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Rethinking Relational Autonomy ANDREA C. WESTLUND John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one’s action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy. When Catriona MacKenzie and Natalie Stoljar published their anthology Relational Autonomy in 2000, their aim was to rehabilitate the concept of autonomy for feminist theory by focusing attention on its social dimensions and disentangling it from suspect ideals of radical independence and self- reliance. As they point out, the phrase ‘‘relational autonomy’’ does not name a single view, but instead designates a loosely related collection of views that share an emphasis on the social embeddedness of the self and on the social structures and relations that make autonomy possible (MacKenzie and Stoljar 2000, 4). 1 This renewed and multifaceted focus on relational concepts has surely enriched and deepened our thinking about the nature and conditions of individual agency, and has opened up a point of fruitful contact between feminist philosophy and moral psychology more generally. 2 Still, it is not always clear whether relational theorists are offering a fundamentally new approach to autonomy. After all, many mainstream accounts of autonomy have turned out to be quite hospitable to the feminist emphasis on relationality. Most currently influential accounts are procedural in the sense that they treat some form of reflective endorsement of motivating desires or values as the key to autonomous choice and action. 3 While adherents of such accounts may not have paid sufficient attention to social factors in the past, most can accommodate the reality that the capacities needed for reflective endorsement must be developed during a relatively long period of dependence on parents and other caregivers. Moreover, procedural accounts of autonomy are, by design, neutral with respect to the content of an autonomous agent’s desires, preferences, and values, imposing formal rather than substantive Hypatia vol. 24, no. 4 (Fall, 2009) r by Hypatia, Inc.

Hypatia Volume 24 Issue 4 2009 - ANDREA C. WESTLUND - Rethinking Relational Autonomy

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Page 1: Hypatia Volume 24 Issue 4 2009 - ANDREA C. WESTLUND - Rethinking Relational Autonomy

Rethinking Relational Autonomy

ANDREA C. WESTLUND

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, asdefended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the humangood. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that impliesperfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneselfanswerable to external, critical perspectives on one’s action-guiding commitments.This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answerto core feminist concerns about autonomy.

When Catriona MacKenzie and Natalie Stoljar published their anthologyRelational Autonomy in 2000, their aim was to rehabilitate the concept ofautonomy for feminist theory by focusing attention on its social dimensionsand disentangling it from suspect ideals of radical independence and self-reliance. As they point out, the phrase ‘‘relational autonomy’’ does not name asingle view, but instead designates a loosely related collection of views thatshare an emphasis on the social embeddedness of the self and on the socialstructures and relations that make autonomy possible (MacKenzie and Stoljar2000, 4).1 This renewed and multifaceted focus on relational concepts hassurely enriched and deepened our thinking about the nature and conditions ofindividual agency, and has opened up a point of fruitful contact betweenfeminist philosophy and moral psychology more generally.2

Still, it is not always clear whether relational theorists are offering afundamentally new approach to autonomy. After all, many mainstreamaccounts of autonomy have turned out to be quite hospitable to the feministemphasis on relationality. Most currently influential accounts are procedural inthe sense that they treat some form of reflective endorsement of motivatingdesires or values as the key to autonomous choice and action.3 While adherentsof such accounts may not have paid sufficient attention to social factors in thepast, most can accommodate the reality that the capacities needed for reflectiveendorsement must be developed during a relatively long period of dependenceon parents and other caregivers. Moreover, procedural accounts of autonomyare, by design, neutral with respect to the content of an autonomous agent’sdesires, preferences, and values, imposing formal rather than substantive

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constraints on autonomous choice and action.4 Substantive independence isneither necessary nor sufficient for autonomy on such accounts, nor doessubstantive dependence (or interdependence) pose any special problem.5

Finally, procedural accounts do not generally require that the autonomousagent’s desires or values be developed or endorsed in the absence of socialforces. Difficult as it may be to distinguish between autonomy-underminingand autonomy-enhancing influences, procedural theorists such as GeraldDworkin have long acknowledged that some such distinction must be made(see, for example, Dworkin 1988, 18). Some social influences will notcompromise, but instead enhance and improve the capacities we need forautonomous agency. In short, existing procedural accounts seem well-equippedto handle a range of important contributions that relationships and, moregenerally, social embeddedness make to the development of autonomy.

If existing accounts of individual autonomy can happily accommodate somuch of what relational theorists have brought into focus, is there any roomleft for an alternative account that is distinctively relational in nature? JohnChristman has suggested that it is only views that treat relationality asconceptually (not just causally) necessary to autonomy that are uniquelyrelational. Social or relational factors are conceptually necessary if they playan ineliminable role in the definition of autonomy itself (that is, if they arepartly constitutive of autonomy), as opposed just to making a causal contribu-tion to the development and/or sustenance of the capacity for autonomy. Eventhough Christman is sympathetic to the general emphasis that feministtheorists place on relational concepts, he argues that we ought to approachthese stronger, constitutively relational views of autonomy with considerablecaution. Such accounts go astray, in his view, by implying a suspectperfectionism about the human good, requiring that agents stand in idealized,egalitarian relations with one another in order to count as autonomous. Thisdeparture from the content-neutrality of formal accounts is worrisome: ‘‘It isone thing,’’ he writes, ‘‘to say that models of autonomy must acknowledge howwe are all deeply related; it is another to say that we are autonomous only ifrelated in certain idealized ways’’ (Christman 2004, 158).

I agree with Christman that the latter sort of claim is too strong. Suchegalitarianism is undoubtedly an admirable goal for other reasons.6 But to denythat individuals can ever autonomously engage in non-ideal relations is boththeoretically problematic and inappropriately patronizing toward at least someindividuals who endorse such lives for themselves. In this paper, however,I argue that autonomy may be construed as constitutively relational withoutbuilding any such perfectionist ideal into the concept itself—without, that is,giving up on content-neutrality. My focus is, in the first instance, onautonomous choice and action, as opposed to autonomy as a feature of personsor as a global feature of an entire life.7 The central question, from thisperspective, is what makes a choice or action an agent’s own. But I think thereare important connections between this and other notions of autonomy:

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roughly put, an autonomous person is one who has the capacities that areexercised in autonomous choice and action, and an autonomous life is one ledby an agent who successfully exercises these capacities to a significant extentover time.8 In my view, autonomy in choice and action—and hence,derivatively, in its other senses—relies (at least in part) on the disposition tohold oneself answerable to external critical perspectives on one’s action-guiding commitments. I do not argue that this disposition is sufficient forautonomy, but I do think it is a necessary and key component of autonomy.Autonomy, on this view, requires an irreducibly dialogical form of reflective-ness and responsiveness to others. But this type of relationality, whileconstitutive, is formal rather than substantive in nature and carries with it nospecific value commitments. I close the paper with some comments on thesignificance of this sort of relationality to feminist theory.

THE PERFECTIONIST THREAT

Christman cites Marina Oshana’s account of autonomy as a rare example of arelational view that is clearly constitutive in nature.9 Oshana positions herselfas a critic of what she calls ‘‘internalist’’ views of autonomy. These views, whichinclude the procedural, reflective-endorsement-based views mentioned above,are distinguished by the fact that they treat autonomy as entirely a matter of theinternal, psychological condition of agents. Oshana acknowledges that suchviews are friendly to some of the points that feminist critics have made. Still,she charges, they run afoul of reasonable intuitions about cases of subservience.A voluntary slave or other self-subordinating character may count asautonomous, for the internalist, as long as she endorses her own subserviencein an adequately reflective manner. Oshana finds this result unacceptablebecause a person’s status as slave or subordinate robs her of the power to‘‘determine how she shall live’’ (Oshana 1998, 82), even if the constraintsunder which she lives are self-chosen, and her actions and choices are in accordwith preferences that are, authentically, her own.10 In place of the internalistaccount, she offers an ‘‘externalist,’’ social conception of autonomy accordingto which autonomy is a matter not just of what goes on in an agent’s head butalso of ‘‘what goes on in the world around her’’ (Oshana 1998, 81). To beautonomous, an agent must (among other things) enjoy a significant range ofviable options and retain authority over her social circumstances. Relation-ships that violate these conditions are by definition incompatible withautonomy.11

