Moral Significance of Personal Autonomy


The capacity for personal autonomy, conceived of broadly as a capacity for self-government, is so central to contemporary understandings of human agency that respect for persons is plausibly construed as respect for the exercise of this capacity. If our behaviour is constrained by others on the grounds that we are incapable of governing ourselves , we experience a sense of violation, invasion, or belittlement (Feinberg, 1989). There are many different accounts of personal autonomy, and we cannot give detailed support here for any single account. We describe some of the key features of what is known as the procedural account of personal autonomy (Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000) and outline an argument for the claim that personal autonomy is capable of grounding individual rights to psychological autonomy.

Personal autonomy has an important place both in modern liberal and republican theory and in corresponding theories of justice (Pettit, 1997; Rawls, 1971). The possession of an adequate degree of personal autonomy is considered to be a prerequisite for the status of full citizenship and civic participation. Possession of a sufficient degree of autonomy is also the basis on which citizens can claim individual rights against the state and other citizens , be they civil and political rights (often called negative rights) on one hand, or economic, social, and cultural rights (often called positive rights) on the other (Williams, 1999). Those rights and liberties are the social and institutional means necessary for individuals to exercise their autonomy, and include the freedoms of conscience, expression, and association.

Personal autonomy does not merely concern liberty, considered as the absence of restraint on action. It also concerns the independence and authenticity of individuals values. A person might be physically free to smoke or not to smoke, and yet, being addicted to cigarettes, may lack autonomy regarding the decision whether to smoke or not. Once an addiction is in place, a person s decision to light up is not autonomous. Thus, autonomy is, in an important sense, concerned with how people form, hold, and revise values.

Two sorts of conditions must be satisfied for an agent to count as autonomous with regard to a certain action or domain, and to count more generally as an adequately autonomous agent. First, the agent must satisfy certain competency conditions. Competency conditions specify the skills that a person needs in order to act autonomously. We do not attempt to prescribe particular competency conditions necessary for autonomy here; one representative and avowedly incomplete list of conditions provided by Diana Meyers includes introspective skills, imaginative skills, memory skills, communication skills, analytical and reasoning skills, volitional skills, and interpersonal skills (Meyers, 2000). Second, the agent must be acting on the basis of values that are, in some sense, his or her own, rather than resulting from the manipulation of others, from addiction, or from lack of self-control, as in the case of the smoker described above. That is, the agent must satisfy certain authenticity conditions. Authenticity conditions are less susceptible to articulation than competency conditions, but on perhaps the most prominent model of autonomy ” the internal self-reflection model ” the agent must have reflected upon and endorsed his or her values in some appropriate fashion. But this alone cannot guarantee that the agent satisfies the authenticity conditions for autonomy, since the agent s reflective process is itself open to manipulation by external influences. Brainwashing, for example, might be used to engineer certain of an agent s values so that, however much the agent reflects on them, he or she is incapable of changing them. This has led some supporters of the internal self-reflection model of autonomy to add further authenticity conditions concerning the agent s history concerning how the agent arrived at the values he or she happens to have. Only if the agent arrived at his or her values in the appropriate way, namely without undue manipulation by external agents or undue influence by external nonagential forces, is the agent s autonomy regarding those values considered truly authentic .

Accounts of autonomy, such as those of Alfred Mele (1995) and John Christman (1991; 2001), that employ historical authenticity conditions are known as externalist, because they hold that an agent s possession of autonomy depends not only on what goes on inside the agent s head, but also on external facts about his or her history. Externalist accounts contrast with internalist accounts ” accounts that make no reference to an agent s history. The external facts considered relevant by externalist accounts concern whether or not a person has been subjected to subversions of his or her capacity for autonomy, and whether the person manages to overcome those subversions at some time in the future. (A more detailed discussion of subversions of personal autonomy is given below.) For the purposes of this chapter, we take an externalist position on personal autonomy.

Our contention is that the moral importance of personal autonomy is sufficient to ground a right held both against the state and against other individuals, to be free of coercive manipulation of one s values, at least with regard to one s own life and how it is lived. Of course, manipulations of a person s values are by no means the only ways in which a person s autonomy may be reduced or distorted . A person may fail the authenticity condition in other ways, for instance, by failing to exercise his or her capacity for autonomy with regard to choice of values. But manipulations of a person s values, unlike the person s own failure to satisfy the authenticity conditions for autonomy, are interventions by others whose purpose is precisely to reduce or distort a person s personal autonomy.

