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Autonomy, Liberty, and Utility*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Neera Badhwar Kapur
Neera Badhwar Kapur
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
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Extract

Lawrence Haworth's book, Autonomy, discusses “Autonomy as a Psychological Idea”, and “Autonomy as a Normative Idea”. Part 1 discusses autonomy in relation to rationality, agency, and responsibility, defends it against Skinnerian sceptics, and outlines a theory of autonomous decision-making and the autonomous task environment. Haworth's conception of autonomy integrates and builds on the concepts of S. I. Benn, G. Dworkin, H. Frankfurt, and R. W. White. Part 2 centres on social/political theory, and not, despite the book's subtitle, on ethics as such. Haworth argues that only autonomy, and not liberty or happiness, is an intrinsic (non-moral) value, and fundamental right. His “autonomist” theory of liberty rights, a form of revisionary liberalism derived from the later idealists, is opposed to the classical liberal/libertarian theory. The arguments prompt a re-examination of the role of autonomy in the arguments for liberty (and happiness), but do not, in my view, make a persuasive case for “autonomism” against classical liberalism (hereafter liberalism). The book is chiefly noteworthy for its success in covering many important topics connected with autonomy, in an impressively short space, and in an always clear and often very insightful way.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 487 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

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References

1 Here and below I go beyond the text: Haworth himself never suggests, with the exception of the example I discuss below, that the persons discussed in his book might be females.

2 Sometimes Haworth confuses needing a domain for autonomy for living autonomously with needing it for being autonomous. Some exercise of autonomy—hence, some limited domain for autonomy—is necessary for being autonomous. But, as Haworth himself points out, a slave, who obviously cannot live autonomously, can yet be autonomous (185). Elsewhere, Haworth makes a useful distinction between open and closed domains: a slave has, at best, a closed domain, wherein whatever is not permitted is prohibited (132–133).

3 Haworth sometimes says that liberty and happiness without autonomy are of little worth, but much more frequently, that without autonomy they are worthless (see, e.g., 139, 142, 147, 152ff.).

4 Properly spelled out, this should allow compulsive, addictive, and other desires that the individual rejects, and that are isolated from her other qualities and actions, only at the periphery of the self.

5 Properly spelled out, this should exclude from the self ideals that are connected neither to action, nor to the individual's other qualities.

6 Haworth's view escapes I. Berlin's famous charge in his “Two Concepts of Liberty”, that freedom as autonomy involves a groundless bifurcation of the self into the higher, noumenal, and the lower, empirical, self. But it falls prey to the similar mistake of identifying the true self with the higher, autonomous, self.

7 See, in particular, the collection of real-life anecdotes, and excerpts from children's fiction, in Matthews, G.' Philosophy and the Young Child (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Miller, A.'s title story in I Don't Need You Anymore (Toronto, ON: Bantam Books, 1967)Google Scholar. In the former we meet, e.g., children questioning the idea that sacrificing one's own preferences for the sake of others is always good; and Frog and Toad renouncing cookies in a supreme achievement of self-control, as they discuss the idea of willpower (second-order volitions). In Miller's story we read about a five year old boy struggling for independence from his mother, while at the same time protecting her and his father from the consequences of a certain act of hers, whose full import he alone has understood. Ironically, in his eyes it was she who was then not fully in control of her impulses or aware of her motives.

8 Some experience and knowledge are necessary for thought and reasoning, and thus for autonomy (as well as heteronomy). But not the kind of knowledge of particulars that children lack. Haworth is inconsistent with his own account of autonomy in Part 1 when he states, on 184, that first-graders playing in a china shop cannot be regarded as autonomous. For ignorance of the consequences of playing in a china shop no more makes the decision to play there dependent or impulsive, than ignorance of the consequences of smoking makes the decision to smoke dependent or impulsive. (If the ignorance results from lack of thought or attention where it is reasonable to expect thought and attention, or if it results from coercion or deception, then, arguably, the decision too is lacking in autonomy.)

9 And this gives one more reason for thinking of Mill, as A. V. Dicey and L. T. Hobhouse did, as standing at the crossroads of classical and revisionary liberalism.

10 Haworth states that Kant's “person/thing distinction is that between entities that can be autonomous and those that are inevitably heteronomous” (156). This is an example of a categorial distinction.

11 Similarly, if we have a right to liberty as moral or rational beings, we are at liberty to act morally or immorally, rationally or irrationally, subject only to the condition that we not violate others' rights.

12 Work on this notice was supported chiefly by a Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University, 1987–1988, and partly by The Arts and Sciences Summer Fellowship at the University of Oklahoma, 1988. It was improved by comments from David Braybrooke, Nathan Brett, Stephen Burns, and the referees of Dialogue. Geoffrey Sayre McCord read the final draft. I would like to thank all of them.