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Personal autonomy:

Distinguishing value and conditions of

persons’ autonomy

Claudio Santander Martinez PhD Student

PEP, University of York

1. Introduction

Since the publication of The Inner Citadel in 1989, edited by John

Christman, the debate about autonomy has received important

attention. The Inner Citadel,1 collected a group of papers that

triggers, after two decades, what may be called the contemporary

discussion about personal autonomy.2 Certainly, such

‘contemporary discussion’ has enormous debts with a Kantian-

inspired discussion on the matter, however, it differs from the latter

in that it points to an intellectual debate that goes beyond the

frontiers of Kantian ethics, covering also several fields of knowledge

such as psychology, law, bioethics and politics. Some even have

argued that between the Kantian model of autonomy and the so-

1 The Inner Citadel. Essay on Individual Autonomy. Ed. by John Christman. New Y ork, Oxford University Press, 1989.

2 This does not mean that the discussion on the value of autonomy only received scholarly attention from the publication of The Inner Citadel. Before 1989 the idea,

of course, had been defended and circulated amply and in several fields and for different purposes. The magnificent study of J. D. Schneewind The invention of Autonomy. A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (1998, Cambridge University Press) is probably the most comprehensive work in which autonomy received a treatment in terms of the philosophical concept that informs Kantian ethics -and the scholarly associated to that tradition- by investigating both the historical sources and

the practical problems that the concept of autonomy came to solve. However, the publication of The Inner Citadel made it possible to recognise a corpus of authors and arguments that, by adopting the concept, take some distance from its Kantian origins.

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called contemporary treatment of autonomy there is nothing in

common.3

In the contemporary debate about personal autonomy developed

during the last thirty years, it has become a commonplace to

distinguish between procedural and substantive accounts.

Procedural accounts argue that persons are autonomous when

agents show procedural independence in the reflective process of

conformation of choices. On the other hand, substantive accounts

on personal autonomy hold that persons are autonomous when

their choices are constrained by substantive conditions derived

from an ideal of good life. Normally then, procedural and

substantives accounts have been understood as opposite views. So

for example, a substantive account would suspect about a person’s

autonomy if she chooses to lead a life merely following the

requirement of procedural independence. According to the

substantive account, the view could imply contra-intuitive

outcomes such as subservient or demeaning lifestyles. However,

this is not envisaged by proceduralists as a defect, since the account

they defend is “content-neutral”. In the same token, proceduralist

theorists cast some doubts that a person might become

autonomous if she merely restricts her choices according to values

derived from the substantive idea of a worthwhile life. Again, such

a view could imply similar contra-intuitive autonomous lifestyle,

since person’s autonomy might depend on unreflective

commitments to consuetudinary ways of life.

If the above accounts of personal autonomy descriptions are

correct, we might assume also that each one leads to different

normative positions. The value of autonomy in procedural accounts

3 See For example, O´Neill, O., 2003. “Autonomy: The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 7 7 , pp.1– 21. O’Neill argues that the contemporary treatment has more debts with J.S Mill’s idea of indiv iduality rather than with Kantian conception of autonomy. For this discussion see Jeremy Waldron, 2005 “Moral Autonomy and Personal Autonomy”. In J. Christman and J. Anderson Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism. New Essays. Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press. 2005. Oliver Sensen, 2013 Kant on Moral Autonomy. Cambridge, New Y ork. Cambridge University Press. Especially Chapter 1 Thomas E. Hill Jr. “Kantian Autonomy and Contemporary ideas of autonomy” and Chapter 8 J.B. Schneewind “Autonomy after Kant”.

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then would rest on person’s approval or endorsement of choices if

they are the result of critical reflection, no matter what the process’s

outcome is. Substantive accounts, on the contrary, value personal

autonomy as person’s endorsement of choices committed to a

substantive idea of a good life. At this point, the way we get a sense

of the value of autonomy, namely, associated to the description of

the nature of autonomy, seems problematic. For if procedural

accounts state that autonomy consists of following an independent

process of critical reflection, such accounts should explain also why

such a process is necessary and sufficient as the source of value of

personal autonomy. For, it does not imply that, from a defective or

insufficient process of formation of choice, we might get a better

sense about the value of personal autonomy through just improving

or adjusting our critical reflection. That is to say, such accounts

would need further reasons about why personal autonomy is

valuable only if it is the case that persons show certain ability for

procedural independence. Additionally, but separately, from the

defective capacity of constraining my choices by a substantive idea

of good life, it simply does not follow that autonomy is valuable

uniquely on the grounds of an adequate performance of such

substantive forms of life. Once again, substantive accounts would

need to appeal to further arguments that shows why autonomy is

valuable only when it is a satisfactory expression of ideas of good

life. To what extent does a person gets a valuable autonomous

status by improving her critical reflection about her choices? Or

what does determine the suitable realisation of a life in accordance

with the ideal of good life?

The basic thought is that a normative conception of autonomy –its

value- is not the same as the description of the requirements

stipulated by procedural or substantive accounts. For the value of

autonomy is neither a property of the critical reflection’s outcomes

nor a property of a particular standard of living in accord with a

substantive ideal of good life. From these requirements, we still

have a lot of ground to cover before we are entitled to accept that

the value of autonomy reflects merely meeting accounts’

conditions. Procedural and substantive accounts need, in any case,

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to show us why we would not take some further arguments to

establish the value of autonomy. The point is, in consequence, that

such accounts needs to go further and bring into account

complementary values that, at some level, fit in the accounts and

award value to autonomy. There is no inconsistency in maintaining

that autonomy matters even though persons do not show an

expected procedural independence or do not perform adequately

certain living standard of good life.

The latter conclusion looks like an extra claim. In fact, what I

have argued so far might fit with the thought that either procedural

or substantive accounts of autonomy are necessary for the value of

autonomy, but they are not sufficient. When I claim that autonomy

matters, despite the fact that person do not fulfil what a given

account’s requirements minimally ask them for, I am not implied

that such given account might not even be necessary. I am tried to

suggest that persons might need to engage with some kind of

account of autonomy in order to have, say, standard criteria for

assessing their own lives, as a formula to value their lives as an

autonomous one. However, it is not clear that, in doing so, they also

are engaged in valuing personal autonomy. Accounts of autonomy

may be a useful tool to check how autonomous we are. However, in

regard to how persons value their own choices, and what they have

chosen, they have little need to use a given account of autonomy. In

other words, persons have little need to appeal to either procedural

or substantive autonomy’s requirements as a way of thinking on

their own lives’ choices as valuable. From this, it does not follow

that the value of autonomy is instrumental simpliciter, but rather,

that we need to think personal autonomy as a relation to a kind of

value – or a family of values- that provides practical reasons

regarding why should reasonably be seen a life as a valuable

autonomous one. We find that our autonomy is worth pursuing on

the grounds of how we link our autonomous choices with a practical

context of justification. A person can reasonably be proceduralist to

choose her career and substantivist to choose the city where to

develop it. Eventual conflicts between adopting either an

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individualistic or a relational point of view do not need to invoke to,

in the sake of a solution, the value of autonomy.

