Charles Foster seems to read Kant as making the claim that “we are only autonomous when we act in accordance to the moral law” (Foster, The Tyranny of Autonomy, Hart 2009). Foster’s perspective treats Kantian autonomy as a means of arbitrarily imposing prescriptive (and rigorous) moral principles on human life.
I believe that this misstates Kant’s account of autonomy. Thomas E Hill's reading of Kant is insightful: Kantian ethics is particularly valuable because of it delineation of the sort of reason morality provides . Autonomy, in its appropriate context, is merely a way of describing morality as a requirement of our own reason: as a product of our rational will. Rather than a freestanding moral concept, it is a logical necessity in Kant’s entire argument about moral philosophy. The concept of autonomy simply fulfills the need for the individual’s rational will to produce categorical imperatives that will guide that individual’s actions.
This is in contrast to Foster’s reading, where autonomy is a crude shorthand for the maxim that ‘one is only free when one is right’, a view that ultimately sees Kantianism as requiring rational beings to comply with substantive moral principles in order to be ‘treated as autonomous’. For Foster, ‘to be treated as autonomous’ means having one’s decisions about oneself respected.
Foster’s coverage of Kant is taken from his book considering the value of autonomy in medical law and ethics. Ultimately, Foster decides that a theory that requires an individual to consistently uphold a rigorous moral code for autonomy to be ascribed to them is normatively repugnant. And understandably so.
Yet, it seems impossible to use autonomy in a Kantian sense without an appreciation of the context of his whole ethical theory. As we have shown above autonomy in a Kantian sense is not a delimitation of ‘personal freedom’ but a component of moral behavior. Kantian autonomy is senseless without this broader understanding of Kant’s ethical theory.
I. Personal Autonomy and Moral Autonomy
As Timmermann has argued, it is wrong to conflate Kantian autonomy with the contemporary notion of personal autonomy. There are already huge difficulties within the general arena personal autonomy. This will not be helped by throwing Kantian autonomy into the mix.
Arguments about personal autonomy are often unhelpfully intertwined with arguments about how far the law should respect a person’s decision. In medical law, such discussions may even be addressed without drawing this vital distinction.
The legal question about personal autonomy is different from the ethical one. The legal question draws our attention to the legitimate scope of legal interference with a patient’s prima facie decision. The ethical question about autonomy is concerns the philosophical concepts of agency, causation and free-will. In the following discussion, I will attempt to avoid falling into either of these rabbit holes. I will try to tease out the distinction between autonomy and responsibility from a theoretical standpoint. I will begin by discussing personal autonomy, and how aspects of the concept have allowed it to become contaminated by the distinct concept of moral responsibility.
a. Personal Autonomy
Discussions of personal autonomy will ultimately concern freedom. It is useful here to adopt Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty. Personal autonomy ultimately connotes the freedom of the individual to make their own decisions. This, however, has both a positive and negative aspect. The negative freedom to make a decision is synonymous with the political notion of liberty. It is the freedom to act without external interference. This has been vigorously debated since Mill’s development of the harm principle, but the meaning of political liberty is outside the remit of this discussion.
If political liberty is the negative aspect of personal autonomy, what is its positive aspect? Positive liberty is described by Berlin as ‘control over one’s life…the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one’s life’. The corollary of the negative liberty to act free from interference is a positive liberty to act with an ability to shape one’s life. Some have confusingly labelled this ‘autonomy ’ but it more closely resembles a certain capacity.
What this positive liberty precisely entails cannot be succinctly stated, if at all, despite efforts to the contrary . When does a person have the necessary internal state of affairs to be considered to have made (in the richest sense possible) a decision? Any answer to this question will be necessarily speculative. The internal corollary of external liberty is impossible to pin down.
This is where some have attempted to transplant Kantian autonomy. Kant’s concept of autonomy has been appropriated to show the ‘rationality’ required for an individual’s decision to be autonomous. The reasoning of this argument follows a similar form in these accounts. It culminates in a reshaping of Kantian autonomy to fit the needs of a specific conception of the positive aspect of personal autonomy. I will propose that the deductions of the following argument are valid, but that its conclusion is invalidated by its reliance on Kantian ethics. This argument runs as follows:
First, a sufficiently deep concept of the self is required to explain the normative importance that is commonly ascribed to autonomy. This is because we do not simply value x’s external representation of their decision, but we value instead the internal procedure that has led them to identify with their decision.