On more than one occasion, Oshana invokes the case of fundamentalistMuslim women in an effort to marshal our intuitions to her view (see Oshana1998, 2003, 2006). She argues, for example, that a woman who willinglyembraced the strictures imposed by the Taliban in pre-2001 Afghanistanshould not be considered autonomous, whatever her attitude toward her socialrole may be (Oshana 2003, 104).12 What to say about such a case is clearly a

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delicate matter. While I share Oshana’s conviction that many relations ofsubordination (including this one) are substantively criticizable on feministand other grounds, I also share Christman’s concerns about building anegalitarian ideal directly into the definition of personal autonomy. Aconception of autonomy should not imply that certain egalitarian values are,as he puts it ‘‘valid for individuals even if they (ex hypothesi) authentically andfreely reject them’’ (Christman 2004, 152).13

Now, I would by no means suggest that all or even many ‘‘Talibanwomen’’ accept their condition freely or authentically (to borrow Christ-man’s terms), and it can be a form of intellectual and moral laziness toassume that they do. But if (ex hypothesi) a fundamentalist woman does freelyand authentically accept a condition of social and personal subordination, itseems equally problematic to assume that her condition as subordinate, inand of itself, undermines her status as self-governing agent. It may be thatstandard internalist views leave something to be desired in their handling ofsuch cases. But if we want to construct the most formidable test case for aninternalist view, we need to be more attentive to possible differencesbetween self-subordinating characters. We should not assume that allindividuals who willingly embrace subordinate roles will be psychologicallysimilar to one another. Even among those who have ‘‘stood back’’ andreflected on the preferences they endorse, some may be far more responsivethan others to considerations that (apparently) weigh against those prefer-ences. Responsiveness to critical perspectives on one’s action-guidingcommitments is not an externalist condition in Oshana’s sense, but itshould, I think, make a difference to our intuitions about relative autonomy.A ‘‘Taliban woman’’ who is prepared to take up and respond to the criticalperspectives of others, even if she is unconvinced by their arguments, isstrikingly different from one who is not. We may find the content of hercommitments to be utterly wrong-headed, maybe even in part because wesuspect they will erode her own autonomy competency over time andirreparably stunt the development of such competency in her daughters.But to treat her as non-autonomous even as she speaks on behalf of her self-subordinating commitments is to refuse to take the possibility of suchdialogue with her at face value: not only does this woman lack authorityover her social circumstances, our treatment implies, she lacks authority overher own voice. And this flies in the face of the evidence she gives of suchauthority in engaging in just the kind of critical dialogue in which one mightexpect reflective, self-governing agents to engage.

One difficult feature of the case, of course, is that one might wonder whethermany (if any) ‘‘Taliban women’’ will be ready or willing to speak up on theirown behalf, since they might regard such self-assertion as at odds with their self-ascribed social role. Later in the paper I consider a number of non-autonomy-compromising reasons why one might be hesitant to respond to criticism, alongwith a number of alternative, less discursive, forms of responsiveness that might

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take the place of a direct exchange of reasons. But I concede that some self-subordinators may simply not show any responsiveness to alternative views, ormay just repeat pat ‘‘responses’’ that have been drilled into them over the years.I do not mean to deny that some of the women Oshana has in mind may be likethis, nor that autonomy is compromised in such cases. My claim is just that theexamples she gives of fundamentalist women are under described, and that aview that is externalist (in her sense) may not do the best job of handling ourintuitions about different cases within this broad category. At least someindividuals who accept a subordinate place within a social or personalhierarchy are quite prepared to answer for their choices (and, indeed, bristle atthe suggestion that they are oppressed in virtue of them). While I cannot citeexamples of women defending such extreme conditions as those imposed byTaliban rule, Anna Mansson McGinty describes in wonderful detail cases ofwomen converts to Islam who give dialogically sensitive defenses of suchapparently non-egalitarian practices as veiling, modest dress, and obedience totheir husbands (Mansson McGinty 2006).14 Similarly, Uma Narayan presentsus with the perspectives of women who live in purdah and veil in the SufiPrazada community of Old Delhi, arguing convincingly that once we attend towhat they actually say about their choices, it becomes clear that these womenare neither simply ‘‘prisoners’’ nor ‘‘dupes’’ of patriarchy (Narayan 2002).15

Some of these women may lack control over significant aspects of their socialcircumstances, but, in reading their case studies, it is hard to see them as lackingin personal autonomy—and it would feel quite wrong to address them in thoseterms.

AUTONOMY AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR SELF

Christman seems to suppose that any constitutively relational view ofautonomy will come at the price of perfectionism about the human good andcommit us to paternalistic treatment of those whose values we find objection-able.16 In this section I argue that autonomy may in fact be constitutivelyrelational in important respects, and yet carry with it no substantive valuecommitments.

It is a widely shared starting point among proponents of different views thatpersonal autonomy is a matter of self-governance of choice and action. What itis to be self-governing in these matters is a far more vexed question. A currentlydominant answer is that to act autonomously is to act on a desire (or value)that passes a test of reflective endorsement and thereby counts as truly one’sown.17 One way of putting the general thought is that such endorsementconstitutes the agent’s authorization of the desires by which she is moved. Inthe absence of such authorization, many philosophers speak of agents’ being‘‘gripped by’’ or ‘‘alienated from’’ their desires.18 There is reason, however, tosuspect that reflective endorsement of particular motivating desires cannot yetbe the whole story of autonomous action. Michael Bratman, for example,

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argues that the idea of autonomy, understood as self-governance, involves theidea of guidance by what he calls an agent’s ‘‘justificatory point of view’’(Bratman 2003a, 169, n. 39, my emphasis). This argument begins from theobservation that we are the sort of creatures whose actions often issue fromdeliberation, in which we consult considerations that seem to us to justifyacting in one way or another. Just as it is possible to be in the grip of a desirethat is not one’s own, it seems possible to be in the grip of the thought thatsome consideration justifies a particular course of action. The infamousMilgram experiments, in which subjects persist in administering apparentlypainful shocks despite their own discomfort in doing so, provide a stockexample of such a case. These subjects seem to be gripped by the thought thatobedience is required of them in this sort of situation, a thought that(presumably) they themselves would not, under other circumstances, regard asappropriately action-guiding. Surely, practical reasoning driven by suchthoughts should not count as self-governed, nor should any actions yielded bysuch reasoning. In short, self-governance of choice and action seems to requireself-governance of relevant practical reasoning.19 So what does self-governanceof practical reasoning require?

One might think that we could explain the self-governance of practicalreasoning through continued appeal to structural features of the agent’spsychology. Bratman himself takes this route, arguing that practical reasoningis self-governed when it is guided by a known, ‘‘self-governing policy’’ withwhich the agent is satisfied (Bratman 2003a). A self-governing policy is ahigher-order attitude that ‘‘concern[s] the significance that is to be given tocertain considerations in our motivationally effective practical reasoningconcerning our own conduct’’ (Bratman 2003a, 160). Satisfaction with a self-governing policy is also treated as a structural matter on Bratman’s view: to besatisfied with a self-governing policy is for ‘‘that policy not to be challenged byone’s other self-governing policies’’ (Bratman 2007, 44). On this account, aperson who decides that she should go to the gym because she is overweightacts autonomously, in so doing, if the reasoning that leads to her action is itselfguided by a known, unchallenged policy that grants considerations of herweight a justifying role in reasoning about her conduct.

The problem with this sort of approach is that it leaves open thepossibility that an agent may be gripped by a self-governing policy (despiteits name) in the same problematic sense in which she may be gripped by adesire or a bit of practical reasoning. This objection is similar in form to thenow-familiar regress objection to hierarchical accounts of self-governance,which stems from Gary Watson’s early critique of Frankfurt (Watson 1975).As applied to Bratman, however, the objection may appear to beg thequestion: Bratman argues that unlike the higher-order volitions cited byFrankfurt, self-governing policies with which one is satisfied do have a claimto what he calls ‘‘agential authority’’ (Bratman 2007, 210). Why? Becausethese policies contribute to the organization of our cross-temporal agency

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‘‘by way of continuities and connections of a sort that are highlighted byLockean accounts of personal identity over time’’ (Bratman 2007, 207).That is, these policies have a claim to speak for the agent because they areamong the psychological ties that constitute a person as one and the sameagent over time.

It is not clear, however, that one could not be gripped by (or alienatedfrom) such a policy in the autonomy-undermining sense, despite its role inorganizing one’s agency over time. Bratman himself raises this possibility,asking whether a case in which satisfaction with a self-governing policy isgrounded in depression counts as a counter-example to his view. The case hehas in mind is not one in which depression actually undermines thefunctioning of self-governing policies, preventing one from (say) gettingout of bed in time to make one’s planned trip to the gym. This sort of casewould not, as he notes, pose a challenge to his account, since it wouldrecognize such disruptions as compromising autonomy. Instead, the objec-tion concerns the sort of case in which self-governing-policies continue toplay their Lockean role in organizing agency over time, but do so onlybecause the agent experiences a depression-based lack of pressure to changethose policies. One might imagine, for example, a case in which the agent issatisfied with a policy of treating her weight as a reason to go to the gymevery morning only because she is depressed over her bodily appearance (or,perhaps, because her depression distorts her bodily self-image). Bratmansuggests that such a case does not in fact provide a counter-example to hisaccount, precisely because the policy’s Lockean role is still intact:

. . . in this case, the self-governing policies remain settledstructures that play these central Lockean roles in temporallyextended, deliberative agency, and they do that in the absenceof relevant pressure for change. So it seems to me that they stillhave a presumptive claim to establish the (depressed) agent’sstandpoint. (Bratman 2007, 211)

This argument does not strike me as decisive. Even if the depressed agent’sself-governing policies do contribute to the organization of her agency overtime, it is still, plausibly, a further question as to whether they do so in a waythat renders her self-governing.20 Stable organization over time may be onlyone aspect of a more complex set of characteristics that mark out an agentialperspective. I’ve noted elsewhere that deeply deferential agents may be satisfiedwith the policies that govern their practical reasoning and yet strike us as beingmerely in the grip of the concerns that motivate that reasoning (Westlund2003).21 By ‘‘deeply’’ deferential agents, I mean those who endorse theirdeference but have no basis for doing so that is not itself deferential. Pressed toexplain why they always defer, such agents simply persist in referring theirinterlocutors to the perspectives of those to whom they defer. Just as it is hard

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to interpret the highly responsive converts interviewed by Mansson McGintyas non-autonomous, it is hard to construe such unresponsive, deeply deferential,agents as fully autonomous. (In virtue of what we might regard their autonomyas impaired is a question to which I return shortly.) An agent whose exerciseregime is grounded in depression about her weight does not, of course, invokethe perspective of some other person to whom she defers. But she hassomething in common with the deferential agent nonetheless.22 Becausesatisfaction with her reasoning-governing policy is grounded in her depression,her reasoning on these matters seems likely to be strongly psychologicallyinsulated from confrontation with contrary considerations. The difficulty wewould face in engaging her in anything like genuine dialogue about herincessant gym-going would feel very similar to that which we would face inengaging the deeply deferential agent. It is in precisely such cases, wherenothing we say really seems to make contact, that we want to say somethinglike ‘‘That’s the depression speaking, not you!’’ (or, in the case of deference,‘‘That’s so-and-so speaking, not you!’’). These reactions seem to depend on theidea that one might be in the grip of a reasoning-governing policy that is notone’s own, regardless of the role played by that policy in organizing one’sagency over time.

On a structural approach to understanding agency, it may be unclear whatelse it could take for an attitude to count as the agent’s own. This is preciselywhere I think an adequate understanding of autonomy must take a rela-tional turn. The alternative approach I want to defend looks not to internalpsychological structure but to how the agent positions herself as one practi-cal reasoner among many—or, more specifically, to how she is disposed torespond to the normative pressures placed on her by other agents who may callher to account for the commitments that guide her choices and actions.23

There is, then, a sense in which I join Oshana in rejecting what she calls‘‘internalist’’ views of autonomy. But I do not think that one must look outsidethe agent’s psychology to her actual social standing in order to overcome theproblematic kind of internality. Instead, we must consider whether the agent islimited, in her reflective capacities, to essentially monological functions such asendorsing or rejecting lower-order attitudes from elsewhere within her ownhierarchy of attitudes, or whether she has a dialogical disposition to hold herselfanswerable for elements of that hierarchy in the face of critical challengesposed by other agents. This distinction does not map onto any straightforwarddistinction between what is internal and what is external to the agent. Thedisposition to hold oneself answerable to others is, after all, a feature of theagent’s psychology, and thus internal to the agent. But it is nonetheless adisposition to be engaged by what is external to the agent, that is, by points ofview other than her own.24

Consider, again, the responsive ‘‘Taliban woman’’ described in the section‘‘The Perfectionist Test.’’ What makes it seem inappropriate to treat thiswoman as non-autonomous is the fact that, despite her unwavering commit-

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ment to her own subservient role, she is disposed to answer for thatcommitment in the face of critical challenges. Admittedly, what she defendsmight (in part) be a commitment not to exercise her own judgment in manysignificant practical matters. But even this commitment is one that may or maynot be backed by practical reasoning of the agent’s own. The responsive agent’sreadiness to answer for such a commitment in the face of critical challenges setsher apart from more deeply deferential counterparts who cannot be brought tofeel the normative force of such queries. An agent who lacks the disposition toanswer for herself may be reflectively satisfied with her commitments, but herpractical reasoning will be strangely disconnected from, and insensitive to, anyjustificatory pressures to which she, the agent, is subject. Being impervious tocritical challenge in this way is an excellent candidate for what it is to begripped by an action-guiding commitment or bit of practical reasoning asopposed to governing it, which is precisely the distinction of which we needour account of autonomy to make sense.

It might, at first blush, seem paradoxical that the status of one’s reasoning asone’s own should depend, in part, on one’s sensitivity to considerations raisedby others. But again, it helps to remind ourselves that we are the sort ofcreatures who engage in practical deliberation, in which we consult considera-tions that count for or against various courses of action. A lack ofresponsiveness to considerations that purport to challenge our current sense ofthe justificatory landscape constitutes a recognizable form of passivity in theface of one’s commitments. By contrast, an agent who holds herself answerablefor her action-guiding commitments effectively shows that, however firmlycommitted she is to certain values, she is not just passively in their sway.25

There is an important sense (to which I’ll return shortly) in which she insteadtakes responsibility for her commitments, and this is a stance that is intuitivelyincompatible with being in their ‘‘grip.’’

To clarify, my claim is not that the agent must actually have arrived at all ofher commitments through a process of critical reflection in order to actautonomously. While other theorists (including, prominently, Dworkin) havestressed the importance of the capacity for critical reflection, I think it isimportant to distinguish between different ways in which that capacity mightbe invoked. On the one hand, critical reflection might be seen as important toautonomy for its historical role in the agent’s endorsement of certain desires orvalues as action-guiding. On this construal, a choice or action may be regardedas autonomous just when it is motivated by a desire or value that has survived asuitably rigorous process of critical scrutiny. While attractive in some respects,this picture has its drawbacks: though most people spend time deliberatingabout their commitments at moments of uncertainty or before major, life-altering decisions, it is simply implausible that most of our commitments have,at any given moment, already undergone and survived such scrutiny. If only asmall number of our actions could ever turn out to be autonomous, the conceptseems to lose quite a bit of its purchase on the real cases that interest us. On the

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other hand, a merely hypothetical standard of critical reflection—for example,one that requires that a desire or value could or would withstand some idealizedprocess of reflection—seems to leave the agent’s ability actually to exercise hercritical faculties too far out of the picture, since it doesn’t really place anyrequirements on her at all. Invoking the disposition to answer for oneself avoidsboth pitfalls. This standard does not require that all commitments on whichthe autonomous agent acts have already survived critical scrutiny. But it doesrequire that the autonomous agent actually have a certain kind of self-relation—namely, one in which she holds herself answerable, for her action-guiding commitments, to external critical perspectives. This dispositionrequires readiness to engage in critical reflection. Indeed, having such adisposition means positioning oneself as always a potential member of areflective or deliberative dyad, which is one aspect of the relationality of theview.