So the problem seems to be that procedural accounts need a

family of arguments –apart from its conditions- that justifies the

value of procedural independence as a way to get autonomy, and

not merely internal coherence between states of mind. On the other

hand, a substantive account would also need to appeal to a further

family of arguments that, in this case, justifies the value of a given

substantive ideal of good life for an account of personal autonomy.

Thus, in order to get a complete sense about the value of personal

autonomy, procedural and substantive accounts should be

understood in combination with models of justification.

To show this, in the next section I will focus on how procedural

accounts of personal autonomy justify the value of autonomy

through the idea that procedural independence obtains in virtue of

an internal hierarchy in person’s volitional structure. Persons, tell

us this strategy, are autonomous if they endorse the motivations of

their actions and if the persons’ critical reflection is characterised

by the absence of any kind of interference. To get such endorsement

and independent reflection, procedural accounts rest on a volitional

hierarchy between lower-order desires and higher- order desires. I

will call Hierarchical model to this family of arguments that justify

the value of autonomy as the formation of autonomous choices. My

strategy to examine this procedural account and its correlative

hierarchical model is, in the section two, to connect them with a

normative reconstruction of the contemporary debate on personal

autonomy.

In section three, and following the historical development of the

debate on personal autonomy, I focus on substantive accounts of

autonomy characterised by the rejection of the hierarchicalist

model on the grounds of its allegedly intrinsic individualistic and

rationalistic consequences. In the substantive account version that

I present –a second phase characterised by a criticism from

feminist perspectives- , I examine how this version argues that the

value of autonomy rests in the relational condition of persons, by

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means of interpersonal and social relationships. I call this family of

arguments Relational Model. The basic idea of the relational model

is that autonomy is valuable because it permits persons to achieve

a worthwhile life by recognising the relational value of social

practices. While the value of autonomy for procedural accounts lies

in a hierarchicalist view of formation of choice, according to

substantive accounts the value lies in the relational conditions of

autonomous persons.

So far, in section two and three I have argued that accounts of

autonomy need to justify the value of its core idea, the idea of self-

government, that is to say, the idea that act within a framework of

rules one sets for oneself, matters. I have also mentioned that the

description of the accounts’ requirements need to account for the

value of autonomy in connection to reasons that express how the

account is commitment to a practical value. In the last section, the

section four, I hold that this third phase in the contemporary debate

of personal autonomy, reassesses the foundations of hierarchical

and relational models. I will show in this section that these models

might in principle be reconciled. One of the characteristic of this

third phase, is that there was a congruence between the discussion

on autonomy and one on the value of person and the nature and

justification of liberalism. My suggestion is that one of the

consequences of such congruence frames the debate about the

value of autonomy in a new fashion by reconciling relational and

hierarchical models. So for example, reconciling both models might

imply that the status of moral person, citizens for instance, is what

granted the value of autonomy by ascribing it certain conditions of

reflective competency and recognising it some relational features. I

will call the “instrumental value of personal autonomy” to the view

that recognise

Finally, to sum up. This paper is divided into three sections plus

this introduction. The section that follows examines the procedural

account of personal autonomy and argues that its value, the value

of personal autonomy for procedural accounts, depends on a

hierarchical model regarding the formation of autonomous choices.

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To show this, I firstly set the discussion around John Christman’s

anthology entitled The Inner Citadel. Essays on Individual

Autonomy as the corpus of works that systematises for the first time

the procedural account of personal autonomy. The next section

explores a substantive account and holds that autonomy is valuable

by appealing to a relational model. This means that the relational

model centres its justification in the conception of the autonomous

person as an essentially situated agent within substantive

relationships. I also set the discussion of this substantive approach

in a group of papers collected in Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie

Stoljar’s Relational Autonomy. Feminist perspectives on

Autonomy, Agency and Social Self. Lastly, the section four focuses

on how a third phase deals with the evaluation and reshaping of the

procedural and substantive accounts. Such evaluation is made

around an anthology edited by John Christman and Joel Anderson

entitled Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism. I will argue

that the spirit of this third phase of the contemporary debate

centres on personal autonomy in a context-sensitive framework. In

particular, this means that the value of autonomy might be

mediated by moral considerations in political contexts. In turn,

such a content informs the approaches about what kind of choices

are those that apply and account for personal autonomy, and on the

other hand, what kind of regime or threshold of the status of

autonomy account for persons in a political context. The aims also

are different. Procedural accounts seek to avoid, for instance, forms

of paternalism or State perfectionism, whereas substantive

approaches seek to reflect demands of social justice with political

legitimacy, precisely provided by accounts of personal autonomy.

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2. Hierarchical Model: The First phase

The first phase in the contemporary discussion about personal

autonomy could be characterised, as Christman suggests, with the

“inner citadel” as the metaphor of autonomy. This metaphor, which

Christman took from Isaias Berlin, captures the idea that autonomy

should not only be valued by the moral principle of self-legislation,

but rather, by the idea that the concept and the value of autonomy

matters because it defends the self –“the concept of autonomy […]

refers to an authentic and independent self”- from any illegitimate

not-endorsed influence. According to this metaphor, then, personal

autonomy would be characterised by person’s volitional structure,

that is to say, by an internal structure of the agent’s psychological

dispositions. Along with this, the procedural account advanced

separately both by Henry Frankfurt and Gerard Dworkin4, is

centred on an agent’s judgments about her internal psychological

states. On this view, agents should recognise and distinguish

desires of the higher order and desires of a lower order. This multi-

level psychological structure assures autonomy, if it follows a

suitably critical reflection, when person’s lower-order desire to act

is coherent with and endorsed to person’s desires of the higher

order. However, I will argue in this section, such requirements for

an agent’s active critical reflection are not sufficient for getting the

value of persons’ autonomy. Indeed, the account requires also that

persons’ critical reflection identifies their own desires and

preferences in a hierarchical way that reflects persons’ authentic

choices. What makes choices authentic, and by extension autonomy

valuable, is an account of the value of authenticity, which is only

indirectly implied by the procedural account. In other words, the

procedural view of personal autonomy implies an account about the

kind of constrictions over an agent’s psychological states in order

to be autonomous, but also an extra claim. It is necessary to claim

that autonomy is valuable because it observes a certain hierarchy

within such states by means of a procedure that expresses persons’

4 See Henry Frankfurt “Freedom of the Will and the concept of a Person” and Gerard Dworkin, “The concept of Autonomy ” In Christman (ed)1989

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authentic choices. The aim of this section is to explain these

procedural account’s claims.

