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Doubts About Autonomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2011

John Kekes
John Kekes*
Affiliation:
University at Albany
*
jonkekes@nycap.rr.com
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Abstract

Most of us are more or less dissatisfied with some aspect of our present self and want to change it to a better future self. This makes us divided beings. The beliefs, emotions, and motives of our present self prompt us to act in one way and our desired future and better self often prompts us to act in another way. This makes us ambivalent. One of the shibboleths of the present age is that the key to overcoming our ambivalence is to cultivate autonomy. This Kantian ideal is defended, developed, and somewhat revised by Christine Korsgaard, who constructs an ideal theory of self-constitution. This theory is untenable. Its very nature makes it incapable of addressing the concrete problems ambivalence presents to us in our very different individual circumstances. It unreasonably claims that either we meet arbitrary, unrealistic, and mind-bogglingly complex requirements, or disqualify ourselves from being rational and moral agents. And it optimistically assumes that by becoming more autonomous, we become more rational and moral, rather than merely continue to act in the ways we have been acting before. The failure of this latest ideal theory does not show that there is something wrong with autonomy. It shows that the extravagant claims Korsgaard makes for autonomy are groundless. The way to cope with our ambivalence is not to follow a theory, but to think better and harder about what we – individuals in individual circumstances – are, and want to be.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 86 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 333 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2011

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References

1 The emergence of autonomy as an ideal is superbly traced in the monumental work of Schneewind, J.B., The Invention of Autonomy, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

2 See Korsgaard, Christine M., Creating the Kingdom of Ends, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, The Sources of Normativity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, and Self-Constitution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. I will concentrate on the last work, which represents Korsgaard's fullest and latest position.

3 The numbers in parentheses refer to the pages of Self-Constitution. The italicized phrases in the passages cited are always as they appear in the book.

4 Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 5.

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23 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 9.

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26 I gratefully acknowledge Leo Zaibert's comments. They helped in several ways to improve the argument.