coons_c_weber_m_eds_paternalism_theory_and_practice

personal autonomy

The case for moral environmentalism presented so far is merely presumptive. A conclusive case for the practice would need to identify and respond to the full range of considerations that could be marshaled against it. This is not something I shall undertake here. My concern is with one influential objection to moral environmentalism. This objection appeals directly to the value of personal autonomy. Since autonomy is an elusive concept,12 we must take care to identify the sense of autonomy that is being considered before we assess the extent to which it opposes moral environmentalism. With this in mind, I distinguish three senses of autonomy – autonomy as a condition, an ethical ideal, and a sovereign right.13 The latter two notions are prior to the first. Autonomy as a condition refers to the capacities and opportunities that a person must have if he is to realize the ideal of autonomy or exercise the right that it designates. We understand the condition of autonomous agency by understanding what it would mean to exercise that agency.

Autonomy as an ethical ideal

As an ethical ideal, autonomy refers to a life of partial self-creation.14 It is the ideal of a person charting his own course through life, fashioning his character by self-consciously choosing projects and taking on commitments from a wide range of eligible alternatives, and making something out of his life according to his own understanding of what is valuable and worth doing. So depicted, autonomy is an achievement, one that enriches the life of the person who realizes it. But what kind of value does this achievement have? It is sometimes claimed that autonomy is an essential element of a well-lived human life. Any life that fails to realize the ideal is flawed. That is a strong claim. A weaker claim holds that the realization of autonomy has intrinsic value. If either claim is true, then there are ethical reasons for the state (and others) to let people make their own decisions about important aspects of their lives.

My strategy is not to contest either the strong or weak claim about autonomy’s value. Granting these claims, I want to show that they do not

12In what follows, I use autonomy to refer to personal autonomy. Personal autonomy is not the same thing as the freedom of the will that we may or may not have. Nor is it the notion that Kant had in mind when he articulated (what he took to be) the conditions of moral agency.

13Here I follow Feinberg. See his discussion in Harm to Self.

14Raz, The Morality of Freedom.

defeat the presumptive case for moral environmentalism outlined above. To begin with, consider a policy that directs people to adopt a fairly specific way of life, say the life of an active citizen or the life of an artist. That policy certainly looks like it would curtail the autonomy of many. Even if the ways of life in question are good ways of life, autonomy requires that people make their own decisions about how to live. To do this, they need a wide range of options. If the state directs them down one or two paths, then, whatever else may be said about the value of their lives, they will not be autonomous. This simple point establishes that autonomy does conflict with some moral environmentalist policies. But it would be a clear mistake to conclude from this that moral environmentalism as such is in conflict with personal autonomy. Rather than directing people down specific paths, the moral environmentalist could seek only to close o certain options, or perhaps just make their pursuit more di cult. This action, when successful, could still leave all a ected with a wide range of alternatives from which to choose.15

Some will object that every time an option is closed o by deliberate human action, and in particular by the deliberate action of the state, the autonomy of people is diminished, even when they are left with a wide range of options from which to choose. If autonomy adds to the intrinsic value of a human life, then this would imply that moral environmentalism always comes with an ethical cost. Suppose we grant the objection. Not too much would follow for the permissibility of moral environmentalism, since autonomy is but one component of a well-lived human life. The gains from closing o bad options might overbalance the loss of autonomy in a range of cases. To block this possibility, one would need to insist that any loss in autonomy outweighs any gain that could be secured by moral environmentalist policies. Such a stance would be unreasonable. Imagine a person who is prevented from ruining his life with heroin addiction because the option to do so had been removed from him. This action might diminish his autonomy to some degree, but overall he may lead a much better life. And, as this example brings out, he may lead a more autonomous life on the whole because his autonomy has been diminished with respect to this particular option.

The discussion so far has assumed that there is disvalue whenever a person’s autonomy is set back. I now want to challenge that assumption. I believe that if autonomy has intrinsic value, then its value is subject to

15This point is pressed well by Dworkin, “Is More Choice Better Than Less?,” 80–81, in his The Theory and Practice of Autonomy.

conditions. Since this idea was advanced by Raz, I shall call it Raz’s claim. He writes: “Autonomous life is valuable only if it is spent in the pursuit of acceptable and valuable projects and relationships.”16 Let us distinguish autonomous agency from valuable autonomous agency. The latter includes the former, and so autonomous agency is a necessary constituent of valuable autonomous agency. That is why, on Raz’s claim, autonomy has intrinsic value. It does not follow that autonomous agency as such has value. The autonomy realized in the autonomous engagement with worthless options does not improve, and may detract from, the ethical value of a life.