The collection of works that focus on the debate of personal

autonomy in 1989 presents a tension between what I have called

the account and the model. According to this distinction, account is

the set of requirements that an agent should follow in order to be

autonomous, that is to say, in order to set rules and principles that

determine their own preferences about their own life. Models of

autonomy are the group of reasons and arguments that speak of the

value that those requirements impose over the account. Speaking

of account and model is a way of saying that the value is not

necessarily implied into the account. So, the tension consists in that

there is an ambiguity between what makes an agent autonomous

and why this entitlement is valuable. I explain then how the

procedural accounts mainly developed in this stage of the

contemporary debate depends on a hierarchical model of

justification of the value of autonomy.

Suppose an archetypical example, the religious person. He

endorses a set of beliefs about different religious issues –call it “the

doctrine”- and he thinks that he came to choose the doctrine freely.

What the procedural account of personal autonomy tells us is that

behind a religious man’s free choices lies the question of whether

he is free to choose and, in doing so, whether he is autonomous. To

choose freely, we can say that some requirements should be met.

For instance, to choose freely a belief normally one of the conditions

is to be free from any kind of arbitrary manipulation. The person

who becomes religious should be seen as not forced by any

illegitimate power that exerts invasive control over their choices.

Another requirement that applies is that the person chooses to

believe freed from several forms of domination, such as, say, a

dictatorial theocratic regime that obliges people to become

religious. Being free of manipulation and domination are typically

two kinds of requirements that free choices must meet. This is not

sufficient, however, for autonomous choices. In order to be

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autonomous, a choice, no matter what be its content, must identify

with persons’ preferences. While the value of a free choice comes

from the fact that there is no unjustified influence, the value of

autonomy would come, in this picture, from the fact that it

expresses agent’s own preferences. The problem is that such sort of

value is a non-direct one. Otherwise we should firstly answer the

following question: why are an agent’s own choices valuable per se?

According to the hierarchical model, the value of an autonomous

choice obtains when it reflects persons’ identification with their

own preferences. In contrast, free choices do not require prima

facie any kind of agent’s endorsement. The agent may decide

whether an action is free according to general considerations of

non-arbitrary constrains and hence there is no need of identifying

herself with such considerations. It could be the case that the

religious person does not identify herself with what the doctrine

says about women’s role in society, however, is able to freely

endorse it on basis of higher convictions. The question whether

autonomous choices can skip the question about the relation

between free and autonomous choices is not being implied here.

Instead, what is at issue is the question about what kind of specific

choices are the autonomous ones. The line that differentiate both

can however be blurry. If I choose to work today, such a decision is

free if I consider that I am not constrained in any illegitimate way.

If I choose to work today because by doing so I express my own plan

of life or some part of it, I am not only choosing freely but also

choosing autonomously.

The distinction between autonomous choice and free choice

is necessary to understand certain hierarchical model’s features.

Particularly, the idea of “first-order desires” and “second-order

desires”. Desires of the second order have, as the object of desire,

some action of the agent, the desire to do X or Y. First-order desires

have a different object of desire, the desire to desire to do X or Y. In

other words, persons’ volitional make-up reflects the way person

endorses her preferences and in doing so, it expresses a sense of

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personal identity. Procedural account’s point is to frame

autonomous choices as the outcome of a formation of preferences’

process.

The matter of the acquisition of personal preferences implies

then to appeal to, at least two arguments about why the way persons

choose to become a process by which they get a sense of their own,

and secondly why this is valuable. Thus, the account about such a

process of preference formation imposes the need to make

understandable how persons came to form those preferences. Here

it is a problem with proceduralism: it would fail to provide by itself

reasons about why the identification with a given process of

preference formation is valuable. The answer provided says that the

process follows a certain psychological organisation that, in turn,

represents an ideal of personhood. Subsequently, procedural

accounts place the value of autonomy in the fact that the person is

the author of her choices. However, there is no account that

explains why a person is the holder of the value. What we just get is

an account about what the regulative mechanisms are through

which we are entitled to assert that an agent meets certain

requirements of psychological consistency. To respond this worry,

Frankfurt argues there are situations in which persons “has a desire

of the second order either when he wants simply to have a certain

desire or when he wants a certain desire to be his will”5. The thought

is that being a person is, according to Frankfurt, to have such

volitions of the second order and not merely “desires” of the second

order. So for example, there is the possibility that autonomous

choices rest upon a false, partial or even over-abstracted sense of

persons’ self. In order to faces examples of the sort, the model

would offer a kind of metaphysical solution. Frankfurt invites us to

think of what he calls a “wanton”6. The example of a wanton

responds to the logic possibility -“however unlikely”- that there

should be an agent with a desire to have desires (desires of the

second order) but identifying those desires to have desires as

5 Frankfurt, op.cit. pp.68 6 Fankfurt, H. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of Person” .pp. 67 . In The Inner Citadel. J. Christman (ed.)

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merely the desires to have certain desires. There is no identification

or endorsement of those desires as being part of person’s sense of

her own, or as Frankfurt put it, “when she wants a certain desire to

be his will”7 . In such a scenario, there is not sufficient to have

second-order desires, also it is necessary to have “second-order

volitions”. Thus, an agent is a wanton when he has desires of the

second order but fails to have volitions of the second order. It is an

agent, but is not a person8. To avoid the problem that the example

of the wanton presents, proceduralist accounts as the one Frankfurt

defends, the ideal of personhood rests in an ideal of “identification”.

Person is the entity that can recognise that her choices are the

expression of her own will. Personhood then is determined by a

volitional hierarchicalism. In Frankfurt’s view this hierarchical

model provides value to the psychological states insofar as the

identification that takes place integrates choices with persons’

psychological satisfaction. In a later reinterpretation of this point,

Frankfurt argues that this satisfaction element is not an additional

or external attitude but rather an internal structural “satisfaction

with oneself”, or “wholeheartedness”. In a nutshell, the idea is that

an agent is free from arbitrary influence when “wholeheartedly”

identifies the motives of her actions, whereby wholeheartedly

means a psychological state of satisfaction that reflects “state of the

entire psychic system”9. Basically, the idea is that one person is

autonomous when she is committed to complete and sincerely –

wholeheartedly- with the motivations of a course of action. This is

reached when the agent is in such volitional state that is used “in

the design of ideals and programs of life, and generally in

determining what to regard as important and to care about. What

we care about should be, to the greatest extent possible, something

we are able to care about wholeheartedly”1 0. The hierarchical model

7 Ibid. pp.67 8 Ibid. 67: “I shall use the term “wanton” to refers to agents who have first -order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second order, they have no second order volitions”. 9 See H. Frankfurt. ‘The Faintest Passion’. In: Necessity, Volition and Love. New Y ork: Cambridge University Press, pp. 104. 1 0 Frankfurt, H. Ibid. pp. 106

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teaches us then the mechanism by which Frankfurt procedural

account is valuable in terms of an account of personhood.

