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Liberal Neutrality and the Value of Autonomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

George Sher
George Sher
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Rice University
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Extract

Many liberals believe that government should not base its decisions on any particular conception of the good life. Many believe, further, that this principle of neutrality is best defended through appeal to some normative principle about autonomy. In this essay, I shall discuss the prospects of mounting one such defense. I say only “one such defense” because neutralists can invoke the demands of autonomy in two quite different ways. They can argue, first, that because autonomy itself has such great value, the state can produce the best results by simply allowing each citizen to shape his own life; or they can argue, second, that even if non-neutral policies would produce the most value, the state remains obligated to eschew them out of respect for its citizens' autonomy. Here I shall discuss only the first and more consequentialist of these arguments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 136 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1995

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References

1 Hurka, Thomas, “Why Value Autonomy?” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 13. no. 3 (Fall 1987), p. 363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 371.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 372.

4 Ibid., p. 374.

5 To be fair to Raz, it is not clear how much of this he is committed to denying; for he is concerned less with understanding when a particular choice or action is autonomous than with specifying the conditions under which someone lives an autonomous life.

6 Connolly, William E., The Terms of Political Discourse, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 150–51.Google Scholar

7 One way of responding to these questions is simply to identify autonomy with one or another of (what I have presented as) its necessary conditions. Interestingly, this has been tried with all three sets of conditions. Thus, as we have seen, in “Why Value Autonomy?” Hurka focuses exclusively on (an aspect of) the first condition when he identifies autonomy entirely with the freedom to choose among important life-options. By contrast, Irving Thalberg focuses exclusively on the second when he suggests that to be autonomous is to have received the sort of socialization that men, but not women, currently get; see Thalberg, , “Socialization and Autonomous behavior,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, vol. 28 (1979), pp. 21–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar And in addition to Connolly, various philosophers have fastened on the third condition, and have held that the essence of autonomy is critical scrutiny of one's goals and values. See, for example, Scoccia, Danny, “Autonomy, Want Satisfaction, and the Justification of Liberal Freedoms,” Canadian journal of Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 3 (09 1987), pp. 583–601CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schwartz, Adina, “Against Universality,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 78, no. 3 (03 1981), pp. 127–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although I shall not examine any of these accounts, the obvious worry about them is that each fails to accommodate the intuitions that motivate its rivals.

8 Gutmann, Amy, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 62.Google Scholar For Kant's theory, see Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959).Google Scholar

9 For two discussions that explore related conceptions of freedom, see Wolf, Susan, “Asymmetrical Freedom,” in Fischer, John Martin, ed., Moral Responsibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 223–40Google Scholar; and Nozick, Robert, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 291–362.Google Scholar Wolf does not quite say that an agent acts freely when he acts in response to a good reason. Instead, she asserts that “[i]n order for an agent to be morally free,… he must be capable of being determined by the Good” (p. 236; emphasis added). By contrast, Nozick does consider the possibility that acting freely “is (to be determined) to do the action that is the best of those available to us; moreover, that this doing what is best or most valuable not be an accident, like true belief, but rather that the action tracks value or bestness” (p. 317). However, he concludes that “we are left with the feeling that the notion of ‘tracking bestness or rightness’ has not gotten to the heart of the free will problem” (p. 332). Whether Nozick would also say that “tracking bestness” fails to illuminate autonomy is unclear.

10 The idea that (moral) autonomy need not involve ceaseless self-scrutiny, but requires only “continuous but essentially passive receptivity to particularly significant developments” together with “periodic full-scale reviews,” is advanced by Kuflik, Arthur in “The Inalienability of Autonomy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 1984), p. 274.Google Scholar

11 It is, indeed, an additional important virtue of the responsiveness-to-reasons account that it assigns a significant yet subordinate role to the idea that agents only act autonomously when they are motivated by desires by which they want to be motivated. This idea is often put forward as yet another rival approach to autonomy; for some important statements of it, see Frankfurt, Harry, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68 (01 1971), pp. 5–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dworkin, Gerald, “Acting Freely,” Noûs, vol. 4 (1970), pp. 367–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Neely, Wright, “Freedom and Desire,” Philosophical Review, vol. 83 (1974), pp. 32–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Yet, as many have noted, we cannot simply identify acting autonomously with acting in accordance with one's higher-order desires; for, among other things, one may be brainwashed to acquire higher-order as well as first-order desires. But if autonomy is responsiveness to reasons and if desires sometimes provide reasons for seeking their objects, then higher-order desires will fall into place as important sources of reasons for retaining, revising, or implementing lower-order desires. They will thus at least partly determine the criteria an agent should use in critically evaluating his ends.

12 I owe my appreciation of the issues discussed in the remainder of this section to the constructive bullying of Derk Pereboom and David Christensen.

13 Raz, . The Morality of Freedom, p. 304.Google Scholar

14 Even if an agent's autonomy depends entirely on the relative strength of the reason that moves him, what moves him about the reason may still be its absolute strength.