Our argument runs as follows : The recognised moral value of personal autonomy is generally considered to ground certain rights, at least for those who possess personal autonomy, to a sufficient degree. These rights are generally concerned with citizens freedoms to perform certain actions on the basis of their chosen values and convictions. These rights include freedom of opinion, expression, and association, although this is by no means a complete list. John Rawls (1971), Gerald Dworkin (1977), and Joel Feinberg (1984) have all famously used the value of autonomy to ground sets of rights, and many others have made similar arguments (Buchanan, 1989; Griffin, 1986; Richards, 1989). The domain of these autonomy-based rights is broad; they hold both against the state and against other individuals. The protection of these rights, it is to be hoped, will protect the key value of autonomy.

A full account of personal autonomy is concerned with agents capacities to consider, deliberate upon, and revise their values, as much as their substantive freedoms to act upon those values, once formed . Another way of making this point is to say that personal autonomy includes psychological autonomy . The freedom to form values without undue influence from other people is as important to the exercise of autonomy as is acting on those values. This freedom should be protected, just as freedoms of opinion, expression, and association are protected. Accordingly, the possession of personal autonomy can be taken to ground rights to the unimpeded formation and revision of values, in addition to rights to hold, express, and act upon those values, once formed. Rights based on the moral value of personal autonomy should, then, include the right ( applicable to all persons possessed of an adequate level of autonomy) to assess, revise, and pursue personal values without undue manipulation or interference from others. [ 1] These rights might be called rights to psychological autonomy . [ 2] It should be clearly stated at this point that we do not see rights to psychological autonomy as inviolable. They are not basic rights in the sense that rights to self-preservation, for instance, are basic. Rather, they are rights, like rights to freedom of speech, that may be overridden in certain circumstances. For instance, if a person autonomously forms racist or sexist values, then (in some circumstances) autonomy-reducing intervention may be justified to change those values. Nevertheless, we see rights to psychological autonomy as significant and worthy of protection.

What sort of behaviour might violate an agent s psychological autonomy rights? In the first instance, it should be noted that not all attempts to change someone s values reduce autonomy. The development of personal autonomy involves social interaction and discussion with others; such interactions and discussions are often intended to change individuals values. Many such attempts, in fact, encourage the development of psychological autonomy by stimulating critical thinking, introspection, and other associated skills (e.g., an equal opportunities training event may attempt to change people s values without undue manipulation.) It is only when attempts to change an individual s values are also unduly manipulative or coercive that they involve an attempt to undermine psychological autonomy. The question at issue here is precisely what sorts of actions fall into that category.

On an externalist account of personal autonomy, some types of behaviour quite straightforwardly count as forms of interference with an agent s personal autonomy, violating the authenticity condition. This includes coercing another agent into choosing to perform acts that he or she would not have chosen, were the agent not coerced, which is a type of manipulation that is often used by bullies, but may also be part of accepted management practice in some circumstances. [ 3] It also includes depriving an agent of the capacity for autonomy itself (e.g., giving the agent a drug that makes it impossible for him or her to think and choose clearheadedly).

Other types of interference with personal autonomy are rather different, since they concern the distortion rather than the destruction of an agent s capacity for personal autonomy. As Alfred Mele (1995) puts it:

By manipulating the perspective or orientation from which [critical and reflective] faculties operate in another agent, one can subvert the faculties without dulling their edge. By controlling which principles or values an agent takes for granted, one can make another person s critical and reflective capacities serve one s own purposes ” purposes perhaps violently opposed by the individual prior to manipulation. (Mele, 1995,p. 148)

Mele (1995) calls manipulations of this kind covert non-constraining control (p. 147). Covert non-constraining control might be used to subvert a person s agency in three different ways. First, it might be used against a person s motivational attitudes by, for instance, brainwashing or similar, less invasive, strategies. Where the person concerned has not autonomously requested or agreed to the brainwashing or value change (the person might request cognitive therapy or hypnotherapy to cure his or her of habits or addictions that he or she disavows), these strategies distort the person s personal autonomy.

