There are at least two autonomy debates. There is a debate in
social philosophy, about the conditions under which an agent’s preferences are
authentically her own [rather than the product of, variously, ideology, false
consciousness or adaptive preference formation], and a debate in political
philosophy over the extent to which the state ought to reflect and respect the
uncoerced preferences of its members. These two debates share a great many
concepts, and refer to some of the same seminal texts [by Kant, Locke and Mill,
among others]. Yet they have for the most part proceeded independently of each
other. This volume aims to bring them together, to see to what extent the
considerations that figure in each can illuminate the other. The contributors
are many of the major figures in each debate. I cannot touch on all the
contributions in this brief review. Here I shall simply mention some of the
highlights, and try to suggest how they contribute to the central issues around
which the volume is focused.

Much of the debate over what might be called the authenticity
question has centered around whether autonomy ought to be understood
procedurally or substantively: that is, whether any set of preferences
can count as autonomous, if they are acquired or maintained in the appropriate
manner, or whether instead there are restrictions on the content of preferences
that can count as autonomous. This is a question with immediate relevance to
the debate over liberalism. Rawls famously distinguished between political
liberalism and metaphysical liberalism. Metaphysical liberalism promotes a
particular conception of the good, maximizing the substantively conceived
autonomy of citizens, while political liberalism merely seeks an overlapping
consensus on principles of non-interferences already implicit in a political
culture. In the political debate, it has been the value-neutral conception that
has been dominant; in the individually-focused debate neither has clearly
dominated.

Among
the most influential value-neutral approaches have been those hierarchical
conceptions to autonomy, associated especially with Harry Frankfurt and Gerald
Dworkin. On these approaches, an agent is autonomous, roughly, if she endorses
the desires that issue in her actions. Several of the essays here take issue
with the hierarchical approach.  Meyers gives several examples of apparently
autonomous actions that do not fit neatly into the hierarchical, or indeed any
individual, framework. In a similar vein, Benson’s emphasis on accountability
to others, and Anderson and Honneth’s emphasis upon recognition by others, as
necessary conditions of autonomy, lead them to think of individual autonomy as
essentially involving social conditions. This suggests a neat way of moving
beyond the question of whether autonomy is unacceptably individualist: properly
understood, autonomy as an individual ideal has social conditions. In the
political realm, this has been an idea pursued most forcefully by
communitarians; unfortunately the communitarianism/liberalism debate goes
largely unaddressed here.

Though the emphasis on the social is a necessary condition to a
debate too frequently centered on the individual conceived as a social atom,
Marilyn Friedman’s essay sounds a note of caution. She suggests that though
autonomy indeed has social conditions, there is a risk of over-emphasizing the
social. The individual may need protection from the values that are
extant in her society, rather than the opportunity to express them unhindered —
especially in the context of ongoing gender discrimination. We need to retain a
conception of autonomous preferences where autonomy is opposed to adaptive preferences,
and therefore to socially constituted preferences.

Rather than focus on the question of the extent to which
liberalism is unacceptably individualist, the more politically minded
contributors draw upon other strands of the communitarian critique of
liberalism: the question of the extent to which disengagement from the
political process threatened the viability of liberal states, and the extent to
which the liberal polity ought to be neutral between conceptions of the good.
Richard Dagger, continuing his reflections on the relationship between
liberalism and republicanism, addresses the first question.  A more republican
liberalism will require greater civic involvement in politics, he suggests,
rather than the non-interferences coupled with opportunities for involvement
characteristic of traditional liberalism.

Waldron and van den Brink pursue the question whether a Rawlsian
overlapping consensus on principles of justice can reasonably be expected under
contemporary conditions. Waldron suggests that the distinction between
conceptions of the good, which can be allowed to vary across a society, and
principles of justice, upon which all reasonable people can be expected to
agree, cannot sustain the weight placed on it by Rawls. In a diverse society we
ought to expect fundamental disagreement upon principles of justice, and
therefore cannot hope for a thoroughgoing, overlapping consensus. If this is
true, political liberalism may not be able to avoid the substantive questions
which have been at the forefront of the moral debate. Van den Brink also
suggests that the diversity of liberal societies precludes any kind of
substantial agreement on principles, and instead requires acceptance of deep
disagreement as a normal feature of political life.

Does this volume succeed in its aim of bringing these overlapping
debates fruitfully to bear on one another? My sense is that it does not: most
of the contributors simply continue to pursue the debate in which they are
interested, with hardly a bow in the direction of the other autonomy issue.
Perhaps this is inevitable: liberalism in the political sphere is, as Rawls
argued, founded on the need to find a modus vivendi to accommodate a
diversity of conceptions of the good, and ways of life. Attempting to impose
substantive criteria in the political sphere therefore risks the stability of
the liberal order. Hence the political philosopher’s interest in how the
tyranny of the majority can be ameliorated, a concern predicated on a
procedural view of liberalism. The moral philosopher, whose concern is more
focused on the individual than on society, is free of these constraints, and
can pursue substantive conceptions of autonomy without restraint. However, if
philosophers like Waldron and van den Brink (and, in a different way, Dagger
and Gaus) are correct, this may be a debate in which political philosophy
cannot avoid engaging. In a world in which deep diversity is characteristic of
societies, debates over the correct conception of the good may be unavoidable.
If that’s correct, another volume, in which the mutual engagement is deeper,
may soon be required. In the meantime, even if Autonomy and the Challenges
to Liberalism does not really succeed in bringing these two debates
together, it contains many significant contributions to each.

© 2006 Neil Levy

Neil
Levy is a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public
Ethics, University of Melbourne, Australia and is author of Being
Up-To-Date: Foucault, Sartre, and Postmodernity (Peter Lang, 2001), Moral
Relativism: A Short Introduction (Oneworld, 2002), Sartre
(Oneworld, 2002), and What
Makes Us Moral?: Crossing the Boundaries of Biology (Oneworld, 2004).

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics