IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

There is much to learn from and admire in Danielle Wenner's (2020) "Nondomination and the Limits of Relational Autonomy." The core claim Wenner advances is that the very concerns that have motivated feminist relational autonomy theorists would be better pursued by foregoing their concern with autonomy and pursuing instead the political aim of promoting a neorepublican conception of freedom as nondomination. While leaving open the possibility that "autonomy speak may remain valuable in some contexts" (29), Wenner nevertheless claims that "for the purposes of understanding and combating relations of oppression and subjection, freedom as nondomination provides a more useful conceptual apparatus than the ideal of relational autonomy" (29).

This is a bracingly provocative thesis. Historically speaking, the retrieval and rehabilitation of republicanism presents feminists with a daunting task. It is a task at least as formidable as that faced by earlier efforts to excise the concept of autonomy from the liberal tradition and its valorization of characteristically privileged male traits of material self-sufficiency and social independence (Sherwin 1998, 2011; Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). As even its most ardent contemporary advocates are quick to point out (so as to defuse), there is much that is cringe-worthy in republicanism's history—not least from a feminist perspective.¹ And for feminists concerned to articulate conceptions of autonomy that take seriously the social embeddedness of persons within relationships of mutual dependence and vulnerability, there are reasons to suspect that contemporary republican views of freedom as nondomination do not present models of agency that fully rid themselves of historical republicans' individualist baggage.² The republican focus on nondomination as the condition of independence from the arbitrary will of another renders immediately problematic many [End Page 60] of the relationships of care and dependency that relational autonomy theorists have strenuously sought to move from the margins of concern to the center of their theorizing.³ Finally, perhaps most obviously provocative is Wenner's claim that several decades of feminist efforts to articulate and operationalize relational conceptions of autonomy suited to the task of overcoming relations of oppression and subjection are ultimately unsuccessful. Better to have started with republican freedom, as it happens.

I think this conclusion is premature. While Wenner is right to claim that many of the concerns and values that motivate feminists toward the relational turn in autonomy are both coincident with and supported by the concern to promote freedom as nondomination, I doubt that all are. Specifically, I can see at least two reasons why relational autonomy theorists might resist Wenner's proposal. The first relates to the substance of the proposal: it isn't clear that in fact "the aims of relational theorists would be better served by the promotion of republican freedom, understood as nondomination, and the institutional conditions that facilitate it" (29). There are reasons to avoid changing the subject. Further, relational theorists may rightly resist Wenner's claim that, whereas relational accounts of autonomy are "at best conceptually messy, and at worst a category error," the conceptual apparatus of republican freedom is "conceptually neater" and "more useful." There is ample evidence to suggest that this comparative benefit is overstated. Indeed, if the nub of her criticism is that relational autonomy theory has "failed to provide unambiguous guidance about how and when to value social embeddedness, which values and preferences to respect, and how to determine when social relations threaten agency," the same criticism may prove true of Wenner's alternative (45).