ingenious move here is to point out that we not only identify narrative patterns in our actions, we also choose actions so as to ensure that there is a pattern into which they will fit. Otherwise, we cannot make sense of ourselves. The idea of the self as narrator is thus not a fantasy of arbitrary control; we cannot make ourselves up simply by wishing. Instead, when we are living the life we are narrating, it is built into the task that we have to ensure both that the narrative fits the life and that the life continues to fit the narrative. This does not require that autonomous agents always continue a past trajectory, but any departures from past patterns must then cohere with a larger narrative identity and self-conception.27
But however much we may write our own narratives, we do so under conditions that are not of our own choosing. This is a central theme in Oshana's chapter (4). She takes up the thorny issue of whether - and, if so, under what conditions - one can act autonomously on the basis of inescapable components of one's identity. Classical liberal conceptions of autonomy typically focus on voluntary consent as the sole basis for legitimate choice, whether in the domain of personal autonomy or political deliberation. This suggests that one acts autonomously only if one acts from values, desires, traits, and so on that one could give up if one wanted to. In the 1980s, this assumption of detachment came under fire from such theorists as Harry Frankfurt and Michael Sandel, who argued that such a requirement would eliminate far too many of our best reasons for acting. In particular, if "sheddability" were a necessary condition for a component of one's identity to count as a grounds for autonomous action, then it would be non-autonomous to act out of love for family members or, in general, from many of our deepest commitments (commitments, incidentally, that liberalism was designed to protect).28 But if autonomy involves acting from reasons that are most fully one's own, then it would seem that conceptions of autonomy must not rule out attachments and commitments, for it is often precisely those that it is unthinkable for us to give up that are most centrally constitutive of who we are.29 As Oshana points out, however, some defining and inescapable components of one's identity may be unwanted. She insightfully analyzes her own case of having ascribed to her the racial identity of an African-American. This racial attribution is inescapable and clearly determinative of who she is, despite the fact that, as a biracial woman, she is alienated from it. This seems to generate an unwelcome implication for authenticity-based accounts of autonomy. For if autonomy requires wholehearted endorsement of one's self-conception, then one cannot allow into one's self-conception any components about which one is ambivalent. But in some cases, Oshana argues, this creates an indefensible disjunction between either being autonomous or viewing oneself clearly - for example, acknowledging the social reality of being African-American. One response, for which Oshana has a great deal of sympathy, is to say that this is a further cost of living in a racist society, and that promoting autonomy is a matter of promoting justice, racial and otherwise. Her core theoretical response, however, is to call for a rethinking of the requirement that one not be alienated from components of one's identity. It may be, she suggests, that full authenticity is not actually necessary for autonomy.
© Cambridge University Press