Abstract
It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as reason to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect.
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Notes
Of course, to claim that something is true need not involve saying it to anyone in particular. We can claim that certain kinds of individuals or certain particular individuals lack freedom or virtue without saying it to their faces or discussing it as gossip. Doing those things likely would be disrespectful, but claiming it, by itself, does not seem to be.
There’s a distinction between a person being morally responsible generally versus a person being responsible for a particular choice. There is also a distinction between a person being autonomous versus a person’s particular choice being an autonomous one. There is ongoing disagreement in the literature regarding which is more fundamental—the state of the choice or the state of the person more generally—and I am not in a position here to declare one more worth focusing on than the other. However, it seems to me that regardless of which we focus on, the disrespect objection to substantive theories of autonomy will be unsuccessful. As a result, I move back and forth between talking about one and the other depending on what makes the most sense in the context and what assumptions are being made by the authors with whom I’m engaging.
See, for example, Serene Khader (2012).
For example, I doubt that we have appraisal respect for the fully autonomous, completely evil person as a person (though we may positively appraise them in their capacity for self-guidance).
Killmiser (2013) makes a similar point when she claims that it is better to maintain a more difficult to achieve theory of autonomy than to accept a weaker one because having higher standards will make us more motivated to rectify the injustices that prevent people from meeting them.
Of course oppressed individuals often have certain very strong self-guiding abilities as I noted in Section IV.
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Daventry, A. Respecting the oppressed in the personal autonomy debate. Philos Stud 178, 2557–2578 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01562-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01562-4