One should expect that hierarchical model explains the value

of autonomy in terms of the person’s wholeheartedness of

autonomous choices rather than appealing to the value of

personhood. However, according to the Frankfurt version of a

proceduralist account what is at play is a project about the value of

moral responsibility rather than one of personal autonomy, despite

the fact that his “second-order volition” account advances the basis

for a procedural account of personal autonomy. In addition, beyond

the Frankfurt’s conceptualisation and the analysis of the categories

associated to his view, there is no need to get rid of the condition of

person to those agents that fail in identifying with their own will.

Most importantly, the incorporation of the distinction between

“second-order desires” and “second order volitions” is incorporated

in the procedural account of personal autonomy that is developed

by Gerard Dworkin. According to volitional hierarchicalism,

Dworkin procedural account seeks to solve the failure of the

volitional structure taken as the identification of desires of the first

order with desires of the second order. Dworkin’s version argues

that the task of “second-order volitions” is to provide an account

that counts with a principle of procedural independence but also

with a condition of authenticity. On this view, autonomy obtains “if

he identifies with his desires, goals and values, and such

identification is not itself influenced in ways which make the

process of identification in some way alien to the individual”1 1 .

Dworkin’s proceduralism captures the idea that autonomy is

a reflective capacity that allows persons to form preferences

regarding their decisions, deliberations, desires and habits. This

means, for example, that persons also desire that his motivations

might be different1 2. What counts here is not necessarily that

person identifies wholeheartedly with the motives of her actions, as

in Frankfurt’s account but rather, that the identification goes to a

1 1 G. Dworkin, “The concept of Autonomy ” in The Inner Citadel. pp. 61 1 2 G. Dworkin, Ibid. pp.

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“true self”, that guarantees that persons’ choices be autonomous

insofar as they reveal their own preferences. This point has been

what has attracted more criticism since such model would imply a

kind of “regress”1 3. For the sake of brevity I will condense the point

of the critique as follows: If it is true that persons are autonomous

when, being procedural independent regarding their own desires,

they endorse those preferences by identifying them with their own

true self, what does assure us that is my actual self the one that is

forming my preferences. To solve this preliminarily, the account, as

in Frankfurt’s, distinguishes between second-order desires and

second-order volitions. However, what stop us to suppose a sort of

“third-order desire” that integrates internal divisions in person’s

volitional structure is not the identification with a satisfaction of the

self’s motives. That is to say, divisions that arise between my own

authentic self and my desires in those matters in which persons are

not really sure about the source of their own wants. In such cases,

a third-order desire may stand in an authoritative position in order

solve the internal division. However, nothing secures that similar

difficulties arise again at this third-order, and be necessary to

appeal to the same strategy, in a sort of infinite regress.

One of the responses that the problem of regress has received

was that of Frankfurt. He had argued, as I mentioned earlier, that

the regress problem suggests that there is needed something more

to stop the regress. We can track also another strategy to deal with

the regress problem. This is the one adopted by G. Dworkin, John

Christman and others. On this view, the hierarchical model’s

advantage rests directly on the independent process of formation of

choice as a way to avoid a manipulated reflection. What matters for

a proceduralist hierarchical model is that the person’s reflective

process meets certain condition of procedural independence so that

the process of critical reflection be “autonomous”. Dworkin

1 3 See Thalberg, I. ‘Hierarchical Analyses of Unfree Action’. In The Inner Citadel.pp. 123-136. originally published in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8, 1978 pp. 211-26; Friedman, M. ‘Autonomy and the Split-Level Self’. Southern Journal of Philosophy 24, 1986. pp. 19-35. Watson, G. ‘Free Agency’. In The Inner Citadel. Originally published in Journal of Philosophy 7 2, 197 5. pp. 205-20.

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summarises this by arguing that the key aspect of required

conditions is distinguished between conditions that

“Interfere with the rationality of higher-order reflection and

those that do not. We believe, prior to philosophical

reflection, that there is a difference between a person who is

influenced by hypnotic suggestion or various modes of

deception and those who are influenced by true information

and modes of rational inquiry. In the former case, but not the

latter, we think of someone else as responsible for his

reasoning and his conclusions. This is not a meta- physical

distinction but a practical one and it is important to make

explicit what criteria we use to make such a distinction”1 4

The Dworkin account responds to a project mainly focuses on

the way person’s choices become autonomous ones in virtue of a

process of independence. The critical point then is to know whether

the account of what makes persons autonomous is also what makes

it valuable. If the principal feature of the account is to emphasise

the conditions that “interfere with the rationality of higher-order

reflections and those that do not”, a primarily sense one expects to

have an idea about the value of autonomy is regarding an element

that it absent in the proceduralist account defended by Dworkin.

This element is the value that autonomy is valuable as

independence and self-determination. These two elements, in turn,

are representative of a kind of consideration regarding

“independence” as the way the “authentic self” gets expression.

One way of explaining why this proceduralist account needs

to appeal to a set of argument, if the objective is to defend that the

value of personal autonomy lays in the description of the

proceduralist requirements, is to argue that both Frankfurt and

Dworkin versions tell us about the value of autonomous choices.

That we can access to the value of autonomy through a suitable

formation of critical reflection seems unpromising from a

normative point of view. The thought is that proceduralists are able

1 4 Dworkin, G., 1988. The theory and practice of autonomy, Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 161.

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to respond to the question about what is to be autonomous,

however when we ask them about what is the practical implication

of being autonomous1 5, they must bring into account a

metaphysical view of personhood either as a volitional or structure

or as an authentic self.

To insist: a proceduralist account about the formation of

autonomous choices does not provide directly an argument in

favour of the value of personal autonomy. For, from the lack of

person’s critical reflection, it does not follow necessarily that such

a person are not due to receive, as a practical implication, a

treatment as an autonomous person. Certainly, there are cases

(children or persons with cognitive disabilities) to whom we owe a

special assisted treatment. However, the point is mainly that the

treatment we owe to autonomous persons is not locally placed in a

process of formation of choices. What we value is, and that is the

reason of the practical implications of the value of personal

autonomy, is the account of personhood, the inner citadel, that

proceduralist account implies. However, from the point of view of

proceduralists, the idea of person is associated with psychological

states of the mind, and such a view obliges us to think in a strategy

of justification of the value that is not part of the account. At least,

an account that claim for such psychological perspective of

autonomy needs empirical studies that guides us how we should

ascribe autonomy to individuals, to what extent, and in which

circumstances. Dworkin, regarding these complexities of the

concept of autonomy actually argues that “what one needs,

therefore, is a study of how the term is connected with other

notions, what role it plays in justifying various normative claims,

how the notion is supposed to ground ascriptions of value, and so

on – in short, a theory”1 6.