Placing answerability at the core of autonomy also offers a relational wayof understanding the idea of responsibility for self, an idea that has oftenbeen treated as central to the concept of autonomy. On structural views inthe Frankfurtian or Dworkinian molds, responsibility for self is fundamen-tally about marking the boundaries of the self through the endorsement ofsome motives and the rejection of others (see Dworkin 1988; Frankfurt1988). The view of autonomy I defend here also concerns one’s relation toone’s motivating desires or values, but treats that relation as having aninterpersonal or dialogical dimension. One who is disposed to hold herselfanswerable to others treats her commitments as something for which sheherself is interpersonally accountable: they are neither simply brute factsabout her, nor, ultimately, assignable to anyone else. She purports to speakon her own behalf, or to ‘‘represent’’ herself in interpersonal dialogue.Because the autonomous agent holds herself responsible for her endorsementof certain values and desires, and for her treatment of them as justifyingreasons for action, it makes sense to describe her as manifesting ‘‘responsi-bility for self’’ or ‘‘self-responsibility.’’26 In comparison with the structuralconstruals mentioned above, this construal of responsibility for self drawsmore directly on important conceptual links among responsibility, account-ability, and answerability.

In sum, I’ve argued that self-governance of choice and action requires self-governance of the practical reasoning that issues in choice and action, and thatself-governance of practical reasoning requires a disposition for dialogicalanswerability.27 In order to count as governing one’s practical reasoning, ratherthan being in the grip of the considerations that drive it, one must be open toengagement with the critical perspectives of others. Autonomy, on this view, isconstitutively relational. It does not require that one stand in idealized,egalitarian relations with others. But the internal psychological condition ofthe autonomous agent does point beyond itself, to the position the agentoccupies as one reflective, responsible self among many. For one’s action-

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guiding commitments to be one’s own, one must be disposed to answer forthose commitments in the face of external, critical challenges. The critics towhom the agent answers may sometimes inhabit her own moral imaginationrather than her real social environment. Either way, responsibility for selfdepends on the internalization of a very basic sort of interpersonal relation—namely, a form of justificatory dialogue that (presumably) we begin to learn inour early interactions with parents and other caregivers and continue todevelop throughout the process of maturation.

Relations of care are causal contributors to the developed capacity forautonomy on this view. But the concept of autonomy itself also turns out tohave a relational dimension, since self-governance of choice and actionrequires a form of reflectiveness that is irreducibly dialogical in form.‘‘Dialogue,’’ as I use the term, is to be understood broadly. Although theexplicit citation of reasons in a conversational context is one paradigm formthat the required answerability may take, it is not the only possible form, andperhaps not even the dominant one outside of certain special contexts. (I willremark further on this possibility in the section ‘‘Formal versus SubstantiveConditions.’’) But self-governance is dialogical in the sense that it requiresmore than one perspective to be in play, even in its internalized forms. It isprecisely insofar as one is responsive to perspectives that are not one’s own thatone demonstrates that one is not simply in the grip of one’s own commitments,but responsive to normative pressures to which those commitments aresubject.

FORMAL VERSUS SUBSTANTIVE CONDITIONS

Now, this view of autonomy may appear to smuggle in certain substantivevalue commitments, and so lead to a suspect perfectionism after all. In fact,Paul Benson has defended a somewhat similar view under the banner of a‘‘weakly’’ substantive conception of autonomy. On his view, taking ownershipof one’s actions and will is a matter of ‘‘claiming authority to speak for [one’s]intentions and conduct’’ (Benson 2005a, 102), and one’s authority to speak forone’s intentions and conduct depends on having a certain sort of regard foroneself: autonomous agents must treat themselves as ‘‘sufficiently competentand worthy to speak for their actions’’ (Benson 2005a, 117). Whereas stronglysubstantive views of autonomy directly impose restraints on the contents ofagents’ desires or preferences, Benson describes his view as one on whichnormative constraints enter indirectly, ‘‘by way of the attitudes toward theirown competence and worth through which agents claim such authority’’(Benson 2005b, 136).

Though recognizing its differences from Oshana’s account, Christman treatsBenson’s account as equally susceptible to the charge of perfectionism, since, as heunderstands it, it does involve a substantive value commitment—namely, acommitment to one’s own worthiness to speak and answer for oneself. Benson’s

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view might, at least at first blush, appear to invite this charge. It requiresautonomous agents to have a certain sort of positive regard for themselvesas agents, and positive regard for one’s own agential status certainly soundslike a substantive value commitment. Benson argues that the autonomous agentmay invest authority in herself implicitly, rather than in a conscious or explicitway. This may help to defuse the perfectionist charge, if implicit treatment fallsshort of a full-blown value commitment. At the same time, however, Bensonrequires that the agent understand that she would not possess authority to answerfor herself did she not treat herself as possessing it, which seems a rather strongcondition.

The question of whether Benson’s view really is susceptible to Christman’scritique would require more discussion than I can give it here. On my ownview, however, we needn’t encumber the autonomous agent with anyparticular value judgments about herself. Answerability for oneself is a formalrelation, constituted by a disposition to respond to normative pressures on one’scommitments, not by any particular beliefs about or attitudes toward oneself.When one holds oneself answerable for a self-subordinating commitment, one’sexplicit values and beliefs about oneself may even manifest a lack of self-respect.What marks an agent out as self-answerable is how receptive she is to thecritical perspectives of others. The autonomous agent experiences thosechallenges (when they meet conditions of legitimacy that I will sketch out) ashaving normative standing in her deliberations, and reacts as though she owesa response.28 If the autonomous agent can be said to display any special sort ofself-regard at all, it should not be thought of as an independently identifiableattitude on which autonomy depends, but rather, as a sui generis sort of self-regard that just consists in being disposed to hold oneself answerable to external,critical perspectives. But again, being so disposed is a formal condition onautonomous agency, akin in that respect to other conditions that reflective-endorsement theorists place on our self-relations.

A second and perhaps more challenging objection is that this dialogicalconception of autonomy imports a substantive commitment not to one’s ownself-worth but to justificatory dialogue itself. Ingra Schellenberg describes acase, drawn from her experience as a clinical ethicist, in which a woman shecalls ‘‘Betty’’ confounds her doctors by refusing potentially life-saving skin-graftsurgery (Schellenberg, unpublished comments). Betty could not be drawn intodirect discussion of her refusal, but instead simply shut down when pressedto give reasons. Betty’s refusal to engage, Schellenberg suspects, was in part dueto her limited intellectual abilities. (Betty had a lower than average IQ andlittle formal education, and may not have been capable of articulating herunderlying values or the role they played in her practical reasoning.) But inpart, Schellenberg suggests, Betty’s refusal was based on something else: sheseemed to reject as unreasonable the very demand that she give reasons for herdecision. Unlike the hyper-articulate medical professionals by whom she wassurrounded, Betty did not seem to value justificatory dialogue. She had made a

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choice, was resolute in that choice, and preferred to be left alone about it. Thispreference, Schellenberg reports, appeared to be consistent with a broaderpattern of voluntary solitude and ferocious independence expressed in Betty’slife-narrative.

On the basis of Betty’s independence and resolve, Schellenberg is reluctantto conclude that she was not autonomous. Without more intimate knowledgeof the case, I must reserve judgment about the status of the individual inquestion. I would not, however, regard further evidence of independence orresolve as decisive. If (subject to qualifications I spell out below) Betty does notgive some form of genuine reflective or deliberative response to the considera-tions raised by her doctor and other caregivers, then, however brave she seems,I would argue that Betty is not self-governing with respect to her decision but,rather, ‘‘in the grip’’ of considerations concerning (for example) the value ofsubstantive independence or of standing up to the authority figures in her life.29

To decide autonomously Betty must hold herself answerable for the role suchconsiderations play in her practical reasoning, which (subject to the importantqualifications discussed below) involves being moved by the feeling that sheowes a response to the counter-considerations raised by others.