Secondly, this account of the self must take into the account the value of rationality. The concept of the ‘self’ as adumbrated above is still too thin to explain the value we ascribe to autonomy. The autonomous individual will justify their decision with reasons. We do not ascribe value to a decision that is not justified using reasons, even if the decision-maker possesses selfhood.
Thirdly, this rationality cannot be wholly subjective for the same reason. It does not explain the value we normally ascribe to autonomous decisions. We value decisions made by persons and justified with reasons (rational), provided that those reasons fall within certain parameters.
This calls for some way of discerning whether an individual’s decision-making process is of a nature amenable to autonomy.
It is at this point that Kantian autonomy is introduced. It is argued that Kantian autonomy provides a decisive link between morality and rationality. Therefore, decision making processes that fall short of this threshold – e.g. by being immoral – are not rational exercises, and therefore should not be deemed autonomous.
Acknowledging this, we can see where Foster’s parody of Kant’s account comes from. However, this is a contortion of Kant’s version of autonomy and a false conclusion of the argument that such theorists have relied upon. It simply occurs because the ‘natural’ progression of the argument seems to invite some ‘objective’ measure against which rationality can be measured. For some, morality is the most obvious candidate.
This is not the only conclusion, however. Many theorists use Kant as a ‘way in’ to relational autonomy. I believe this conclusion is correct, but Kant should be left out of the equation. I will explain why below.
II. Moral Autonomy as Moral Responsibility
But as we covered briefly in the introduction, Kantian autonomy was never intended to fulfill the role of a concept of personal autonomy. Kant used his concept to indicate moral autonomy, or independence of agency.
He argued that we are only morally responsible for our actions when it is our will that has authored them. However, our will is a noumenal concept: an instrument of pure reason. In the phenomenal world, the purity of our will is tainted by sensual inclinations. We have to fight against the temptations of reality in order to hang on to our capacity for pure reason.
The account is one of responsibility, not of freedom. Kantian autonomy is about when we are acting for our own reason. Not when our own reason is a sufficient warrant for action.
This can be made clearer by emphasising Kant’s concept of heteronomy. This is the opposite of autonomy: acting for the reason of another. When one is heteronomous, as opposed to autonomous, one is not acting for one’s own reason, but for some other reason. An individual can only either be heteronomous or autonomous.
This suffices to dispose of the silliness. Kant has nothing to do with personal autonomy. If we want to modify the concept, we have to do so in a different way.
Thankfully, this has already been done. Mitchell and Stoljar’s accounts of rationality and autonomy reveal the socially located nature of both of these concepts. Moreover, the argument outlined above is taken to a more coherent and self-embracing conclusion. The self is defined by its relationship with others: if one accepts rationality that denatures these relationships, one damages the concept of the decision maker itself. Where this principle is abstracted, the self is self-contradicting. X cannot do something that leads – eventually – to the non-existence of X. This is the essence of relational autonomy.
III. Conclusion
Scholarship in this area frequently transcends the divide between the legal and the ethical, between personal autonomy and moral responsibility, often all in a single account.
It is now clear that it is not only the detractors of Kantian autonomy may not have attended to the specific purpose of Kant’s argument. The supporters of Kantianism in contemporary debate must also remember that the most we can say about Kantian autonomy is that, in the words of Hill, it is a 'modest sort of autonomy…the capacities and dispositions to guide decisions…by categorical imperatives'.
It is not an account of personal autonomy. It is an account of moral responsibility, and one that emerges by implication. Kant’s major focus was to examine the basis of morality, and how individuals may act in accordance with it. It was not intended to provide a principled delimitation of personal freedom (the job of autonomy), nor an account of capacity.
This does not affect the validity of the arguments made in support of relational autonomy, however. My point here is that relational autonomy does not need to root itself in Kantian ethics. In fact, doing so renders that concept vulnerable to attack. Relational autonomy has its own warrant.
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