15 Ackerman, Bruce, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 11.Google Scholar

16 Ibid.

17 Richards, David A. J., “Human Rights and Moral Ideals: An Essay on the Moral Theory of Liberalism,” Social Theory and Practice, vol. 5, nos. 3–4 (1980), p. 474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Ibid.

19 Here I have in mind not only some of what Mill says about individuality in chapter 3-see, for example, his remarks about Calvinism (Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. Rapaport, Elizabeth [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978], pp. 59ff.)Google Scholar-but also his emphasis in chapter 2 on the importance of understanding the grounds for one's beliefs.

20 Hurka notices this problem in “Why Value Autonomy?” p. 377.Google Scholar

21 Ackerman, , Social Justice in the Liberal State, p. 368.Google Scholar

22 Haworth, Lawrence, Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a similar suggestion, see Hurka, , “Why Value Autonomy?” p. 378.Google Scholar

23 Kymlicka, Will, liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 12.Google Scholar

24 As David Christensen has pointed out to me, the reasoning of this paragraph presupposes that autonomy is an all-or-nothing matter. If instead autonomy is a matter of degree, then even policies that do diminish autonomy may increase people's chances of living valuable lives. In particular, this will be possible whenever (1) a policy does not undermine a person's autonomy enough to prevent his choices from actualizing any (potential) value, and (2) it leads htm to choose activities that are much more (potentially) valuable than any alternatives. This rejoinder is significant because responsiveness to reasons (and hence, on my account, autonomy) does seem to be a matter of degree. However, in the discussion to follow. I shall forgo this objection in favor of others.

25 In a manuscript still in progress. Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics, ch. 2.

26 For pertinent discussion, see Sher, George and Bennett, William J., “Moral Education and Indoctrination,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 79, no. 11 (11 1982), pp. 665–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Waldron, Compare Jeremy, “Autonomy and Perfectionism in Raz's Morality of Freedom,” Southern California Law Review, vol. 62, nos. 3 and 4 (1989), p. 1147:Google Scholar

The trouble with a perfectionist tax is that it provides a reason for refraining from an activity that is not one of what I have called “the merits” of the case. A subsidy would be objectionable on similar grounds if it were so substantial as to provide a positive inducement to an activity thought to be noble. We would then worry because people were responding, not to the nobility of the activity, but to the bribe that was being offered for pursuing it.

28 Waldron, , “Autonomy and Perfectionism,” p. 1151.Google Scholar

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 For two clear statements of this interpretation, see Kymlicka, Will, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” Ethics, vol. 99, no. 4 (07 1989), pp. 883–86ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Larmore, Charles, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 42–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, for a dissenting interpretation, see Goodin, Robert E. and Reeve, Andrew, “Do Neutral Institutions Add Up to a Neutral State?” in Goodin, Robert E. and Reeve, Andrew, eds., Liberal Neutrality (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 202.Google Scholar

32 In making this argument, I assume that however much conditioning interferes with autonomy, it does leave room for at least some autonomous choices. Some thinkers, such as B. F. Skinner, reject this assumption; see, for example, Skinner, , Beyond Freedom arid Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971).Google Scholar If a neutralist followed Skinner in rejecting it, but retained the premise that only autonomously chosen lives have value, he could recast his argument by inferring first that all attempts to promote valuable ways of life are doomed, and second that any available funds should be spent in pursuit of more achievable aims. But in addition to invoking (what I take to be) an extremely implausible premise, this move would transform what began as an appeal to the value of autonomy into an appeal to its impossibility. This would entirely fail to capture the argument's original intent.

33 To cite just one example. Will Kymlicka seems mainly concerned with threats and force when he writes that “[s]ince lives have to be led from the inside, someone's essential interest in leading a life that is in fact good is not advanced when society penalizes, or discriminates against, the projects that she, on reflection, believes are most valuable for her” (Kymlicka, , “Rawls on Teleology and Deontology,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 17, no. 3 [Summer 1988], p. 186).Google Scholar Kymlicka suggests that similar claims are attributable to Mill, Rawls, Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin (ibid., p. 187 n. 20).

34 Of course, in response to this justification, it can be replied that gambling and narcotics attract organized crime precisely because they are illegal; for discussion, see Nadelman, Ethan A., “The Case for Legalization,” The Public Interest, vol. 92 (Summer 1988), pp. 3–31.Google Scholar

35 I defend this claim in Beyond Neutrality, ch. 9.

36 See Titmuss, Richard, The Gift Relationship (New York: Pantheon, 1971).Google Scholar For an interesting exchange on Titmuss's book, see Arrow, Kenneth J., “Gifts and Exchanges,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1972), pp. 343–62Google Scholar; and Singer, Peter, “Altruism and Commerce,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 3 (Spring 1973), pp. 312–20.Google ScholarPubMed