Conditions of individual autonomy
Freedom rights enable autonomy; autonomy concretizes a general concept of freedom. Accordingly, autonomy, properly understood, involves both the absence of obstacles and a horizon of options that are meaningful and desirable in a very broad sense. It also involves an autonomous person who, in reflecting on the question of how she wants to live, is capable of grappling and identifying with her own ideas and desires within a given social context. This is the framework within which we can more precisely define what autonomy as a capacity means and what qualities we must attribute to autonomous persons in order to be able to characterize them as autonomous. I want to briefly outline this here, but only the individual chapters will be able to give a more complete picture of the various aspects, problems, and tensions involved in the concept of autonomy.21
Persons are autonomous when they can ask themselves how they want to live and how they should live. We saw this above with Mill as well as in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Ernst Tugendhat describes the question of how one wants to live, what kind of person one wants to be, as a practical one: “[W]e are free in the sense of self-determination if we act on the basis of an explicit or implicit process of deliberation in which the practical question is posed in its fundamental sense.”22 Autonomy aims at asking, or at least being able to ask, ourselves regularly – even in the course of our daily routines – whether the life we are living is really the life that we want to live, a life that is our own. Although we are only ever autonomous in dealing or engaging with others, in relationships – we are never autonomous in total isolation – the responsibility for our own plans and projects nevertheless lies with us. I use the technical term “projects” here as a catchall for those things that are important to us in our lives: our career plans, family relationships, friendships, political interests, and so on. Projects form the content of our lives and we pursue them as autonomously as possible when we devise them ourselves, when we decide – reasonably independently – to pursue them, and when we determine our own actions in the course of this pursuit. Such plans or projects always exist within a framework of particular values and beliefs, and even if we are not always able to choose them ourselves (as in the case of family relationships), we can still accept them, endorse them, stand behind them as our own. When I use the terms “plans” or “projects” in the ensuing chapters, then, I also mean relationships – family relationships, romantic relationships, and friendships – that we decide to embrace and that are part of our lives.
This is the kind of concept of autonomy that stands at the center of debates around questions of what individual qualities or abilities must be attributed to a person if we want to be able to deem them more or less autonomous, and what social conditions are necessary to make these attributions. First, such debates frequently distinguish between global and local forms of autonomy. The concept is global when it refers to the whole person, to all of her actions; it is local when it refers only to certain actions or to a particular range of activity. The limited concept of local autonomy is often the more apt as it allows that certain motivations, social conditions, character traits, and other aspects of life may not be autonomous, without this necessarily meaning that we must deny the autonomy of the person as a whole. This is precisely how I apply the distinction between local and global autonomy, as I argue that we can be autonomous as persons even if certain actions or aspects of our lives are not autonomous. For attributing autonomy to a person (say, a reluctant smoker or, less trivially, a person with adaptive preferences), even if only in a local sense, is more commensurate with the practical value of autonomy.23 I do employ both concepts in this book, however – local autonomy and global – depending on context and the specific issue at hand. Moreover, the possible tension between our local inability to exercise autonomy and our general understanding of ourselves as autonomous persons can lead to discrepancies that are particularly illuminating for my approach to the question of autonomy in everyday life and autonomy as a precondition of a life well lived.
We can further understand the theoretical debates of recent decades as arguments about the conditions for the formation of the will of an autonomous person. I want to briefly outline these debates, as it is easier to develop a plausible concept of autonomy against this backdrop. We must tread carefully here, however, as the discourses of action theory and what is called moral psychology, both of which deal with the conditions of autonomy, are often extraordinarily granular and, at first glance, relatively far afield from the matter of autonomy in everyday life. Yet they are interesting insofar as, on second glance, they can in fact be linked back to an explanation of everyday autonomy and the question of a life well lived.
What, then, constitutes autonomy as a capacity? Procedural theories have been among the most influential in recent debates; they are also referred to as content-neutral theories, as they do not admit any content-dependent determinations (e.g. specific moral values, beliefs, or emotional attitudes) in the attribution of autonomy and only postulate formal conditions.24 There are a number of different varieties of procedural theories, the most prominent of which is surely Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchical model; no theory of autonomy, at least none of any analytical interest, can avoid grappling with this approach, which also comes up for discussion repeatedly in this book. Frankfurt’s model is hierarchical because it considers that a person may be called autonomous if she is able to take a second-order position (at the level of what are called volitions) with respect to her immediate, first-order desires, and then decide which of these desires she can identify with, which should affect her actions. Thus, for example, at the level of desire, a person may want to smoke a cigarette, but then reflect on this desire and come to the conclusion that it should not drive her actions – instead, a different desire should have the authority to move her to act. A person has a free will and is autonomous if she can go through this process and actually come to decisions that she acts upon, regardless of the origins of her desires (which she may have because she was manipulated), their content (which may be wicked), or their justifiability. If I have the will I want to have, I am autonomous – and I have such a will if I can, upon reflection, identify with a certain desire in such a way that it drives me to act. Identification (with a desire) and authenticity (it is actually my desire) are thus central to Frankfurt’s conception of autonomy, as is the hierarchical structure of the will, which is constitutive of being a person.25
In his later works, Frankfurt seeks to halt the impending regression of first- to second- to nth-order desires through the idea of “wholeheartedness,” acting from one’s whole heart or with an undivided will – the motivational power that a person has when she has decided unconditionally to pursue a certain course of action, without any trace of a desire to even question her decision. This motivation results from a person’s fundamental “cares,” the things that are important to her in life, that she loves and cherishes, which determine how she acts and thus are able to end the regression of desires.26
Yet – to raise an initial objection – it remains unclear how one is supposed to be able to resolve a conflict of desires if this regression can itself only be halted by other, stronger desires. Frankfurt overlooks the fact that even weighing two conflicting desires requires good reasons. There are reasons behind our actions, and reasons always have a normative dimension. This is something Frankfurt