Hypatia

Personal Autonomy in Society covers a tremendous amount of philosophical ground. In this book, Marina Oshana defends a number of distinctive and provocative positions, and she addresses many more topics than I can take up in this brief review. So, I shall start by outlining the scope of Oshana's concerns and then explore her principal claims.

Chapter 1 identifies the position Oshana advocates—a social-relational conception of autonomy—and it distinguishes Oshana's topic—global personal autonomy—from related ones, such as episodic autonomy, moral autonomy, and political autonomy. Chapter 2 criticizes an assortment of value-neutral, procedural accounts of autonomy, including those of John Christman, Gerald Dworkin, Harry Frankfurt, Marilyn Friedman, Gary Watson, and myself. Chapter 3 examines a series of case studies designed to clarify readers' intuitions [End Page 202] about autonomy and nonautonomy. Chapter 4 sets out Oshana's social-relational theory by specifying seven necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for personal autonomy. Chapter 5 defends her view against charges that it is objectionably perfectionist and that it invites paternalism. Chapter 6 contrasts the value of autonomy with the values of well being and self-realization and maintains that social-relational autonomy is valuable because it is necessary to democracy, because autonomous choices express the chooser's "competence and singularity," and because it is necessary for "full moral standing" (132, 134). Chapter 7 denies that causal determinism is incompatible with autonomy and explores the relations among autonomy and negative liberty, positive liberty, and "freedom as non-domination" (153). Chapter 8, the concluding chapter, argues that personal autonomy does not entail moral responsibility. I now focus on Oshana's central line of thought.

Oshana asks what makes a person autonomous as opposed to what makes a particular action autonomous, and she correctly maintains that a lot of episodically autonomous actions do not add up to global autonomy (2–3). Two intuitions underwrite her inquiry:

Summing up her view, Oshana states that the "autonomous individual is one who is free to choose what sort of social relations to be in" and that "these relations . . . grant the agent substantive power and authority" (106; also see 129). The necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for autonomy are:

According to Oshana, "These conditions will inevitably appear somewhat underdescribed" (87), and I expect that "micro-precisifying" (I borrow the term from Marilyn Friedman [2003, 29]) isn't possible here. However, since Oshana claims to be offering a "naturalistic" account that enables us to assess the degree of someone's autonomy based on empirical information (5), enough precision to apply these standards would be desirable. In this respect, conditions 3, 5, 6, and 7 are particularly troublesome.

Condition 3 initially seems vulnerable to the same authority (or regress) problem that bedevils hierarchical identification accounts, such as Harry Frankfurt's. Given that people are subject to lifelong socialization that leaves none of their capabilities untouched, they appear to lack any independent resources that could serve as arbiters of authenticity. To avoid this problem, Oshana invokes "content-laden stipulations about the nature, origin, and plausibility of a person's motivational and valuational states" (81). Yet, apart from ruling out autonomously choosing slavery, subservience, and purdah, Oshana lists no ineligible options, nor does she articulate any standards for identifying additional constraints on autonomous choice.

Condition 5 seems so strong that it's not realistically possible to satisfy. Control is threatened if "coercive impediments to self-government are merely likely, or where it is possible although unlikely they will be put into effect" (83). That I live in a society with a national military makes it possible, albeit unlikely, that I'll be drafted into the U.S. Army with the result that either my autonomy will disappear or I'll be forced to exercise my autonomy to resist instead of doing what I had planned. Does it follow from this bare possibility that I'm not an autonomous person, or even that my autonomy is at risk? I suspect that the threats to my autonomy are far less fanciful.

Condition 6—accessible, relevant options—is notoriously...