Autonomy

"Again, it reduces someone's moral responsibility and intellectual autonomy to a racial stereotype — that all blacks are innocent victims who cannot be held responsible for their beliefs or arguments; or that all blacks are so oppressed that any bigotry they utter is permissible."

"Autonomy is traditionally regarded as the instrument of agency for individuals who are perceived as separate, independent and fully rationale."

"I have always been a strong supporter of patient’s autonomy in decision-making, particularly at the end of life and believe that this should be respected. By the same token, the doctor involved in the end-of-life decisions also has his autonomy to consider."

"But while I breathe Heaven's air, and Heaven looks down on me, And smiles at my best meanings, I remain Mistress of mine own self and mine own soul."

"It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending."

"They tell me I am here to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live."

"My parents have a wonderful marriage, but they have been together since my mother was 12, married when they were just teenagers and are barely ever separated. They even work together. As a result, I have always thought of marriage as involving the loss of a certain amount of autonomy."

"Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision."

"It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures."

"Thoreau's famous retreat to Walden Pond is thus in a continuum with his sense of the duty of disobedience. ... He understood this exile as the need to create a society—even if a society of one on the banks of a tiny Massachusetts pond—that he could willingly join."

"Among those who stressed the ‘autos’ were Kant’s early [[w:German Romanticism|Romantic followers and critics (usually both followers and critics at once) who thought that each of us should be the author of our own morality. My morality, therefore, is valid only for me, as an expression of my unique individuality. After all, a moral law proceeding from my will seems by that fact alone to be a law valid only for me, perhaps even a law whose content is subject to my whims and arbitrariness. But that leads to a natural question: How can a law bind me at all if I am its author, because that apparently puts me in a position to change or invalidate it at my own discretion? The same thoughts, once we try to answer this question, might also lead in the direction of associating the concept of moral authority with some notion of individual “authenticity,” “choosing oneself,” or “becoming who one is,” sometimes taking those who travel this road beyond morality entirely. For just that reason, however, the self-esteem which appears to ground Kantian morality can begin to seem (as it does to some of Kant’s critics) like a kind of arrogance or even a perverse self-deification, in which each person blasphemously usurps the traditional place of the Deity as the giver of moral laws. The tradition that went in this direction therefore included some, such as the later Schelling and Kierkegaard, whose encounter with Kantian ethics ended (paradoxically) in some form of “theonomy” or theological voluntarism that either preserved the notion of autonomy only by a speculative pantheist merging of the self and the Deity or else rejected outright (as a demonic or satanic principle) the whole idea that the rational creature might tear itself away from its creator and claim authority over itself."

"If, on the other hand, your primary goal is wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, and an intact world, then there's quite a lot wrong with it."

"How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual."

"Autonomy itself is not the monolithic concept it is sometimes imagined to be; as flower, instead of being simply an American Beauty, autonomy would be more of a varietal that come in several hues."

"In some ways autonomy, broadly defined, is not an enforceable right in any useful sense. It is the basis of all fundamental rights – namely to be able to behave and to be treated with the dignity that goes with being human, whatever one is, it is that self that commands respect. This underlies all of the rights of the European Convention. Privacy, freedom of expression etc., are the part-expression of this in positive law, for those situations in which the autonomous individual finds him or herself in the context of society. Then, the autonomy rights of one may clash with those of the other and one will give way. Given that it is the social context that will decide which right has the stronger claim, it must follow that many autonomy claims are unenforceable and privacy rights are weak."

"The Kantian idea of moral autonomy as “self-determination” is as good a place as any to begin elaborating the conception of personal autonomy I favour. The autonomous life cherished by liberals is the life that can be characterised as (in part) self-determined, self-authored or self-created, following plans and ideals - “a conception of the good” - that one has chosen for oneself. Choice, on this view, is prerequisite to leading a successful, fulfilling and authentic existence according to one's own moral rights. To have an autonomous life a person must be free to deliberate about and choose the projects he or she will take up in life from an adequate range of options accommodating the diversity of human aptitudes, abilities, interests and tastes. In contrast to the value of liberty conceived as the negative right to be left alone, that is an active, “positive” conception of autonomy which requires, as Rawls nearly summarised, the opportunity “to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of the good”. Jeremy Waldron helpfully expands: The dominant theme in modern liberalism is that an individual conception of the good life is a plan of life or a strategy for living that an individual uses as a basis for making and reflecting on his more important decisions and for scheduling his enjoyments and set backs (to the extent that he has any control over them). His conception, moreover, defines what is to count as a setback or any enjoyment for him; and it defines for him the things that are most, and least, important in his life."