1 5 In this first phase of the contemporary debate these questions do not seem to have a proper place in the reflection about personal autonomy. In fact, The Inner Citadel faces certain ambiguity regarding

these two factors. John Chirstman, in Inner Citadel Introduction shows that “autonomy is used to pick out, not the actual psychological condition of self-government […], but rather a right not to be treated in certain way s” Cristman, The Inner Citadel, p.6 1 6 See Dwrokin, “The Theory and Practice of Autonomy ” p. 6

17

The implications are that speak of an account of autonomy

and a model that explain why such account reflects the value of

autonomy is treated as different matters.1 7 . As I have already

mentioned, autonomy is conceived as the internal ability to rule

one’s own by setting principles and the value is singled out by the

right to demand a special treatment.

3. Relational Model: The Second Phase

As a reaction to this conception of autonomy, it emerged what

could be called the second phase in the autonomy-based discussion.

In 2000 Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar reunited another

series of works on autonomy, emphasising its relational character,1 8

and questioning what have been, according to them, a mistaken

common view on the concept and value of autonomy. The problem

with procedural accounts is that they assimilate the requisites of

procedural independence with the value that a hierarchical model

ascribes to person’s volitional structure. The mistaken common

view would consist in that such assimilation, while focuses on the

psychology of persons, fails in recognising the social and

interpersonal embeddedness of person’s psychology. Therefore, it

misses what is allegedly seen as the crucial point: personal

autonomy depends on a substantive view about the condition of the

autonomous agent, which, in turn, is depending on the value of

persons’ relational character. In this section, my aim is to show how

substantives accounts of autonomy challenge procedural views

appealing to a relational model. My review of these substantive

accounts also is motivated by the thought that substantive accounts

1 8 Relational Autonomy. Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the social Self. Ed. by C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar. New Y ork, Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2000.

18

of personal autonomy need to appeal to a further reasons that bring

into account the notion of value that is implicit in its claim.

The main concern of the relational model is that content-

neutral accounts of personal autonomy are blind in respect to a

certain process of socialisation that might jeopardise persons’

autonomy. The relational emphasis adopts then different strategies

to cope with this worry. Because of that, the relational character is

not a “single unified conception of autonomy but it is rather an

umbrella term, designating a range of related perspectives. These

perspectives are premised on a shared conviction, the conviction

that persons are socially embedded and that agents' identities are

formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a

complex of intersecting social determinants, such as race, class,

gender, and ethnicity”1 9. In order to organise a common

terminology for this section, I shall distinguish between relational

model and substantive accounts. With relational model, the

“umbrella term”, I mean the group of related perspectives, reasons,

and justifications that, by focussing in the social relationships that

play a central role in the formation of person’s autonomous

features, constrain in a substantive way, the value of persons’

choices20. A substantive account, complementarily, reflects the

focus on the substantive contents that, arguably, person’s

autonomy entails. In practice, the difference between relational

model and a relational substantive account of autonomy is not

always evident. While in general relational views of autonomy are

expressed through substantive accounts, these latter do not

response necessarily to a relational model.21 My strategy, however,

is to focus on the stipulation that the value of autonomy in certain

substantive accounts may be seen as depending on a series of values

such as the influence of other on a person’s identity, the significance

1 9 C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar, 2000. pp.4

20 Thus, I use the term “relational” in a wide sense, as a term used to call general dependences to social and interpersonal ties. Christmas, for example, claims that “relational” and “social” must be differentiated (Christman, 2005 f. 15). This v iew bring light for several matters, particularly for those in

which the topic at issue is a criticism related with the danger of perfec tionism in substantive accounts. Despite the importance o f such a discussion, in this paper I will use “relational” as socio -relational. 21 For example, it is arguably correct to sustain that Mill’s account of autonomy is a substantive view on the matter, however it is not necessarily clear that it is a relationa l v iew.

19

of interpersonal commitments and attachments, or the

fundamental role that social practices (culture, language) plays for

a person’s practical deliberation.

One characteristic that immediately appears is that

substantive accounts are content- loaded, which requires that

persons’ choices be restricted by normative conditions. In what I

have called the contemporary treatment of autonomy, these

normative conditions of the second phase are adopted as a way of

contending over-individualistic approach of procedural accounts.

Natalie Stoljar, for example, argues that the substantive contents of

autonomy should be guided by what she calls a “feminist intuition”.

According to it, women are a targeted group of persons that, due to

historical and sociological circumstances, are agents whose

preferences are “influenced by pernicious aspects of the oppressive

context”.22 In this view, critical reflection and regulative agency are

not sufficient to capture the conditions of autonomy. We need then

substantive guidance, as the “feminist intuition”, to understand

how social oppressive norms of femininity do not allow that

women’s preferences be autonomous. Now, If one abstract the

gender-centred content of such intuition, what we get is the idea

that critical reflection’s requirements are insufficient for capturing

the value of persons’ self-governance, and as a result, the

requirement for autonomous choices must be, at least,

supplemented by substantive constrains in order to avoid the

danger of “critical reflective agents in non-autonomous lives”.

A second characteristic of relational substantive account of

autonomy follows on the heels of the procedural insufficiency

claim. Autonomy has essentially an emancipatory character.

Indeed, what the substantive constrictions seek to bring into

account is the potential liberating ideal of autonomy as a mean to

emancipate persons from arbitrary, unjustified but efficient social

repressive practices. According to this criticism, autonomy is not

only a property of the choice but also it is a condition of the agent

22 See. Natalie Stoljar, Autonomy and the Feminisist Intuition”. In Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000. Pp. 95.

20

or person to whom autonomy is ascribed23. According to the

centrality of this positive emancipatory character, the value of

autonomy can be precluded if the perspective lies merely in the

psychological or cognitive process of critical reflection without

attending how persons’ capacities are influenced by external

influences. In Dworkin’s approach as “procedural independence”

for instance, it is claimed that there is no account regarding how a

person’s capacity is interfered by oppressive social contexts such as

indoctrination, brainwashing, male domination, manipulation, etc.