Second, covert non-constraining control might be used against the targeted person s informational attitudes by deliberately restricting the person s access to information or giving false or misleading information. If a person proceeds on the basis of incomplete, false, or misleading information, the person s actions may not further goals reflecting his or her values, and may indeed further goals reflecting values to which the person is opposed.

Third, covert non-constraining control might be used against the targeted person s executive qualities; that is, against the skills, capacities, and habits that contribute to the person s autonomous agency (Mele, 1995). In other words, manipulation may warp the functioning of an agent s autonomy capacities, which include (following Meyers) introspective skills, imaginative skills, memory skills, communication skills, and analytical and reasoning skills. An example would be the attempt to inculcate deliberative habits in another person by administering subtle rewards to that person when he or she employs reasoning of the desired kind, and similarly subtle punishments if the person does not. Mele s example is of a cult leader who subtly encourages disciples to accept reasoning based on theological premises, and to discount reasoning based on scientific authority or methods (Mele, 1995). If the disciples adopt and employ these deliberative habits without question, then their autonomy has been subverted by the cult leader; although the disciples are capable of reasoning of a kind, it is of a limited, distorted kind. Of course, if a disciple becomes aware of the inculcated deliberative habit and endorses it for reasons that are not themselves products of the described conditioning, then that disciple can be said to have recovered his or her personal autonomy (though with no credit due to the cult leader).

The manipulator s motives for subverting another s autonomy through these types of manipulation may, in some cases, not be morally repugnant in themselves. They may instead arise from the manipulator s wish that another s executive qualities successfully serve the targeted person s own best interest. However, this does not dissolve the charge that the manipulation is an attempt to deprive someone of personal autonomy. Insofar as subversions of another s personal autonomy deprive that person of something that is of great moral value, namely the independent and authentic exercise of self-government, then such manipulation is prima facie a moral wrong, even in cases where such manipulation is justifiable, all-things-considered, on other grounds. (While I might be justified, all-things-considered, in brainwashing a psychopathic killer into loving the human race, this would still be wrong insofar as I have undermined the killer s psychological autonomy, assuming he was psychologically autonomous to start with.)

The key point about Mele s (1995) analysis of personal autonomy, for our purposes, is that (successful) manipulation of another person s motivational attitudes, informational attitudes and executive qualities reduces or distorts personal autonomy. Such manipulations may go unnoticed by their victims, in which case they will not experience the same sense of violation, invasion, or belittlement as a person whose autonomy is violated by the use of physical restraint. Yet such manipulations still reduce or distort autonomy, and as such, individuals plausibly have some right to protection from them. [ 4] If the value of personal autonomy is sufficient to ground rights to psychological autonomy, then it is arguable that manipulations of motivational attitudes, informational attitudes, and executive qualities are actions from which agents have a right to be protected. Such manipulations distort an agent s personal autonomy by deliberately preventing the agent from developing and maintaining values that are truly his or her own. [ 5]

[ 1] The qualification undue is added to cover certain restrictions in cases where a person s chosen values are harmful to others or to the common good. The important task of delineating the circumstances in which this qualification applies is beyond the scope of this chapter.

[ 2] Rights to psychological autonomy could be considered as one aspect of a general right to freedom of conscience. But, to our eyes at least, they are important enough to deserve a title of their own.

[ 3] See, for instance, David Zimmerman on coercive wage offers (1981).

[ 4] Even the perpetrators of failed attempts at covert non-constraining control may deserve some degree of moral criticism. Not all attempts to distort autonomy via covert non-constraining control will be successful; in some cases persons may maintain their autonomy even when subjected to manipulation. Attempted but unsuccessful manipulation still attracts moral blame, however, because it amounts to an intentional attempt to reduce or violate another person s autonomy. It may be said to infringe on personal autonomy even if it does not reduce it.

[ 5] This last claim is true even if the goal of distorting another s autonomy is itself a means to some further goal (e.g., arranging matters so that the other s welfare is increased).




Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace. Controversies and Solutions
Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions
ISBN: 1591404568
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 161

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