Autonomy

The word "autonomy" comes from the Ancient Greek word autonomos, meaning "self-law." An important concept in philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, autonomy refers to an individual’s ability to make a decision that is rational, informed, and not subject to coercion. Every element of this definition—rational, informed, not subject to coercion, even what constitutes a decision—is important and subject to exploration and interrogation by philosophers and social scientists.

The concept of autonomy is also applied more broadly to refer to nonhuman entities that operate with some degree of independence from a central or controlling authority. For instance, autonomous regions of countries are regions that are still part of the larger country but retain powers of self-determination in some important way; in the United States, Puerto Rico is considered autonomous in this sense. Robots that operate independently of a human-operated or preprogrammed controlling device are also described as autonomous.

Background

Autonomy has been a central focus in the moral philosophy of several philosophers, including Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. In part due to the influence of Mill’s utilitarianism on the development of Western ideas of freedom and democracy, autonomy has become a basic political and moral value throughout the modern West, most commonly expressed in rhetoric stressing individualism. Autonomy and individualism are not the same thing by any means, but they are mutually compatible concerns.

Philosophers distinguish among moral autonomy, the individual’s capacity to judge their own actions according to objective moral law and to make decisions accordingly (an important concept to Kantians); personal autonomy, a broader concept that is not limited to moral decision-making and does not require accepting the aforementioned implicit claim of objective moral law; and freedom. While some philosophical definitions of freedom are compatible with or synonymous with personal autonomy, others address only the capacity to act. True autonomy entails not only freedom from constraints on actions, but also freedom from constraints on desires—even biases and access to information that can impact the decision-making process.

Some philosophers are willing to discuss a person’s autonomy in terms of their overall state separately from their status regarding a certain activity; the classic example in this case is a smoker, who may be an autonomous individual in what philosophers call the global condition but who, due to their nicotine addiction, is constrained in their decision-making regarding cigarettes. A slightly different example is an individual with Tourette syndrome. Unlike the smoker, there is no decision-making process involved; the person is an autonomous individual in the global condition who is nevertheless a passive bystander to one very narrow set of their actions.

Insofar as the autonomous individual is capable of making decisions, they are also a responsible individual. The idea of autonomy carries a connotation of responsibility that is not always attendant on the word "freedom." Philosophers also distinguish between basic autonomy, a certain minimal state of independence and responsibility, and ideal autonomy, a hypothetical state in which the individual’s decision-making is entirely authentic—that is, free of distorting influences such as biases, preconceptions, and incomplete information.

Overview

One of the most important concepts in legal and ethical discussions of autonomy is what came to be known in the twentieth century as informed consent: the idea that an individual consenting to a proposed course of action must have all the information necessary to make a decision and, as much as possible, be able to understand that information. In the field of bioethics, for instance, the doctrine of informed consent means that it is not enough for doctors to be well-informed in their medical decisions, as was the case in the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth; the patient must also be told, and made to understand, the medical consequences of a proposed course of action and any alternatives that may exist. This concept illustrates the difference between autonomy and freedom. Without informed consent, patients are free to choose whether to follow a doctor’s recommendations, but they are forced to delegate the true decision-making to the doctor.

While bioethics has been the most direct in addressing the importance of informed consent to an individual’s autonomy, similar discussions occur in business ethics, environmental ethics, sexual ethics, and all areas of political philosophy. For instance, contract law typically requires only that each party agree to the contract’s terms at the time of the contract and that they have the capacity to do so, meaning they are not minors, intoxicated, or legally incompetent. An ethicist might argue in favor of both parties further being informed about all the ramifications of the contract they are to agree to—and indeed, in many legal systems, if one party deliberately conceals such ramifications from the other, it may be a case of misrepresentation or fraud.

One of the criticisms of autonomy as it is constructed by most moral and political philosophers is its implicit treatment of identity as either belonging wholly to the individual or being inappropriately influenced by outside forces. This either ignores or vilifies the role played in the formation of an individual’s identity by their deeper connections with race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and other groups beyond themselves. Since the late twentieth century, philosophers such as Will Kymlicka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Amy Gutman have offered models in which self-reflection and self-endorsement do not deny the role played by such externally constructed identities.

Moral philosophers (at least those who find this distinction meaningful) stress autonomy as one aspect of what appears to make humans unique. Few animals demonstrate the capacity for self-reflection, self-appraisal, and self-endorsement that is required for autonomous decision-making. Of the overwhelming majority of species, it can comfortably be said that they are not autonomous, by human measure; for the small remainder, humanity’s inability to communicate with animals that might be intelligent has been a barrier in definitively establishing the motivations behind many of their actions. Given recent advances in avian, cetacean, and cephalopod research, these and other questions of consciousness may need to be reexamined from a perspective that is not limited to human minds.

Bibliography

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. 2005. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Gutman, Amy. "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism." Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 14, no. 3, 1985, pp. 308–22.

Kymlicka, Will. Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Mindell, David A. Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy. Viking, 2015.

Sensen, Oliver, editor. Kant on Moral Autonomy. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Sneddon, Andrew. Autonomy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Stern, Robert. Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Taylor, James Stacey. "Autonomy." Britannica, 20 June 2017, www.britannica.com/topic/autonomy. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

Taylor, James Stacey, editor. Personal Autonomy: New Essays on Personal Autonomy and Its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Ward, Keith. Morality, Autonomy, and God. Oneworld Publications, 2013.