The issues of vaccination and abortion have been at the forefront of recent cultural dialogue, at least in the US and Canada. In connection with both issues, there has been a continual emphasis on “autonomy” in one form or another. Both issues have seen many people focusing upon ‘bodily’ autonomy, though I must admit that I am not at all sure what this adjective adds to the notion of autonomy—unless it is presumed that there are people who desire some sort of ‘gnostic’ or ‘stoic’ autonomy of the mind with no care for the body. Such bizarre distinctions aside, it seems to me that the very notion of ‘autonomy’ as a standard of justification for any action is mere foolishness.
To begin, it must be acknowledged what the word ‘autonomy’ actually means. As far as I can tell, many people today use the word autonomy to mean something like: ‘I can make my own choices, and others should not be able to prevent me from doing so.’ This does, in fact, lead into the meaning of autonomy, but I believe it stops short of understanding the full implications of the term. An etymological detour is in order to make this point clear.
‘Autonomy’ is merely an anglicization of a Greek term: αὐτονομῐ́ᾱ (autonomia). Its use in Greek is typically understood to mean ‘independence and freedom to act according to its own laws.’ This is surely intertwined with the two roots that make up another form of the same term: αὐτόνομος (autonomos). This is constructed from the prefix αὐτο- (auto-), meaning ‘self,’ and the word νόμος (nomos), meaning ‘custom, law, or ordinance.’ Thus, by looking through its etymological roots, ‘autonomy’ can be understood to mean a law coming from oneself in a deep sense—it is the claim to be allowed to reject any form of external authority and be beholden merely to what is deemed worth obeying by oneself.
Now, anyone familiar with the typical canon of political philosophy in the modern era, especially within the anglosphere, will recognize that there is something that feels right about a desire for autonomy. A facile reading of either Thomas Hobbes or John Locke seems to indicate that a collection of autonomous persons simply comes together and creates a ‘social contract’ that results in a ‘government.’ In the case of Hobbes, this is predicated on self-preservation; in the case of Locke, the recognition and protection of private property. In both, all the individuals come together out of their own volition, their own autonomy, to attain a certain end. From a certain view, this does not contravene the notion of autonomy as all members involved in the social contract choose to enter it for themselves. I bring up this note on political philosophy as I do believe that many people today conceptualize government, at least somewhat, in this manner: as the guarantor of autonomy. I would like to point out that it may very well be merely ‘conceptualized,’ and those same folks who think in this manner may act in a way that contradicts these conceptions, but nevertheless it does in part inform how we think and speak about these subjects.
An implication of this view is that if government is merely accepted by an autonomous act of the will, then those same institutions can simply be contradicted or resisted by a new, autonomous act of the will—which is where this facile reading will begin to reveal its errors. I hope well-read readers of any of the social contract theorists will forgive my haste as I outlined the thinkers above—they obviously are not so naïve. Rather, I am trying to acknowledge how derivative understandings of these thinkers may illuminate our contemporary trials. One may erroneously focus on the autonomous nature of people’s wills in these theories and take that to be central—a tendency our contemporary culture has, in my view, at least partly taken up. Nevertheless, for the sake of brevity, I move along: assuming what I have said above is accepted for the sake of discussion, my hope is that considering this errant understanding of social contract theory may enlighten our broader conversation about autonomy.
First, the views inherent to social contract theory, at minimum, imply that the government must actually be the guarantor of some end—but this becomes a contradiction if the end being sought is merely “autonomy” itself. Thus, for the social contract theorists, autonomy is never the normative standard itself; it is something like ‘the preservation of life’ or ‘the protection of property,’ etc., depending on the thinker under consideration. To request that a government be formed to protect autonomy as its dominant aim is akin to a man requesting that his fiancée help him become a bachelor—such an act requires the termination of the relationship in question itself. In short, a genuine appeal to autonomy as a normative claim is in actuality an ask for a kind of anarchism: the only way to guarantee that each person is ultimately a law unto himself is to eliminate any ‘head’ of the law as is presupposed by government.
Second, this view of society as a form of contract—despite whether figures such as Hobbes or Locke believed this or not—fails to adequately address the possibilities and implications of there being a kind of ‘law’ that is bound up in the world itself. Prior civilizations, especially emerging out of the Greco-Abrahamic traditions, would have understood this as something akin to ‘natural law.’ Social contract theory tends to conflate morality with explicit governmental structures—a view that is most clearly expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of civilization and the ‘State of Nature.’ No doubt, governance is intertwined with the world of morality; but to reduce morality to law and its enforcement is, in my view, idiotic (in the most literal meaning of the term). This is partly, as far as I can tell, what Jesus is indicating when he says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” In fact, both Hobbes and Locke at least implicitly concede that there must be some evaluation prior to the social contract—even if it is somewhat vague. Hobbes takes life itself to be worth protecting at all costs, and Locke assumes the right to property (fundamentals we may disagree with but are nonetheless prior to the social contract even according to their own systems).
Thus, we must acknowledge that there is an evaluation that is actually prior to governance in these conceptions that we might consider a ‘law’ in some sense—not in the sense of ‘prior’ in time but prior in terms of logical necessity. Government exists so as to allow something deeper than itself to manifest; this is, in my view, an unbroken notion that has existed—at least, though perhaps not only—since the thought of Plato. A government that serves itself is a corrupt government. To try and be pithy about this idea: governance is a particular activity within the whole of human life that aids man in his movement toward fulfillment. What we have moved into here is the domain of moral truth claims; government is an activity that participates in the fulfillment of humanity (though locally so), so it must therefore have some rational conception of right and wrong that extends beyond mere volition.
Let us come back to the main issue at hand: autonomy. What I think is clarified by this small excursion through social contract theory is that autonomy as a core value is destructive to the very nature of governance and politics. In fact, especially when thinking through a figure like Hobbes, the openness of autonomy and its destructive possibilities are the very impetus for government in the first place. Bizarrely, autonomy contains within itself the possibility of its own destruction; my autonomous actions can stifle the autonomy of another, vice versa, or even my own future actions. Governance, we might therefore say, is a domain of activity in which those activities which fundamentally erode our capacity to exercise our wills—something we take to be a good as is implied by the very invocation of autonomy—must be somewhat constrained by an entity with capable force. The existence of government itself provides us with an insight that perhaps we should think about actions that are utterly deleterious to volition—which themselves, counterintuitively, emerge out of that very volition.
In my view, we should therefore understand autonomy to be a descriptive condition of how we find ourselves in the world; there is a way in which we could choose to perform any wild number of things. However, some of those things can destroy the capacity to will anything at all; thus, we should not desire autonomy but whatever law there may be that allows for us (meaning both myself and others) to continue to partake in the world so far as we can manage. In my view then, as poorly sketched out as I have managed it here, the language of autonomy and its constant invocation represent an ideological error in the nature of experience. Of course, we desire to will things and the will is in some sense taken by us all to be a good; nevertheless, this will must adhere to certain criteria that allow it to partake most fully in itself—something to which absolute autonomy is a constant threat.
Hoping for Clarity 