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Abstract
Autonomy, which literally means self-legislating, is a useful concept for analyzing how agents organize their lives and how they respect each other's organized lives. While historical analyses of this concept – most famously that of Immanuel Kant – have tended to be overly abstract, contemporary analyses have not fared much better, often failing to maintain autonomy's substantial value. My dissertation attempts to regain the substantial value of autonomy found in historical accounts while retaining the more intuitive aspects of contemporary uses.
To build a non-abstract and valuable notion of autonomy, I argue the autonomous agent needs to meet two conditions: she must critically think about her motives and she must deliberate over how to act. To meet the first condition, the autonomous agent must critically think through moral matters since she can only act morally by intentionally acting from moral motives she understands. She must also critically think about what prudentially matters to her so she can live a fulfilling and happy life.
Once the agent has critically thought-out motivational views, she needs to deliberate to enact her important motives when instincts alone won't accomplish this. In complex situations, the autonomous agent must deliberate to determine the morally permissible action that makes her happiest. An autonomous agent then does what she should do, given her deliberation over morality, her happiness, and her circumstances. Surely such a rational determination of how an agent's life should go should be respected.
Many objections to autonomy accounts, however, focus on whether communities ought to be able to override individual autonomous choices for the greater good of the collective. For example, it is thought that coercion undermines autonomy, but coercion is necessary for societal goods that are lost when everyone looks out for themselves. We can avoid placing autonomy in this biding war between values if we understand that coercion is justified only when it is structured to respect autonomy. Coercion, when used to push agents towards their own autonomous actions, respects autonomy. Since autonomy respecting coercion is justified, we need not think the existence of justified coercion requires lowering the value of autonomy; one of the main objections to placing substantial value on autonomy is thus removed. Thus, we would have a concept of autonomy that makes intuitive sense and is substantially valuable.
