autonomy, in Western ethics and political philosophy, the state or condition of self-governance, or leading one’s life according to reasons, values, or desires that are authentically one’s own. Although autonomy is an ancient notion (the term is derived from the ancient Greek words autos, meaning “self,” and nomos, meaning “rule”), the most-influential conceptions of autonomy are modern, having arisen in the 18th and 19th centuries in the philosophies of, respectively, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.
For Kant, a person is autonomous only if his choices and actions are unaffected by factors that are external, or inessential, to himself. Thus, a person lacks autonomy, or is heteronomous, to the extent that his choices or actions are influenced by factors such as convention, peer pressure, legal or religious authority, the perceived will of God, or even his own desires. That desires are inessential to the self is shown by the fact that, unlike the self, they are contingent on the situation in which one finds oneself (e.g., a person living in the 18th century would not have a desire to own a personal computer, and a person living in the 21st century would not—at least not ordinarily—have a desire to use a chamber pot). A person whose situation and desires change, however, does not thereby become a different person. Even if the desires in question are not the product of one’s social environment but instead arise from one’s physiology, they are still inessential to the person who has them. A person who likes caviar but dislikes lobster would not become a different person if he were to acquire a taste for lobster and lose his taste for caviar.
Rationality, in contrast, is an essential feature of the self, according to Kant. Thus, a person will be autonomous with respect to his choices and actions if they are directed solely by his rationality. Kant is clear that this does not mean that a person is autonomous if he acts rationally to achieve some external end (e.g., to satisfy a desire to eat caviar). To act in this way is merely to act on what Kant called a “hypothetical imperative”—a rule of the form “If you want to achieve X, you should do Y.” Because actions that are guided by hypothetical imperatives are motivated by desires, they cannot be performed autonomously. To act rationally in the sense that grounds ascriptions of autonomy, therefore, a person must act according to a rule that would be valid for all similarly situated rational agents, regardless of their desires. This requirement is expressed in general terms in Kant’s “categorical imperative,” one version of which is: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal [moral] law”—i.e., a law that every similarly situated rational agent should follow. A person whose actions were guided by the categorical imperative could not lie to gain an advantage, for example, because he could not consistently will that everyone should follow the rule “Lie when it is to your advantage to do so.” If everyone did follow this rule, then no one would trust the word of anyone else, and no one, including the person contemplating the lie, would be able to reap the benefits of lying.
Autonomy thus entails acting in accordance with the categorical imperative. Moreover, because an autonomous agent recognizes his intrinsic value as a rational being, he must also recognize the intrinsic value of all other rational beings, because there is no relevant difference between his rational agency and that of others. An autonomous agent, therefore, will always treat rational beings as ends in themselves (i.e., as intrinsically valuable) and never merely as means (i.e., as instrumentally valuable). Kant expressed this conclusion in a second version of the categorical imperative, which he considered to be equivalent to the first: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in another, always as an end, and never as only a means.”
Millian and hierarchical accounts of autonomy
According to the Millian view of autonomy, a person is autonomous to the extent that he directs his actions in accordance with his own values, desires, and inclinations. Mill’s view thus contrasts with Kant’s in that it does not hold that autonomous persons cannot be motivated by desires; all that it requires is that the desires be their own. The crucial question then becomes what it means to say that a given reason, value, or desire is truly a person’s own.
The Millian account of autonomy has been more widely adopted within applied ethics than the Kantian account, in part because it appears to be more realistic. Very few, if any, persons intentionally act in accordance with at least the first version of the categorical imperative, yet it does not seem that autonomy is a rare phenomenon. In addition, the Millian view has been developed in fruitful and interesting ways since the 1970s in so-called hierarchical analyses of autonomy, which were introduced by the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his seminal paper “
Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (1971).
Frankfurt’s early hierarchical account of autonomy addressed, among other problems, the intuitively plausible claim that there are cases in which a person might act in accordance with his own desires and yet not act autonomously. A drug addict, for example, has a desire to take the drug to which he is addicted. But is he acting autonomously when he takes the drug? It is arguable that he is not. If one also assumes that the drug addict wishes he were not addicted—i.e., he wishes that he did not have the desire to take the drug—then it becomes even more plausible to say that he is not acting autonomously. To accommodate such cases, Frankfurt claimed that in order for a person to perform an action autonomously, he must not only possess a desire to perform the action but also reflectively endorse his desire to take that action. For Frankfurt, endorsing a desire consists in having a second-order desire to have that desire. To be autonomous with respect to drug taking, therefore, the addict would have to possess both the desire to take the drug and the desire to have the desire to take the drug. Even if the addict had such a second-order desire, however, he still might not be autonomous with respect to his drug taking, because he might want to have the first-order desire for the drug but not want it to move him to act. (He might, for example, want to know what it feels like to be addicted to a drug but not actually to take the drug to which he would feel addicted.) To take the drug autonomously, therefore, the addict must desire to take the drug, desire to desire to take the drug, and desire that his first-order desire move him to act.
Frankfurt’s account has been subject to three criticisms. The first concerns the criteria for establishing that a given desire is authentic, or truly one’s own. Given that the authenticity of first-order desires is guaranteed by the possession of certain second-order desires, what guarantees the authenticity of second-order desires? If the answer is the possession of certain third-order desires, then the account leads to an infinite regress (the same question could be asked regarding third-order desires, fourth-order desires, and so on) and thus to no real explanation. But if the answer is something else, then Frankfurt’s account is seriously incomplete.
The second criticism is that Frankfurt’s account seems to imply that a person’s second- or higher-order desires are in some sense more authentic than his first- or lower-order desires. It is only by virtue of this greater degree of authenticity that second-order desires should be capable of guaranteeing the authenticity of lower-order desires. But it is not clear why this should be so. The reverse might in fact be more plausible. For example, a teenager might form the second-order desire to become a cigarette smoker because of peer pressure or other forms of socialization. That desire seems to be less authentic, less truly his own, than his particular and acute desire for a cigarette, which he eventually experiences as a result of his addiction to nicotine.
Finally, Frankfurt’s account of autonomy seems vulnerable to a thought experiment known as the problem of manipulation. Through any of various means (e.g., hypnotic suggestion), a first-order desire and its corresponding second-order desire could be implanted into a person without his knowledge. On Frankfurt’s account, there is no apparent reason not to regard both desires as authentic (the first-order desire because it is endorsed by the second-order desire, the second-order desire because it is a second-order desire). But this seems implausible.
Frankfurt attempted to meet these and other objections in subsequent revisions of his view, but his efforts were not wholly successful, according to some critics. Since the 1980s some philosophers have developed variations of Frankfurt’s theory intended to overcome such objections, while others have pursued altogether different accounts based on states or characteristics other than desire, such as values, personal or character traits, and relations to others.