The Value of Autonomy

SW 51-The Value of Autonomy

Convenors: Massimo Renzo, Steven Wall, Westlund Andrea C.

Contact: massimo.renzo@kcl.ac.uk

Autonomy occupies a central place in legal and political philosophy, yet the way in which we should understand its value and its limits remains deeply contested. Appeals to autonomy are ubiquitous in debates about political legitimacy, consent, responsibility, criminal punishment, paternalism, democratic authority, private law, and the limits of state coercion. At the same time, philosophers disagree sharply about what autonomy consists in, why it matters, and how demanding it is as a normative ideal. This panel brings together recent work that reassesses the value of autonomy and clarifies its role in addressing a range of classic problems in legal and political philosophy.

A central aim of the panel is to probe what it is about autonomy that makes it normatively valuable in these domains. Is autonomy valuable primarily because it secures control over one’s choices, because it enables authorship over one’s life, because it expresses respect for persons as rational agents, or because it underwrites particular forms of moral or political accountability? Different answers generate different implications for legal doctrine and political justification. For example, whether autonomy is best understood procedurally or substantively affects how we assess manipulative influence, structural injustice, or adaptive preferences. Whether autonomy is a threshold concept or a scalar ideal shapes how we think about diminished responsibility, vulnerability, and the permissibility of state intervention.

The panel therefore identifies a set of questions that any adequate theory of autonomy must address. These include:

• The structure of autonomy: Is autonomy a matter of higher-order endorsement, reasons-responsiveness, authenticity, independence from domination, or authorship over one’s practical identity?
• The conditions of autonomy: To what extent do social, economic, and epistemic conditions—such as coercion, manipulation, oppression, or unequal access to options—undermine autonomy?
• The value of autonomy: Is autonomy valuable instrumentally, as a means to well-being or moral responsibility, or non-instrumentally, as something that demands respect independently of its outcomes?
• The normative work of autonomy: What kinds of moral, legal, or political claims does autonomy ground: rights against interference, responsibilities for outcomes, authority to bind oneself or others? And under what conditions?
• The limits of autonomy: When, if ever, may autonomy-based claims be overridden by competing values such as welfare, equality, security, or democratic fairness?

The panel also situates these questions within several important recent developments in the literature. The goal is to clarify what autonomy can plausibly be asked to do in our theories, and where its limits lie.