Raz’s claim is friendly to moral environmentalism. But should we accept it? Raz appeals to the intuition that “wrongdoing casts a darker shadow on its perpetrator if it is autonomously done by him.”17 Not everyone shares that intuition, however. Some insist that just as courage can be ethically valuable, even when it is manifested in the conduct of an unjust war, so too autonomy can be valuable when it is realized in the pursuit of worthless endeavors.18 An argument is available, however, to support Raz’s claim. The argument holds that the rejection of the claim licenses an unacceptable kind of bootstrapping with respect to reasons for action.19 The argument is based on the plausible idea that there is an intimate connection between reason and value. Let me explain. Suppose someone, call him John, adopts a project, call it X, that is unqualifiedly bad, although John does not realize this at the time of adoption. Successful engagement with the project will advance John’s autonomy, since a person’s autonomy is furthered when he is able to complete projects he has freely undertaken. Given that X is unqualifiedly bad, prior to adopting it, John had no reason to engage with it. Indeed, even though he did not realize it, he had decisive reason not to adopt it as a project. Still, once John has adopted the project, then its completion will contribute to his autonomy.

Next suppose that John comes to realize that the project he has adopted is worthless. He now sees that he had no reason to adopt it, but is there now a new reason for him to continue with it?20 If autonomy adds to the

16Raz, The Morality of Freedom, 417.

17Ibid., 380.

18Waldron, “Autonomy and Perfectionism in Raz’s Morality of Freedom,” 1127–1128.

19The bootstrapping problem is introduced by Bratman in Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (discussing intentions and means–end rationality). It has been discussed recently by a number of writers. See especially Broome, “Does Rationality Give Us Reasons?”.

20It is important that John’s project is worthless and not merely less valuable than some alternative project he could have taken up. People often do have good reasons to continue with valuable, but suboptimal, projects.

ethical value21 of his life, and if the successful completion of the project furthers his autonomy, then John does indeed have such a reason. But this cannot be right. John’s reasons for completing the project rest on the presupposition that the project is worth doing. Remove that presupposition and the reasons are canceled. John does not have the power to create new reasons for pursuing a project that he never had any reason to pursue in the first place.

The foregoing argument tells against the claim that autonomy has unconditional value, that it contributes to the goodness of a human life, even when it is abused. But the persuasive force of the argument rests in part on how it was presented. I imagined that John himself comes to realize that the project is worthless. Upon this recognition, it would be absurd for John to say “I realize that X is a worthless project; there is nothing really to be said for it. But I must stick with it, for doing so will further my autonomy, and autonomy adds value to my life.” This is absurd not because the reasons for abandoning the project outweigh the reason for sticking with it. It is absurd because there is no reason to stick with it, once it is evident that the project is valueless. Suppose, however, that John does not come to appreciate the worthlessness of X. In his eyes, it remains worthy of pursuit. Here, from the outside, we can say that John has no reason to continue with the project, but we can understand why he thinks he does.

Now imagine that John never comes to see that he is engaging in a worthless project. Even if he has no reason to carry on with the project, his autonomy might be infringed if we prevent him from doing so. Many have held that coercion invades autonomy not simply by reducing a person’s options, but also by subjecting the person to the will of another. Having access to worthless options might only detract from John’s ability to lead a valuable autonomous life, but e orts by others to eliminate these options by coercive means nonetheless might undermine his ability to do so. The point here is sound, but its significance is easily overstated. Imagine a pedophile, who, from firm ethical conviction, rejects the view that having sex with children is in any way immoral. When coercive measures deter him from his crimes, he is, in a sense,22 subjected to the will of others. But since

21To say that a life has ethical value is to say that it is a well-lived life for the person who leads it. A life can manifest other kinds of value as well. In the example in the text, the courage of a soldier in an unjust war can serve as a model for others who are not themselves engaged in wrongdoing. I do not deny that John’s autonomous pursuit of his misguided project could have value in some such way.

22I say “in a sense” since the pedophile is, in the first instance, subject to morality. Others enforce morality, not just their own will, when they interfere with him.

the coercion employed enforces sound morality, he has no complaint. We should not say that his autonomy is sacrificed, but that the sacrifice is justified to protect the interests of children. His autonomy is not sacrificed, since he has no claim, grounded in autonomy, to have access to options to harm children, or to have rights against interference from others in the pursuit of such options. This fact is not changed by the fact that he fails to appreciate the wrongness of what he wants to do.23

This example assumes that having sex with children is wrong. If that assumption were false, then the pedophile would indeed be able to say that the coercive measures in question set back his autonomy, and not just because they closed o an acceptable option, but also because they subjected him to the will of others. To be sure, the kind of moral environmentalism I am discussing goes well beyond this kind of example. It holds that coercive interference may be justified not only to protect people from direct physical harm from others, but also to sustain an environment that facilitates their e orts to lead good lives. But the point I am pressing here is a general one. While it is true that being subjected to the will of another sets back one’s autonomy in a way that is not fully captured by the consequences that such action has for one’s access to options, we cannot assess whether subjecting a person to the will of another invades his autonomy independently of an assessment of the moral appropriateness of that subjection. This point leaves wide open what kinds of interference are morally appropriate.