Certain details of Betty’s case suggest to me that perhaps she was not in factas unresponsive as she seemed at first blush: even though she never changed hermind about the surgery, Betty did, according to Schellenberg, begin to makesome concessions to the medical staff once she came to see that they wereconcerned for her well-being. These concessions suggest that Betty did giveproper consideration to at least some of their arguments, adjusting her ownstance where she found she could no longer justify it. (Proper considerationdoes not, after all, entail being convinced to change one’s mind on all points,nor, as I stress below, does it require a high degree of articulacy about one’sposition.) But the broader point, of course, concerns not just Betty herself, butall those who experience attempts at deliberative engagement not as a sign ofrespect but as a threat or as a form of manipulation—not to mention those whosimply do not enjoy argumentation or do not feel obliged to cite their reasonsto all comers. Just as there were surely those who took cover when they sawSocrates coming around the corner, there must be those who grit their teethand fantasize escape when they find themselves in a room with a philosophi-cally trained clinical ethicist—however sensitive and constructive thatclinician may be. Must one positively value (or at least not disvalue)engagement in the exchange of reasons in order to count as autonomous? Doesanyone who finds the demand for reasons threatening or tedious or presump-tuous, and thus refuses to engage, thereby fall short of autonomy? This is aserious question, especially since, as Schellenberg suggests, the sociallyvulnerable may fall disproportionately into the group of those who feelthreatened by justificatory dialogue.

I will argue, however, that on a proper understanding of the disposition inquestion, responsibility for self does not rely on valuing any specific justificatory

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practice. It does not, in particular, rely on a willingness or ability to cite reasonson demand. It does, by definition, involve the adjudication of reasons indialogue (of some form) with real or imagined others. But the form that both‘‘adjudication’’ and ‘‘dialogue’’ may take is sufficiently broad that it does notcommit the self-responsible agent to anything other than a formal conditionthat may be expressed in any number of substantive ways.

As a start, it is worth re-emphasizing that one may respond to externalcritical perspectives internally rather than in face-to-face conversation. Manyagents who feel threatened by a more articulate interlocutor may prefer toconsider the matter in private where they will not be disadvantaged ordisempowered by an imbalance in sheer argumentative skill. But of course thisdoes not fully answer the objection, for an agent like Betty may not engage inan internal give and take of reasons of the sort her doctors hoped for, either.Moreover, even more articulate agents than Betty are likely to rebuff dialogicalengagement in certain settings, without committing themselves to revisitingthe issues at hand on their own. When the proselytizers come to your door, orthe telemarketers call, it is probably not just that you’re too busy to talk to themnow. We sometimes do not think that we owe a response—and sometimes weare perfectly right about that. The disposition to hold oneself answerable toexternal, critical challenges is not in fact a disposition to defend one’s choicesand actions to all comers, but to respond (in one of a range appropriate ways) tolegitimate challenges. So what is a legitimate challenge?

I will not here embark on the task of providing a set of necessary andsufficient conditions for legitimacy, but will instead focus on two necessaryconditions that may address the objection at hand. First, a legitimate challengemust be situated in a way that makes relational sense of the intervention. Thatis, it must be situated in a relationship that gives context and content to theconcern expressed by the critic. Some sense-giving relationships are broad: oneis a member of the moral community, citizen of the nation, inhabitant of acommunity. Others are more narrow: one is a mother, husband, neighbor, orclub member. It would take me beyond the scope of this paper to specify fullywhat constitutes a sense-imparting relationship. But at very least, it must beclear why it matters to my critic why I think and act the way I do, and it mustmatter to her in a way that she can reasonably expect to matter to me.Challenges that fail to meet this condition—call it the condition of relationalsituatedness—may indeed strike the agent as inappropriate or even, in somecases, as outrageous. If the proselytizers and the telemarketers purport to addressyou under the rubric of any sense-imparting relationship at all, it is typically notone that you accept—and in some cases it is a transparently phony one. Buteven in more intuitively sense-giving relationships like the doctor–patientrelationship, highly open-ended challenges (‘‘Why are you refusing to do X?’’)may sometimes fail to manifest to the agent the right form of mattering. Whilemedical professionals may take for granted a shared context of concern, not allpatients will conceive of such professionals as among those entitled to question

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their choices and actions (or, more precisely, as among those entitled toanswers) when it comes to their own life-and-death preferences.30 Part of theburden of facilitating justificatory dialogue thus falls on the shoulders ofthe would-be critic, who must position herself appropriately with respect tothe agent in question.

The condition of relational situatedness addresses the worry that a self-responsible agent must (implausibly) be prepared to cite her reasons on demand,regardless of the relationship in which she stands to her critics. A second aspectof Betty’s case, however, concerns the very idea that an autonomous agentmust be prepared to cite her reasons at all. Even in legitimate contexts, thedemand for reasons may seem to place an unreasonable burden on agents whoare relatively inarticulate or otherwise disinclined to engage in argument withothers. This concern points to a second condition of legitimacy, to which I’llrefer as the condition of context-sensitivity: a legitimate challenge must becontext-sensitive with respect to the kind of response it invites and tolerates. Inany form of justificatory dialogue, as I’ve already acknowledged, reasons are insome sense up for adjudication. But the direct citation of reasons in response toquestioning may, for some otherwise competent agents, be an alien practice inwhich they do not know quite how to engage. (For others, it may feel alien onlyin some contexts, such as the more personal ones.) But there are certainly otherways of demonstrating that one holds oneself answerable to appropriatelysituated critical challenges. Within the realm of the broadly conversational,one might do any of the following: provide a life-narrative that manifests one’sreasons; provide an interpretation of relevant experiences, putting them in thecontext of a wider pattern of meaning; describe the actions of an admired otherin a similar situation; tell parables or other stories that are chosen andrecounted in a way that demonstrates responsiveness to the question; andprobably much more besides. Outside the realm of the conversational, an agentmay give explicit or implicit signals that she intends to reflect on what has beensaid, signs that she has re-deliberated in relevant ways or sought moreinformation as a result of the challenge, or that she is attempting to repair,restructure, or terminate a relationship or practice that has come into question.This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely to give a sampling of thearray of possible responses that manifest a disposition to hold oneselfanswerable to external critical perspectives.

There is, no doubt, more to be said about the forms that legitimatechallenges and responses may take. But I hope it will already be evident thatneither responsibility for self nor autonomy in fact requires agents to value anyspecific justificatory practice. Autonomous agents will, in one way or another,manifest responsiveness to justificatory challenges, and their disposition to doso is partly constitutive of their status as self-governing. But they can manifestsuch responsiveness even while disvaluing and refusing to engage in certainpractices, including practices in which they are pressed to cite their reasons inthe face of direct questioning.

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Having said all of this, however, it is a striking fact that we sometimes findexternal challenges discomfiting even when they are appropriately situated andcontext-sensitive. This is not surprising, since we do not always know how orwhether we can answer for ourselves. But insofar as it marks a practical concernabout our own apparent shortcomings, such a response actually demonstratesreal sensitivity to the normative pressures imposed on us by others. A self-responsible agent who finds herself unable to answer will not be able to restcontent with her commitments just as they are, and the prospect of having toconfront this predicament is not always a pleasing one. Now, if discomfort inthe face of external critical challenges leads to self-deception or avoidanceinstead of responsiveness, it becomes a pathology of autonomy rather than amark of its healthy functioning. By a ‘‘pathology of autonomy,’’ I mean adisorder that is intimately linked to the conditions required by autonomy—onethat is triggered, in the first place, by the agent’s sensitivity to the requirementsof autonomy, even if that sensitivity is subsequently suppressed. The aversiveresponse I have just described is one that would not be possible in an agent whodoes not at some level understand what autonomy requires of her. Butdiscomfort in itself is not always pathological, nor is it necessarily a sign ofcompromised autonomy. Indeed, that we are capable of feeling discomfited (oreven threatened) in this way teaches us something important about the natureof human agency: it does matter to us, sometimes very intensely, whether wecan respond appropriately to legitimate critical challenges.