The emancipatory potential of personal autonomy, according

to the relational model, allows us as well to get a different sense of

the conception of person. While the proceduralist accounts

highlight an account of person centred in the idea of individual

authenticity, that is, that persons are crucially the identification

with their own volitions, the relational model advances a social

conception of person. Persons, in this view, are always “situated

choosers”. Mackenzie and Stoljar argue that the circumstances of

persons’ choices are entangled with historical practices and

conceptual links, but also with conceptions of political rights and

cultural conceptions of individuality, social roles and selfhood. In

that line, the conception of autonomy must be the result of these

substantive considerations. Otherwise, they contend, the

conception of autonomy is only a “caricature”: “The most obvious

example is the caricature of individual autonomy as exemplified by

the self-sufficient, rugged male individualist, rational maximizing

chooser of libertarian theory. It is this caricature that is often the

target of feminist critiques of autonomy”24 . To avoid such a

caricature, the social conception of person rests on a substantive

notion of personhood. It addresses mainly the significance in the

formation of personhood in certain social conditions like social

relationships, interpersonal bonds, and also, political and social

institutions. The conception of person, it is argued, must be one

that recognises the social dimension as the essential element in the

23 This approach has enormous debts with Jennifer Nedelsky’s paper that appeared in 1989, the same y ear that did The Inner Citadel. In Reconceiving Autonomy: Sources, thoughts and possibilities, Nedelsky raised the same

24 See, Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000. Pp. 5

21

process of formation of selfhood. The challenge of this perspective

is, as Diana Meyers put it, “the question of how autonomy is

possible for individuals whose identities are shaped by structures

of domination and subordination”25.

The substantive account of personal autonomy then has, at

least, three dimensions: It is content-loaded, it has an

emancipatory character and it is supported by a social conception

of person. If we arrange all these three dimensions on one formula,

the relational substantive account claim that persons act as self-

government agents when they realised their social nature through

the adoption of substantive choices and preferences that value their

social environment. Arguably, this formula implies that the value of

autonomy requires us to admit that the value of this account of

autonomy rests in social goods. Subsequently, the relational model

must teach us how the assimilation between the value of autonomy

and the existence of such social goods accommodate one another.

Possibly, this is the reason that, for instance, Mackenzie and

Stoljar26, claims that account for a relational model of personal

autonomy applies, at the end of the day, to the debate between

liberals, communitarians and feminists. To frame the account in

this way has presumably great advantages. However, it misses the

point that what is valuable for an account of personal autonomy is

the justification that the value of autonomy requires regarding the

kind of moral obligations and related attitudes that autonomous

persons are able to claim.

The substantive’s feature of the social condition of persons’

autonomy establishes an important consequence: that the idea of

self-legislation is valuable when it implies self-realisation27 . In such

a view, the social constitution of agents describes how a basic

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid, pp. 4 27 See for example Chapter 7, Diana Tietjens Meyers’s “Intersectional identity and the Authentic Self” pp. 151-180. In this chapter Mey ers argues that -according to our

vocabulary- situated choosers might be seen in terms of “intersactorial identities”, that is to say , as agents socially embedded by complex identities “insofar as they are constituted by race, ethnicity , class, and sexual orientation together with gender” (pp. 154)

22

conception of autonomy should value conditions of social

relationships, interpersonal bonds, practices and institutions.

Diana T. Meyers for example28, explicitly argues that,

although autonomy is possible despite illegitimate influences such

as manipulation or domination, what has not been sufficiently

addressed is, as we mentioned earlier, the conditions of autonomy

in oppressive contexts. The corollary of this argument is that the

lack of recognition of the social embeddedness condition could fail

in accounting for a satisfactory model of autonomy that could resist

structures of manipulation, illegitimate control, or subordination.

Also, it might be implied that if we associate the latter worry with a

critic to individualistic accounts of autonomy, relationalist

theorists identify the individualistic feature with liberal theories or

at least, that would be compatible with, individualistic accounts of

personal autonomy.

These criticisms are parallel to the objections addressed by

communitarian theorists to liberals29. These objections claim that

behind the value of autonomy there is an unjustified and hidden

value, namely, the value of individuality. The problem with

overestimating individuality would be precisely that it minimizes

the value of persons as social constructions, value that

constitutively and motivationally depends on the value of social and

interpersonal practices. This critical reading see that liberal

societies and institutions “frame the picture of human selves that

operates regulatively within the dominant social-political

imaginary of liberal democratic societies”30. However, once again,

a substantive model that gets the value of the account from taking

as valuable the social realm, should account for, or at least, stand

for some ways of justification in which this realm provide us with

not reasons about what social relationships matter, but rather with

28 Mackenzie and Stoljan, 2000. pp.153 29 See Chapter 2, “Autonomy and the social Self” by Linda Barclay in Makenzie and Stoljen, 2000, pp. 52. Barclay centred his analy sis in comparing three l ines of objections developed by communitarian critiques (three senses in which the self is

said to be social: deterministic, motivational and constitutive). Even more, Barclay speaks of a “communitarian-feminist alliance against the idea of autonomy”. pp. 53 30 See Chapter 8, “The perversion of Autonomy and the Subjection of Women” by Lorraine Code, in Mackenzie and Stoljan, 2000. Pp.182

23

reasons about how social relationships or relations of interpersonal

dependence requires us to treat autonomous persons in a

determinate way.

4. The instrumental value: The third phase

In the previous two sections, I have developed a simple

argument: a given account of autonomy might be necessary to claim

for the value of personal autonomy but not sufficient. To

understand what is the practical significance and the treatment that

autonomy calls for we need to associate the account with a family

of reasons – that I have called “model”- that provide us with reasons

that makes us intelligible the value of autonomy. The fact that I

stipulate that “might be necessary” implies that persons’

performance either regarding procedural independence or meeting

standards of good life allows us to claim that our evaluation of such

performance does not affect our consideration about the value of

autonomy. Instead, it seems to be that what is central is to take

autonomy as a relation between, on the one hand, an account of the

requirements and rules of self-government and, on the other, the

beliefs persons have about reasons that make self-government

valuable. With the idea of “the instrumental value” in this section,

I want to highlight that those beliefs persons have on the value of

personal autonomy are framed in a contextual way that would call

for the use of either a hierarchical model or a more relational one.

In what I shall call the third phase of the contemporary debate on

personal autonomy, the instrumental value seeks to reflect that the

value of autonomy is thought as depending on different practical

contexts.

I will take two anthologies, published around 2005, to

delimitate the discussion about the value of autonomy as

instrumental. The first anthology, edited by John Christman and

Joel Anderson was titled “Autonomy and the Challenges to

24

Liberalism. New Essays.”31 . The second one, edited by James Stacey

Taylor, was titled “Personal Autonomy. New essays on Personal

autonomy and its role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy”32.

These two were two efforts to respond to the challenges that

relational theorists have risen to the discussion, which can be

summarised in two critiques. On the one hand, the critique to

individualistic accounts centred in a socially immune agent. On the

other, the need to centre the analysis on the social embeddedness

of autonomous persons. James Stacey Taylor claims that

proceduralist accounts capture an “important true” about persons:

the capacity of reflection, its compatibilism with the true of

metaphysical determinism in moral responsibility, its ability to

readily be applicable in many debates in applied ethics and, finally,

its adequacy for political claims in pluralistic societies.