The presumptive case for moral environmentalism presented above gives us some reason to think that moral environmentalist measures can be morally appropriate. But it may be objected that people have rights to act in ways that moral environmentalism targets, whereas they do not have rights to harm children. And these rights, it may be said further, are grounded in our general interest in self-determination. This line of thought invites us to consider autonomy, not as an ethical ideal, but as a sovereign right. It also suggests that we cannot fully assess the case against moral environmentalism that is grounded in the ethical value of personal autonomy without considering the case against moral environmentalism that is grounded in autonomy understood as a sovereign right of persons.

23Some might say that autonomy includes the freedom to disregard morality. Any intervention, no matter how justified, that reduces one’s control over one’s life is a reduction in one’s autonomy. This is not how the concept is commonly construed; nor is it an attractive construal. Later I consider the much more plausible view that autonomy is bounded only by the equal autonomy of others.

Autonomy as a sovereign right

Many have thought that autonomy is not best described as an element of a well-lived human life. They claim that, whether or not it is an ethical ideal, autonomy refers most fundamentally to the prerogative a person has to make important decisions about his life, whether he is disposed to do so well or poorly.24 Feinberg expresses the thought well: “The life that a person threatens by his own rashness is after all his life; it belongs to him and to no one else. For that reason alone, he must be the one to decide – for better or worse – what is to be done with it in that private realm where the interests of others are not directly involved.”25 If autonomy is understood in these terms, then a person’s autonomous engagement with worthless pursuits should not be interfered with. Doing so would infringe his right to self-rule.

Moral environmentalism, it may now be said, fails to respect the autonomy of persons by failing to take account of this rights-based dimension of the value. This charge needs immediate qualification, however. For no one seriously thinks that the right to make decisions about one’s life extends to decisions that cause direct harm to others. The right to autonomy is bounded. As Feinberg makes plain, the right to do as one pleases ends where the interests of others are directly involved. Thus to understand autonomy as a right, and consequently to understand the objection that moral environmentalism fails to respect it, we must consider the complex relationship between autonomy so understood and the harm principle.

Respect for autonomy does not require us to respect actions that cause direct harm to others. This much is common ground. Controversy ensues once we start to specify the notion of “harm” for the purposes of applying the harm principle. Here there is a strong tendency for writers either to stretch the notion of harm to cover cases which warrant interference, but are not plausibly harms as commonly understood, or to reformulate the harm principle in terms of wrongful actions. The tendency is understandable, since there are compelling reasons to think that the limits to autonomy extend beyond limits that rule out actions that harm others. Consider two

24 The thought here assumes that we can sharply distinguish autonomy as an ethical ideal from autonomy as a sovereign right. This assumption can be challenged. If the interest account of rights is generally correct, then the rights associated with autonomous agency must be grounded in the interests persons have in leading autonomous lives, or some set of related interests. But here, in this subsection and the ensuing subsections, I put these doubts to one side.

25 Feinberg, Harm to Self, 59.

common cases: (1) I treat you wrongly if I exploit your bad circumstances to gain unfairly from a mutually beneficial transaction; (2) I treat you wrongly if I fail to help you when you are in dire need and I can do so at little cost to myself. Neither kind of wrongful action – exploitation and failure to aid – need be such that it counts as an action that wrongfully makes you worse o than you otherwise would have been in the absence of the action.

Cases of this kind put pressure on us to say either that respect for autonomy does not require us to respect all wrongful, but not harmful, actions of others or that one can harm another even if one does not make him worse o than he otherwise would have been. (One can harm him, for example, by failing to treat him in ways that are consistent with one’s obligations to him.) Nothing of substance turns on which manner of speaking we adopt. In what follows, I shall adopt the latter course of speaking. We harm a person when we make him worse o as a result of our failure to treat him as he is entitled to be treated. The content of harm, for the purposes of applying the harm principle, must advert to the duties we owe to others.

There is an important upshot of this discussion of harm for the assessment of moral environmentalism. It now is no longer clear that moral environmentalism threatens autonomy. To explain: On the present understanding, the right to autonomy is limited to the right to engage in actions that do not cause harm to others, but causing harm to others can include actions that fail to meet one’s duties to others. Thus, to understand what it means to respect the autonomy of others, one must identify the domain in which people are properly left free to act as they please. This domain is determined, in part, by the moral duties – some negative, some positive – to which each of us is subject.26 It does not follow, of course, that every moral duty is morally enforceable and should be enforced by the state.27 The point is that, however the relevant duties are specified, respect for the autonomy of people does not extend to those actions that contravene enforceable duties to others. To this conclusion, the moral

26Compare this to Mill’s discussion of the harm principle. Each of us, he says, has an obligation “to bear his fair share in the common defense, or in any other joint work necessary to the interest of the society of which he enjoys the protection” (Mill, On Liberty, 11). And Mill clearly thinks that we do not wrongly infringe the liberty of a person by requiring him to do his part in this joint work. I agree.