FEMINISM, FORMALITY, AND AUTONOMY

Many feminist critiques of autonomy have targeted procedural or formal viewsof autonomy, and some have argued that only a substantive account ofautonomy will answer to feminist concerns about the concept.31 Substantiveaccounts that have been developed by feminist philosophers thus far tend to beconstitutively relational, while formal accounts tend to point at most tocausally relational conditions. As Christman has noted, accounts that arerelational in the causal sense may still be fundamentally individualistic aboutautonomy itself: the fact that a capacity has social conditions does not implythat it is itself a social capacity.32 It can thus appear that the formal/substantivedistinction and the individualistic/relational distinction go together, such thatonly substantive accounts of autonomy can be constitutively relational innature. If I am right, however, it is important to keep these two distinctionsseparate and to recognize that a constitutively relational account of autonomymay in fact be formal.33 But does a formal account of relational autonomyadequately meet feminist concerns?

I argue that conceiving of autonomy as relational in a constitutive butformal sense both meets a number of important feminist concerns and helps usto navigate a pair of feminist intuitions about cases of self-subordination thatmight otherwise seem to conflict. Autonomy as self-responsibility is in no way

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committed to ‘‘masculine’’ ideals of substantive independence or self-reliance.Being self-responsible is compatible with human interdependence and, indeed,with most forms of outright dependence on others.34 Autonomy as self-responsibility makes room for—and in fact demands—attention to caringrelations in which the capacity for autonomy is developed and sustained.Moreover, the account highlights an important aspect of what it is to besocially embedded: our identities and commitments are not inflexiblydetermined by our social positioning, but are instead worked out on an ongoingbasis in dialogue with real or imagined others.

One form of particularly deep cognitive dependence on others—what Ireferred to earlier as ‘‘deep deference’’—is admittedly incompatible withautonomy on this view: where an agent cannot be brought to feel answerableto external, critical perspectives on her commitments, but seems uniformly toexperience justificatory demands as aimed ‘‘through’’ her at someone else towhom she defers, we ought to consider her autonomy impaired.35 But this is notan exception that feminists should be worried about. Indeed, acknowledgingthe incompatibility of autonomy with deep deference provides a way ofexpressing a legitimate feminist worry about certain cases of self-subordinationwithout defining away the very possibility of autonomous adherence to non-liberal, non-egalitarian values and norms. In cases of genuinely impairedautonomy, the question of what explains the impairment is often a morallyand politically important one, and features of the agent’s social environmentmay be directly implicated as causal factors. But this should not lead us to thinkthat substantive ideals of independence, egalitarianism, and the like cannot berejected by autonomous agents. In defending such ideals, we ought to proceedby treating their detractors as autonomous interlocutors—unless compelled, bytheir imperviousness to critical challenge, to conclude otherwise. Thedisrespectful nature of any other treatment has, in effect, been roundlyrecognized within the global feminist literature, even if it is typically stated indifferent terms.36 The view defended here thus accommodates two feministintuitions that have sometimes been hard to reconcile: first, that some cases ofself-subordination are genuinely at odds with autonomy, but second, that it isproblematic to make any general assumption to the effect that non-liberalvalues are incompatible with autonomy.

CONCLUSION

I have argued that, contrary to what Christman suggests, it is possible toconstrue autonomy as constitutively and thus distinctively relational withoutbuilding any troubling perfectionist ideals into our account of autonomy itself.An account of autonomy based on responsibility for self is relational in boththe causal and constitutive senses, but distinctly non-perfectionist in form. Notall self-subordinators (nor all independent individuals, for that matter) will beself-responsible, but there is no contradiction between self-responsibility and

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self-subordination. Recognizing this, perhaps paradoxically, frees us to engagein more constructive forms of moral and political critique, treating thosewho endorse values we find objectionable as autonomous interlocutors whodeserve to be listened to, understood, and, in the case of persistent dis-agreement, argued with—rather than as non-autonomous agents who cannotspeak for themselves.

The account of autonomy I defend is in fact well-suited to accommodate thepolitical concerns that motivate Christman’s critique. Christman suggests thatautonomy is ‘‘the characteristic of persons who are candidates for fullparticipation in . . . collective decision-making processes’’ (Christman 2004,156), and he worries that relational accounts like Oshana’s risk re-victimizingthe victim by excluding many among the oppressed (but not their oppressors)from public deliberation about their own status. The self-responsibility accountrisks no such perverse result: the capacity it treats as central to autonomy is, if Iam right, one that may be shared even by those enmeshed in problematic socialrelations that they themselves endorse. Not only that, but it is precisely in virtueof the relationality of the account that it addresses Christman’s concern as well asit does: the relational capacity required for autonomy—namely, the dispositionto hold oneself answerable to external critical perspectives—would seem to becentral among those capacities required to engage in collective deliberation.Interpreted broadly, as I’ve interpreted it in this paper, the criterion of dialogicalanswerability is not unduly exclusive but treats a wide range of agents, with awide range of skills and deliberative styles, as capable of participation. I hope,then, that the formal but constitutively relational conception of autonomy Idefend will be appealing both on feminist and on more general grounds, andthat it will help us to make sense of strong intuitions about oppression andautonomy that have often seemed maddeningly at odds with one another.

NOTES

I would like to thank Carla Bagnoli, Ted Hinchman, Jules Holroyd, Nate Jezzi, Ingra Schellenberg,Anita Superson, and three anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts. I would alsolike to thank audiences at Cornell University, Northwestern University, the 2007 Central DivisionMeeting of the American Philosophical Association, and the 2nd Conference of the Society forAnalytic Feminism, held in April 2008, for helpful discussion.

1. See also Christman 2004, 147.2. Relational autonomy is a concept that seems, in recent years, to have bridged feminist and

non-feminist literatures in moral psychology. While MacKenzie and Stoljar’s anthology wasexplicitly feminist in orientation, relational theories of autonomy advanced by feministphilosophers have also been featured prominently in collections that are not specifically feministin orientation. See, for example, Christman and Anderson (2005) and Taylor (2005). I do notadvance this as a criterion of success for relational theories, but merely to mark a point of fruitfulcontact and conversation between feminist and mainstream contributors to the literature onautonomy.

3. Accounts of autonomy advanced by Friedman (1986, 2003), Christman (1987, 1991,2004, 2005), Dworkin (1988), Frankfurt (1988, 1999), Bratman (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003a, b,

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2007), and Meyers (2004, 2005) would all count as procedural or formal in the sense at issue here,though of course they differ in their details.

4. MacKenzie and Stoljar offer the following concise characterization of procedural accounts:‘‘On procedural, or content-neutral, accounts, the content of a person’s desires, values, beliefs, andemotional attitudes is irrelevant to the issue of whether the person is autonomous with respect tothose aspects of her motivational structure and the actions that flow from them. What matters forautonomy is whether the agent has subjected her motivations and actions to the appropriate kind ofcritical reflection’’ (MacKenzie and Stoljar 2000, 13–14). Marilyn Friedman also offers a usefulsummary of this distinction in Friedman (2003, 19–25). Friedman prefers the term ‘‘content-neutral’’ to ‘‘procedural.’’ I use the terms ‘‘procedural,’’ ‘‘content-neutral,’’ and ‘‘formal’’interchangeably in this paper, though I have a slight preference for ‘‘formal’’ (and tend to use it indescribing my own view) because of the perspicuity of the contrast between ‘‘form’’ and‘‘substance.’’

5. This fact cuts both ways for feminist theorists. On the one hand, procedural accounts areattractive insofar as they dispense with popular ideals of radical independence and self-reliance andmake room for social embeddedness and deep interpersonal commitment. On the other hand, theyare unattractive insofar as they appear to miss the fact that some forms of dependence do seem toundermine autonomy. My own aim (which takes me beyond the bounds of this particular paper) isto carve out a procedural account of autonomy that gives us tools for distinguishing between formsof dependence that are compatible with autonomy and forms that are not, and for explaining what’sat stake, at the level of individual agency, between these cases.

6. Indeed, its importance may even have to do with the causal contributions that suchrelations are likely to make to the development and sustenance of individual autonomy.