The main feature of the instrumental value is that the

precedent discussion on personal autonomy among hierarchicalists

and relationalists is reframed in a new shape. What is new is the

recognition that the conception of autonomy may be evoked in a

different practical dimension of human lives. This new shape is

coincident with a parallel discussion in political theory, namely,

regarding the justification of liberal policy in a wide range of issues

from the idea of citizenship and minority rights to the role of

institutions and democracy: “At stake in virtually all of these

discussions, however, is the nature of the autonomous agent, whose

perspective and interests are fundamental for the derivation of

liberal principles.”33.

Taylor refers precisely to The Inner Citadel as the milestone

that triggered several debates in books and articles contributing to

depict a recognisable shape to the contemporary treatment of

personal autonomy34. That is also the reason why Christman and

31 Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism. New Essays. Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ed. By John Christman and Joel Anderson. 32 Personal Autonomy. New Essays on Personal Autonomy and Its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, UK, New Y ork. Cambridge University Press. 2005. Ed. by J.S. Tay lor

33 See J. Christman and J. Anderson. Introduction.pp. 1 . In Christman and Anderson, 2005 34 “This change in the status of autonomy is owed in part to the success that The Inner

Citadel had in stimulating interest in both the theory of autonomy and its wide-

25

Anderson begin recognising that noticeably the procedural account

of autonomy developed by Frankfurt and Dworkin was the most

significant breakthrough in the contemporary discussion of

autonomy. Indeed, according to them, one of the reasons of the

interest in moral and political philosophy about personal autonomy

relies on the virtues of the Frankfurt-Dworkin model to capture the

nature of autonomy via two types of requirements: the conditions

of authenticity –a second-order identification with first-order

desires-, and conditions of competency, the free exercise of

capacities such as rational thought, self-control, or self-reflection.35

Along with capturing these essentials of autonomy, this model, the

editors argue, fits adequately with normative standards of liberal

institutions since such a model and, particularly, its insistence in

favouring a “procedural independence”, “is meant to specify in a

non-substantive way the conditions under which choice would

count as authoritative- that is, in a way that makes no reference to

constraints in the content of a person’s choices or the reasons he or

she has for them”36.

Notwithstanding such advantage of procedural account,

Christman and Anderson highlight the “multivocal contestation”

ranging applications”. In Tay lor, 2005.pp.25 n. 13 the range of the most

representative works that followed Christman’s book are Diana T. Mey ers, “Self,

Society, and Personal Choice” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Bernard

Berofsky , “Liberation from Self: A Theory of Personal Autonomy” (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alfred Mele, “Autonomous Agents: From Self-

control to Autonomy” (New Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Marilyn

Friedman, “Autonomy, Gender, Politics” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Also, the conception of autonomy received attention in several papers during the

y ears after The Inner Citadel and before 2005. For example, Bricker, D.C., 1998.

“Autonomy and Culture: Will Ky mlicka on Cultural Minority Rights”. The Southern

Journal of Philosophy, 36(1), pp.47–59.; Munro, A., 1999. “Rawls ’ Stage of Full

Justification and the Kantian Ideal of Autonomy”. Gnosis, VIII(1), pp.3–13.;

Richardson, H.S., 2001. “Autonomy’s Many Normative presuppositions”. American

Philosophical Quarterly, 38(3), pp.287–303.; Oshana, M., 2002. “The misguided

marriage of responsibility and autonomy”. The Journal of ethics, 6(3), pp.261 –280.

Anderson, J., 2003. “Autonomy and the authority of personal commitments: From

internal coherence to social normativity. Philosophical Explorations”, VI(May),

pp.90–108. ; O´Neill, O., 2003. “Autonomy: The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 7 7 , pp.1– 21 .;

35 Christman and Anderson, 2005. Pp.3 36 Ibid.

26

that the hierarchical model has received from various sources. This

contestation adopts normally the form of a criticism about the

“hyper-individualism” because of “the manner in which the

autonomous person is seen as existing prior to the formulation of

ends and identities that constitute her value orientation and

identity”.37 J.S Taylor argues that, in that sense, the debate between

the hierarchical and relational models has brought out an

“expanding role of personal autonomy”. In the same esprit of

Christman and Anderson, she states that such debate had as a result

“the recognition that the philosophical discussion that they

encompass must take into account the deep pluralism of

contemporary Western society and that employing a discursive

framework that hold respect for autonomy to be one of its central

tenets would achieve this.”.38

The development of the debate about personal autonomy in

the last decades has in consequence re-elaborated the conditions in

which the value of autonomy play a significant role. I call “the

instrumental value of personal autonomy” to the recognition that

the value of personal autonomy plays a cornerstone role for the

purpose of legitimating normative standards of political liberal

institutions and value pluralism. A significant implication of the

instrumental value of autonomy is the recognition that persons’

autonomy is a source of moral consideration, at least, regarding the

value of political institutions and value pluralism in society. Thus,

the basic thought is that the autonomy is instrumentally worth

because it makes valuable some state of affairs in the political

dimension. This implication of the instrumental value is quite

familiar. For example, the value ascribed to the free-choice feature

of the monogamous marriage may be seen, thanks to the

instrumental value of personal autonomy, as one of the reason why

marriage is a legitimate social institution.

However, the instrumental value of autonomy has another

implication that it does not seems always familiar. In order to make

37 Ibid. 4 38 J.S. Tay lor, 2005, p.18

27

valuable the instrumentality of autonomy, we must have a sense of

the practical context in which the value of personal autonomy

makes sense. If it is true that marriage is valuable because the

partners freely choose each other autonomously, the content of

such a value is only intelligible in virtue of a concomitant value,

namely, that social institutions should be acceptable for reasonable

persons. Why the fact that two teenagers get married seems to us

unacceptable, even though we are told that they decided to do it

autonomously? One reason could be that we have come to the

conviction that two 12 years-old persons have no minimum

capacities to choose autonomously. So, in such a case, autonomy

does not matter. We can say the same differently: autonomy is not

instrumentally valuable as a way of justifying infant marriage.

Thus, the instrumental value of autonomy needs, in order to be a

workable conception of the value of personal autonomy, dependent

of a practical context.