27Some moral duties are not morally enforceable. For example, I have a moral duty not to speak in defense of unjust practices, but I have a moral right to do so in the sense that you have a moral obligation not to interfere with my bad speech. But these moral rights to do wrong are the exception rather than the rule. They do not foreclose all space for sound moral environmentalist policy.

environmentalist adds the claim that each citizen has a general moral duty, enforceable in some circumstances, to do his fair share in creating and sustaining a valuable moral environment in the society in which he lives. When the state enables or facilitates e orts to discharge this duty, its actions need not infringe the autonomy of anyone, for its actions are grounded in citizens’ moral duties to one another.

The critic of moral environmentalism may deny that citizens have a general duty to promote and sustain a morally valuable environment in the societies in which they live. But if this is the line the critic takes, then his argument with the moral environmentalist is one over the extent of our moral duties. Both the moral environmentalist and the imagined critic accept that autonomy is a right and that the right is limited by our moral duties to others. The presumptive case for moral environmentalism that I presented earlier suggests that citizens have the general moral duty that is in dispute. The critic’s appeal to autonomy, understood as a sovereign right, does nothing to defeat that case, since his argument simply assumes that the duty does not exist.

Enforcing morality

The argument of the previous subsection moved too quickly. A critic can grant that the harm principle must be informed by a moral theory and that state enforcement of moral duties specified by this theory need not infringe autonomy and still insist that the only enforceable moral duties are ones that prevent us from infringing the autonomy of others. Any other moral duty we have to others (including duties not to harm them in ways that do not infringe their autonomy) should not be enforced. Thus, autonomy, understood as a sovereign right, is limited only by the requirement that we respect the equal right to autonomy of others. Call this the autonomy principle.

The autonomy principle articulates a consistent position. It allows that we can harm others in myriad ways, but holds that only autonomyinfringing harms warrant restriction. But is it an attractive position? Recall Feinberg’s claim that the life that a person threatens by his own bad judgment “belongs to him and to no one else.” This image of autonomy depicts it as a right of ownership over one’s person. On this image, once we have fixed the ownership rights of persons, we have fixed the domain in which each should be left free to act as he pleases. Such a view sits well with the position we are now considering. The proponent of such a view can insist that the state has no business attempting to influence the

can dismiss his claim. The right to autonomy does not include the right to treat others unjustly. It is possible, however, that the moral demand against harming others is not a demand that trumps all other considerations. Suppose that if I do A, then I will harm you, albeit without infringing your autonomy. And suppose that if I do not do A, then some project or concern of mine will be set back substantially. It might be true in such a case that I have all things considered reason to do A. And, if this were so, then I might claim that I have a moral right, grounded in autonomy, to do A and that if others compelled me to refrain from doing A, then they would infringe my autonomy.

This view is odd, but it is not plainly wrong. It suggests a reformulation of the autonomy principle. Our autonomy, understood as a sovereign right, is limited only by the requirements that (i) we respect the equal autonomy right of others and (ii) we do not harm others in non- autonomy-infringing ways unless we have all things considered reason to do so. The second requirement captures the thought that we have an autonomy-based right to do what we have most reason to do, even if it results in non-autonomy-infringing harm to others.29

The reformulated autonomy principle is less moralistic. It does not elevate the demands of morality above all other demands of reason. But does it pose a serious threat to moral environmentalism? On the assumption that people sometimes have decisive reason to treat themselves or others wrongly, then the principle could speak against an otherwise sound moral environmentalist policy. Still, in all likelihood, this possibility would not tell against much moral environmentalism. For even if moral considerations against harming others are not always overriding, they uncontroversially are very weighty considerations, considerations that typically will be decisive.

Perspectival autonomy

The search for a version of the autonomy principle that can e ectively challenge moral environmentalism has found no plausible candidates. The right to autonomy is bounded by the moral requirement that we not harm others. And we harm others when we fail to do our part to create and sustain a sound moral environment. Properly appreciated, respect for autonomy, understood as a sovereign right, does not oppose sound moral environmentalist policy.

29The oddity of the view is further evident in the fact that the second requirement stands in tension with the first. If I may harm you in a non-autonomy-infringing way so long as I have all things considered reason to do so, then why should I not also be able to harm you in an autonomyinfringing way when that condition is met?