7. On the distinction between ‘‘global’’ and ‘‘local’’ autonomy, see Dworkin (1988, 15–16).Meyers (1987) draws a similar but more nuanced distinction among episodic, programmatic, andnarrowly programmatic autonomy.

8. The phrase ‘‘autonomous person’’ is, I think, actually ambiguous. It might simply refer to acreature of a certain sort, who may be owed certain kinds of treatment simply in virtue of heragential capacities. It may also be used more strongly to indicate that an agent not only has butregularly and successfully exercises a capacity for autonomy. In the latter usage, the idea of anautonomous person begins to shade into the idea of one who leads an autonomous life.

9. Paul Benson’s view is also constitutively relational, though in a different way fromOshana’s (see Benson 2005a). Elsewhere Christman argues that the perfectionist threat arises inBenson’s case, too (see Christman 2005). I discuss this charge in relation to my own view in thesection ‘‘Formal versus Substantive Conditions.’’

10. Oshana takes it to be a widely shared intuition that an autonomous person must be incontrol of her choices, actions, and will. But she disagrees with internalist theorists over how toconstrue this control. Whereas internalists such as Harry Frankfurt have argued that one may be incontrol, in the sense relevant to self-government, even while lacking alternative possibilities(Frankfurt 1988), Oshana thinks that the concept of personal autonomy includes the power tochoose and act other than one does. How best to construe ‘‘control’’ seems to be a matter ofachieving reflective equilibrium between our intuitions about various cases (including those of self-subservience) and other, equally strong, intuitions and considered views with which thoseintuitions may be in tension. While I share some of Oshana’s intuitions about cases of self-subordination, I also share Christman’s worry about her positive account of control. I think we needa different way of understanding what can go wrong in such cases.

11. Oshana is concerned, in the first instance, with autonomy as a feature of persons.Nonetheless, I do not think we are talking past each other. Oshana seems, like me, to regard theautonomy of persons (and, globally, of lives) as conceptually connected to the autonomy ofparticular choices and actions: an autonomous person, as she puts it, is ‘‘in control of her choices,her actions, and her will’’ (Oshana 1998, 82). Being in control of isolated choices and actions will

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not necessarily add up to a globally autonomous life if one lacks control in a more global way (formore on this possibility, see note 12). But this is a point one can accept in principle whether or notone agrees with Oshana’s further arguments about what it is to have the relevant sort of control. Inother words, where Oshana really differs from the theorists she criticizes is not in discussing globalrather than local autonomy, but rather, in rethinking, in externalist terms, the notion of control thatfigures in both.

12. More precisely, Oshana argues that a woman might make an occurrently or locallyautonomous decision to embrace such a lifestyle in the first place, but that she cannot then countas globally autonomous (Oshana 2003). To count as occurrently autonomous, I take it that thewoman must, at the time of choice, satisfy Oshana’s criteria for control and hence self-governance.(Oshana imagines her as a successful physician who opts to give up her former independence infavor of a life of utter dependence.) But after her choice is made, the Taliban woman no longersatisfies these criteria, for the life she has chosen requires her to give up precisely the sort of day-to-day (that is, occurrent) control over her social circumstances that is, on Oshana’s view, required forautonomy. In sum, Oshana argues that one might, through an occurrently autonomous act,undermine one’s global autonomy by undercutting one’s ability to be in (occurrent) control of heractions, choices, and will in the future.

13. Oshana responds to Christman’s critique with the suggestion that he is conflating personalwith political autonomy (Oshana 2006): he wants to represent the Taliban woman as politicallyautonomous, and as having a moral right to a voice in the political process, but fails to recognize thatone might satisfy these criteria even while lacking personal autonomy in Oshana’s sense. Whether ornot this is true of Christman, my own concern is squarely with agential authority over choice andaction—and agential authority is, in the first instance, a matter of personal rather than politicalautonomy, even if there is ultimately some relation between the two. (Some comments in theconclusion to this paper bear on their relation, but only speculatively.) In her response to Christman,Oshana rightly points out that the Taliban woman in fact lacks a socially and politically authoritativevoice. But whether agential authority (and thus personal autonomy) requires social or politicalauthority is precisely the question at issue. While Oshana argues that it does, I offer an argument,which differs from those she rejects, that it does not.

14. I say ‘‘apparently’’ non-egalitarian practices because these women do not themselvesdescribe the practices as non-egalitarian. Some (like the woman Mansson McGinty refers to as‘‘Cecilia’’) offer their own, alternative interpretations of equality between men and women, whichin their views may be compatible with different rights and responsibilities linked to biological andreligiously ordained roles (Mansson McGinty 2006, 98).

15. While I share Narayan’s view that these women should be considered autonomous, I donot share the very thin conception of autonomy that she defends, which does not include anyanswerability requirement of the sort I discuss in this paper. Oshana also rejects Narayan’s thinconception of autonomy, though for different reasons. See Oshana (2006, 102–4).

16. Oshana claims that ‘‘paternalism just is that which offends against autonomy’’ (Oshana2003, 116), and elaborates that ‘‘Paternalism usurps autonomy because it substitutes one person’sjudgment for another’s’’ (Oshana 2003, 116). This point is an important one to keep in mind inassessing Oshana’s claim that the Taliban woman is no longer autonomous once she gives up hersubstantive independence. If a person has no autonomy to usurp or offend, she cannot (properlyspeaking) be treated paternalistically. My intuitions about the highly answerable women I describein section 2 run strongly against the idea that they cannot be treated paternalistically—that is, that‘‘paternalism’’ does not describe a way in which these women can be wronged. Whetherpaternalism is ever justified is, of course, a separate question, which Oshana also treats in Oshana(2003, 2006).

17. Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchical account of autonomy (1988, 1999) is perhaps the mostinfluential of the reflective-endorsement accounts, and Michael Bratman (1999, 2000, 2001,2003a, b, 2007) offers an important variant on that account. Gerald Dworkin (1988) and John

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Christman (1987, 1991, 2004, 2005) also accord a central role to reflective endorsement, and forDiana Meyers (2004, 2005), critical reflection is among those capacities required for autonomycompetency. See MacKenzie and Stoljar (2000) and Westlund (2003) for detailed discussion ofvarious reflective-endorsement accounts and the differences among them.

18. I borrow the language of being ‘‘gripped’’ by a desire from Gibbard (1990), and followBratman (2003a) in applying it to the discussion of autonomy. The concept of alienation appearsfrequently in the work of Frankfurt, Bratman, and others.

19. See Bratman (2003a) and Westlund (2003) for further discussion of this point.20. Immediately following his discussion of the depressed agent, Bratman does consider the

idea that some further endorsement of self-governing policies’ functioning might be required forfull-blown self-governance (Bratman 2007, 211). Bratman argues that a hierarchical theorist canaddress this worry without falling into a familiar regress. On his view, no further endorsing attitude isneeded because self-governing policies already reflexively endorse their own functioning. Heemphasizes, however, that Lockean role and satisfaction, not reflexivity, are the primary ingredientsin agential authority. The appeal to reflexivity does not seem designed to address the sort of worry Iraise about agential authority in depressed and deferential agents, which is not, in any case,motivated by an intuition that further endorsement is required.

21. Henceforth I will refer to policies concerning the appropriate functioning of variousconsiderations in one’s practical reasoning as reasoning-governing policies rather than as self-governing policies in order to leave open the possibility that acting on a reasoning-governing policywith which one is satisfied may nonetheless not add up to full self-governance.

22. The fact that the deferential agent inherits her policies from someone else is notultimately crucial to the case. Mansson McGinty’s converts to Islam may well in some sense be‘‘taking’’ their reasons from other sources, as well. But, I will argue, they enjoy a form of self-relationthat both the deeply deferential and the depressed agent seem to lack.

23. I develop this account at greater length in Westlund (2003). Paul Benson has defended asimilar approach, on which I comment briefly below.