The instrumental value of autonomy implicit in the value that

Christman, Anderson and Taylor claim that autonomy have is not

exclusively useful for the social and political context. It asks for

being essentially understood as part of a practical context. A

consequence of the instrumental value is, as Sidgwick would say, to

leave out something like “the point of view of the universe” as a way

of understand the value of autonomy, which has been the

predominant view in the previous debate. Frankfurt account, for

example, could be seen as implying that autonomy is worth

pursuing insofar as the exercise of critical reflection entails the

expression of an authentic personhood, which, from the point of the

universe, is valuable. The view, on the other hand, that argues that

the nature of persons, from the point of view of the universe, is

social and hence that autonomy is valuable when it expresses such

a nature, tell us, in reality, very little about the way autonomy is

valuable. As I try to show in the previous sections, procedural and

substantive account needs to appeal to models that explain the

value of autonomy, as a way to deal with the indirect relevance of a

practical context.

28

The centrality of practical context as an essential part of the

instrumental value of autonomy consist in giving practical

significance to persons’ autonomy. It is in the sake of the legitimacy

of social institutions and value pluralism that, according to

Christman and Anderson, we “promote” or “protect” autonomy. As

Scanlon claim, instrumental value adopt the form of a teleological

value, that is, something “to-be-promoted”.39

For example, Rainer Frost claims for an account of

“intersubjectivist” political liberty divided in five integrated and

practical contexts of personal autonomy, such as moral, ethical,

legal, political, and social.40 Another contribution by Axel Honneth

and Joel Anderson advances the idea of a recognitional account of

personal autonomy. According to them, the centrality of a

recognitional conception of personal autonomy lies in the capacity

of a suitable account to claim for substantive conditions of social

justice, especially focusing on what they call “social vulnerabilities”,

as a crucial source of the impairment of persons’ autonomy.

Richard Dagger, from a republican point of view, argues that

autonomy is mainly relevant for the cultivation of a good lives,

through a public sphere that promotes a self-governing polity of

civic virtues. Thus, the conception of autonomy in this account is

seen as the capacity of realising the personal lives politically41 .

The works of Forst, Honneth, Anderson, and Dagger are

representatives of, among their differences, a substantive account

of personal autonomy. However, it is not clear that they follow a

relational model for evaluating the value of personal autonomy.

Neither are “instrumental” in the sense that they combine

proceduralist with substantive claims. They are instrumental in the

sense that what is at play is the necessity to frame a practical

context or dimension that relate the description of the account with

the practical value. Forst, for example, argues that the value of

autonomy depends “on the practical contexts in which the 39 See. Scanlon, What we owe each other”, 1998. Chapter 2. 40 See. R. Forst. “Political Liberty . Integrating five conception of autonomy”. In Christman and Anderson, 2005. pp. 226-244 41 See. R. Dagger “Autonomy, Domination, and Republican Challenge to liberalism”. In Christman and Anderson 2005.pp. 17 7 -202

29

justification of actions is required”.42 Such practical contexts are,

according to him, intersubjectivist contexts of communities, which

requires different kinds of reasons for accountable action. The

value of autonomy on this view seems to come from a model of

differentiated accountability, which, in turn, might be compatible

with a hierarchical model.

Honneth and Anderson recognitional account also stresses a

substantive view, by highlighting a necessary “recognitional

infrastructure” as a mean to support substantive ways of “relating

to oneself practically”. These ways of practical self-relation do not

deny necessarily an allegedly psychological structure of persons’

volition. Instead, the recognitional account claims for the

reinforcement of “self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem” as the

basic means by which persons engage each other in social relations

of recognition.43

In a similar way, the Christman’s neo-procedural account

advanced a reformulation of proceduralism by adding to the

account an historical component in the critical reflective process.

Along with conditions of rational competence and authenticity, the

historical element adds the need that the person’s critical reflection

endorses (or rejects) the influence of socio-historical circumstances

in persons’ lives that, in turn, have gone into the formation of their

volitional structure.44 A person acts autonomously, according to

Christman’s account, not only when the agent is a competent

decision-maker and acts following her authentic desires and

motives. An agent acts autonomously when she is able to

demonstrate that her critical reflection follows independently and

consistently a piecemeal process in light of a person’s history. The

revision of the Frankfurt-Dworkin version of proceduralism

elaborated by Christman consists in replacing the condition of

“identification” (between psychological orders of person’s volition)

for a condition of non-alienation. Non-alienation condition is

understood as the persons’ capacity to contend any characteristic

42 Ibid. pp. 230 43 Ibid. pp. 144 44 In J.S. Tay lor, 2005. Pp. 27 8

30

that, in the piecemeal process, affect negatively the relation that an

agent have with oneself. Persons, on this view, need not only a

competently reflection about their own internal volitional

dispositions but rather need to examine their internal psychology

in accord with a historically-based sense, which persons develop

about themselves in the light of their own lives.

Christman’s account recognises at some extent relational

elements in the constitution of the autonomous choices, such as the

role social ties play in persons’ lives, However, Christman argues

that these relational elements specify certain conditions to develop

autonomy rather than defining it. The focus on personal history

tries to attract those socio-relational elements as background

conditions of personal autonomy. The point is that such conditions

only plays a role as supporting persons’ abilities for critical

reflection. Competency, authenticity, and no alienation conditions

are central to define what personal autonomy is if the person to

whom autonomy is predicated is understood as causally constituted

by her socio relational environment.

5. Conclusion:

In this paper I tried to show that there is a difference between the

value of personal autonomy and the theory that would be able to

explain what are its requirements or essential features. In practice,

the value of autonomy and valuing person’s autonomy have

different consequences and require different practical

commitments. To illustrate this difference I have tried to make

some delimitations in what can be seen as the contemporary

discussion of personal autonomy. I distinguished three phases and

two main accounts: proceduralism and relational substantive

accounts. I argued that such accounts need to appeal to further

reason about the value of autonomy and provides conceptual

resources to evaluate person’s autonomous performances. I call this

group of reasons, models. A model organises principles, reasons

and arguments, and explains systematically why personal

31

autonomy is valuable. I have argued that proceduralist and

substantive accounts need these models for bringing into account

the value of personal autonomy. Section two, devoted to the

hierarchical model try to examine the nature of what I have called

the hierarchical model. The hierarchical model rest on the

controversial and unjustified ideal that a true person is the one that

identified herself with her volitional structure. Autonomous choice

then matter because they are the expression of an authentic

personhood. The relational model, in the third section, is the group

of reasons and values that identify autonomy with substantive ideas

about social ties and interpersonal dependencies. A relational

substantive account of autonomy is valuable then insofar it reflects

the social nature of human beings. Also in this approach, the fact

that persons value their social environment, and that autonomous

persons must realise and exercise this social dimension does not

implied a substantive view about the practical value, independent

of the social nature of persons. Finally in the last section, I reviewed

what I called the third phase of personal autonomy in the

contemporary treatment. There I examine how the diversity of

accounts and application of the terms showed mainly the

instrumentality of the conception of personal autonomy for several

practical dimension.