"Autonomy makes a person the sovereign authority over her or his own life, in recognition of the fact that we each have only one life and that what happens in it – what happens to “us” - is our most special and intimate concern. Although political philosophers might sometimes make heavy weather of it, this is a perfectly familiar and comprehensible idea (as indeed it must be to qualify as a compelling personal and political ideal that can be taken to heart by people like us). Ronald Dworkin contributes the following memorable image: Each person follows a more or less articulate conception of what gives value to life. The scholar who values a life of contemplation has such a conception so does the television-watching, beer-drinking citizen who is fond of saying “This is the life”, though of course he has thought less about the issue and is less able to describe or defend his conception. Having a life-plan – or, more accurately, a “plan for living” - is part and parcel of living life “from the inside”, to borrow Kymlicka's useful metaphor."

"If privacy is an essential component of autonomy, and personal autonomy is such a cherished value for liberals and others, does that mean we must have a right to privacy? Alas, matters are not so simple. It certainly is “not” the case that people enjoy rights over everything that is important to them. In order to determine whether there is a (moral) right to privacy we had first better understand what a right is. The most illuminating conception of rights I know is the Interest Theory proposed by Joseph Raz, in these terms : Definition “X has a right” if and only if X can have rights, and, other things being equal, an aspect of X's well-being (his interest) is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty."

"A useful way to approach the idea of a right to privacy is to see how, in their essential structure as rights-generating grounds of duties, privacy interests resemble or overlap with the negative liberties of traditional political theory. Consider first, by way of contrast, how a positive right to autonomy might be specified. True, a right to have an autonomous life is a conceptual impossibility because nobody else can be under a duty to provide me with something that, by definition, I must do for myself. Only I can lead my life from the inside; nobody can coerce me into doing so, for coercion destroys genuine self-determination through external pressure, nor can I be relieved of the fundamentally personal responsibility for leading an autonomous life in any other way. However, it is possible to sidestep this conceptual objection by reconstituting the supposed entitlement as a right to be provided ith “the conditions and opportunities” for leading an autonomous life. This right is “conceptually” unproblematic, but has never (to my knowledge) been a moral or political reality in the history of the world. For nobody could claim such a right unless society's material and technical resources were such that the same right could be universalized to everyone, in accordance with the foundational moral norm of equal respect for persons. Once this “merely” contingent, but under current conditions impossibly demanding, matrial prerequisite is acknowledged, one is obliged to conclude, with Raz, that our mastery over the physical environment has not yet developed to the point where there could bea general right to be provided with the conditions for living an autonomous life: A right to autonomy can be had only in the interest of the right-holder justifies holding members of the society at large to be duty-bound to him to provide him with the social environment necessary to give him a chance to have an autonomous life. Assuming that the interest of one person cannot justify holding so many to be subject to potentially burdensome dutis, regarding such fundamental aspects of their lives, it follows that there is no right to personal autonomy. Personal autonomy may be a moral ideal . . . But in itself, in its full generality, it transcends what any individual has a right to. Put it another way: a person may be denied the chance to have an autonomous life, through the working of social institutions and by individual action, without any of his rights being overridden or violated."

"Autonomy has been defined in many ways. It has been treated as a synonym of freedom of the will, sovereignty, liberty and self-rule, or equated with self-knowledge, self-development, responsibility, dignity and integrity. It has been identified with self-assertion, critical reflection, freedom form obligation, absence of external causation and knowledge of one's own interests. The concept is related to actions, beleifs, reasons for acting, rules, the will of others, thoughts and principles. Gerald Dworkin's illuminating discussion of autonomy points out that the only consistent features in the variety of views and definitions of autonomy are that it is a desirable notion, that it relates to persons, and that the existence of a core meaning is doubtful. Many philosophers emphasise concepts such as freedom and self-definition when discussing autonomy. Thus, Dworkin suggests that autonomy enables people “to define their nature, give meaning and coherence to their lives and take responsibility for the kind of person they are”. John Rawls suggests that “acting autonomously is acting from principles that we would consent to as free and equal rational beings”."

"A similar notion is that the morally autonomous individual is one who obeys social norms not out of unthinking conformity, but as a result of an independent evaluation of their moral worth. John Harris identifies autonomy as the ability to control one's destiny by exercising one's faculties and John Finnis equates it with the ability to “exercise individual liberty to do what one pleases”. Judge Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit, in considering the lawfulness of the Washington law against assisted suicide, stated that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life”. A common thread to emerge from these definitions, and the definition that we shall adopt, is that autonomy is the capacity of individuals “to choose both the deisrable ends of their own lives and .. the means by which they pursue those ends.”."

"Autonomy is incapable of shoring up other interests unless one is willing to accept that it is justifiable. The right to autonomy has a rich history and transcends both deontological and consequentialist thinking. Autonomy is an individualistic concept and hence there is the tendency naturally to associate the right to autonomy or freedom of action with deontological theories."

"What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own."