24. I have been tempted to describe the disposition to hold oneself answerable to others as‘‘outward-looking,’’ in contrast to ‘‘inward-looking,’’ reflective dispositions that are central tohierarchical, or structural, views of autonomy. An anonymous referee points out, however, that thedistinction between inward- and outward-looking dispositions is hardly a straightforward one, sinceon some views (notably, Kantian ones), answerability to others is grounded in the authority of theagent’s own will. I agree that an unqualified contrast between ‘‘inward-’’ and ‘‘outward-’’ lookingdispositions is overly simple, and for this reason I no longer think that the contrast between myaccount and the structural accounts I criticize is best captured in those terms. In light of this point,however, a few words about how my argument relates to the Kantian project may be in order:Kantian views derive our moral accountability to one another from the autonomy of the will, whichis in turn grounded in the reflective structure of our own consciousness. What I’m arguing is that theautonomy of the will must itself be understood in terms of a disposition to hold oneself answerable toothers, and not in purely structural terms.

25. It may be difficult to tell, in some cases, the extent to which an agent really is dialogicallyresponsive. Some rather articulate agents might be utterly impervious to dialogical engagement,shielding themselves with pat answers designed to deflect further questioning rather than respondto it. Less articulate agents may be receptive to external critical perspectives in ways that are harderto detect. I consider this possibility further in the section ‘‘Formal versus Substantive Conditions.’’For this reason it may be advisable to employ a healthy principle of charity in assessing an agent asautonomous or not.

26. For more on both self-representation and self-responsibility, see Westlund (2003).27. My position is that dialogical answerability is a necessary condition for autonomy.

Whether it is sufficient is a question on which I remain neutral here.

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28. Reacting as one who owes a response may take various forms, some of which I discussbelow. Also, as indicated in note 25 above, in some cases it may be difficult for an observer to becertain whether an agent is being receptive to external critical perspectives or not. But this is,perhaps, just as we should expect: after all, it is not always easy to tell whether an agent is actingautonomously or not. One might be tempted to think that a philosophical account of autonomyshould make it easier for us to tell. But it may simply be a fact of life that the characteristics uponwhich autonomy depends are themselves sometimes hard to identify with confidence. As suggestedin note 25, this is one reason for employing a principle of charity in assessing the autonomy ofothers.

29. Later in this section I argue that genuine reflective or deliberative response may takemore than one form, and I give several examples of forms it may take.

30. I suspect that Betty at first took the medical staff to fail to meet this condition. She didbegin to make some concessions to them once she began to see that they were genuinely concernedfor her well-being (though she never did change her mind about the surgery).

31. These feminists include not only Benson and Oshana, whom I discuss in this paper, butalso Natalie Stoljar (2000) and Sigurdur Kristinsson (2000). Christman describes Diana Meyers’s‘‘competency’’ view of autonomy as non-procedural (Christman 2004, 155), but followingMacKenzie and Stoljar, I would instead categorize it as procedural. As I understand Meyers’s view,however, it is one on which autonomy is causally, but not constitutively, relational—so it is aformal but non-intrinsically relational account.

32. See Christman (2004, 148). Christman cites Friedman (1997) as making a similar point.33. It is also worth reminding ourselves that a substantive account of autonomy may be

individualistic in nature, as were the popular notions of autonomy initially rejected by feminists.These conceptions of autonomy required substantive independence and non-conformity of theautonomous agent. As Christman points out, Oshana’s own account is somewhat paradoxical inthis respect. Though constitutively relational in the sense that it treats autonomy as dependent onthe existence of certain idealized social relations, these idealized relations are in fact ones in whicheach party enjoys a significant degree of substantive independence from the other(s).

34. See the next paragraph for one important exception.35. I argue elsewhere that cases of deference or self-subordination are not the only cases in

which such an impairment may arise (Westlund 2003). Some apparently independent charactersmay likewise fail to be responsive in the right way to justificatory pressures.

36. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s influential paper ‘‘Under Western Eyes’’ (Mohanty 1991),for example, charges Western feminists with ‘‘othering’’ third-world women and treating them (invirtue of their cultural, religious, or familial commitments) as generally less in control of theirbodies and decisions than Western feminists presume themselves to be. Her paper offers a forcefulcritique of such treatment. Similarly, Uma Narayan offers a powerful critique of the tendency totreat third-world or ‘‘other’’ women as either prisoners or dupes of patriarchy (Narayan 2002).

REFERENCES

Benson, Paul. 2005a. Taking ownership: Authority and voice in autonomous agency.In Autonomy and the challenges to liberalism: New essays, ed. J. Christman andJ. Anderson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–126.

———. 2005b. Feminist intuitions and the normative substance of autonomy. In Personal autonomy,ed. J.S. Taylor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 124–42.

Bratman, Michael. 1999. Identification, decision, and treating as a reason. In Faces of intention:Selected essays on intention and agency. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp.185–206.

———. 2000. Reflection, planning, and temporally extended agency. Philosophical Review 109 (1):35–61.

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———. 2001. Two problems about human agency. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 101:309–26.———. 2003a. Autonomy and hierarchy. Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2): 156–76.———. 2003b. A desire of one’s own. Journal of Philosophy 100 (5): 221–43.———. 2007. Planning agency, autonomous agency. In Structures of agency. Oxford and New York:

Oxford University Press, pp. 195–221.Christman, John. 1987. Autonomy: A defense of the split-level self. Southern Journal of Philosophy

25 (3): 281–93.———. 1991. Autonomy and personal history. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1): 1–24.———. 2004. Relational autonomy, liberal individualism, and the social constitution of selves.

Philosophical Studies 117 (1–2): 143–64.———. 2005. Procedural autonomy and liberal legitimacy. In Personal autonomy, ed. J.S. Taylor.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277–98.Christman, John, and Joel Anderson. 2005. Autonomy and the challenges to liberalism: New essays.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Dworkin, Gerald. 1988. The theory and practice of autonomy. New York: Cambridge University Press.Frankfurt, Harry. 1988. The importance of what we care about. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press.———. 1999. Necessity, volition, and love. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Friedman, Marilyn. 1986. Autonomy and the split-level self. Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1):

19–35.———. 1997. Autonomy and social relationships: Rethinking the feminist critique.

In Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. D.T. Meyers. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, pp. 40–61.———. 2003. Autonomy, gender, politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Gibbard, Allan. 1990. Wise choices, apt feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Kristinsson, Sigurdur. 2000. The limits of neutrality: Toward a weakly substantive account of

autonomy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 257–86.MacKenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar. 2000. Introduction: Autonomy refigured.

In Relational autonomy: Feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency, and the social self, ed. C.MacKenzie and N. Stoljar. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–31.

Mansson McGinty, Anna. 2006. Becoming Muslim: Western women’s conversions to Islam. NewYork: Palgrave MacMillan.

Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 1987. Personal autonomy and the paradox of feminine socialization.Journal of Philosophy 84 (11): 619–28.

———. 2004. Being yourself: Essays on identity, action, and social life. Lanham, Md.: Rowman &Littlefield.

———. 2005. Decentralizing autonomy: Five faces of selfhood. In Autonomy and the challenges toliberalism, ed. J. Christman and J. Anderson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp.27–55.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonialdiscourses. In Third world women and the politics of feminism, ed. C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo,and L. Torres. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 51–80.

Narayan, Uma. 2002. Minds of their own: Choices, autonomy, cultural practices, and otherwomen. In A mind of one’s own: Feminist essays on reason and objectivity,ed. L.M. Antony and C. Witt. Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press, pp. 418–32.

Oshana, Marina. 1998. Personal autonomy and society. Journal of Social Philosophy 29 (1): 81–102.———. 2003. How much should we value autonomy? In Autonomy, ed. E.F. Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr.,

and J. Paul. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 99–126.———. 2006. Personal autonomy in society. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate.Schellenberg, Ingra. Unpublished comments.Stoljar, Natalie. 2000. Autonomy and the feminist intuition. In Relational autonomy,

ed. C. MacKenzie and N. Stoljar. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 94–111.

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Taylor, James Stacey. 2005. Personal autonomy: New essays on personal autonomy and its role incontemporary moral philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Watson, Gary. 1975. Free agency. Journal of Philosophy 72 (8): 205–20.Westlund, Andrea. 2003. Selflessness and responsibility for self: Is deference compatible with

autonomy? Philosophical Review 112 (4): 37–77.

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