Who deserves autonomy, and whose autonomy deserves respect?

Personal Autonomy: New Essays on Personal Autonomy and its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy

Volumn , Issue , 2005, Pages 310-329

  Beauchamp, Tom L ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 45849104413     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511614194.015     Document Type: Chapter

References (59)

1. treatments of the concept of autonomy in Joel Feinberg, Harm to Self, vol. 3, in The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): chaps. 18-19
2. Thomas E. Hill Jr., Autonomy and Self-Respect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): chaps. 1-4.
3. Individual (by contrast to political) autonomy is a recent concept lacking a significant history of philosophical analysis. Whenthe eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan) was publishedin 1967, it offeredno indexedmention of “autonomy.” (Its sole reference is to “autonomous idiolects”; the entries under “selfdetermination” are scarcely more informative.) In its current non-Kantian uses, the term came into vogue in philosophy shortly after this Encyclopedia went to press.
4. Julian Savulescu, “Rational Desires and the Limitation of Life-Sustaining Treatment,” Bioethics 8 (1994): 191-222
5. Julian Savulescu and Richard Momeyer, “ShouldInformedConsent Be Basedon Rational Beliefs?” Journal of Medical Ethics 23 (1997): 282-288. I am not asserting that Savulescu's conclusions couldnever be warranted; obviously, a Jehovah's Witness could be acting nonautonomously. I am pointing to the profoundpractical consequences to which a theory of autonomy may be put and suggesting a very different starting point than the one used by Savulescu.
6. Ruth R. Faden and Tom L. Beauchamp,A History and Theory of Informed Consent (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1986): chap. 7
7. Tom L. Beauchamp and James Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): chap.
8. Some writers committedto a feminist perspective have arguedthat my theory is not entirely compatible with the constraints on theory that I have proposed, or at least that my theory needs adjustments. Carolyn Ells, “Shifting the Autonomy Debate to Theory as Ideology,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 26 (2001): 417-430
9. Anne Donchin, “Autonomy and Interdependence,” in C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000): 236-258.
10. Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988): chap. 1-4
11. Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5-20
12. Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of WhatWe Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 11-25.
13. Laura W. Ekstrom, “A Coherence Theory of Autonomy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 599-616
14. Gary Watson, “Free Agency,” Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205-220. Although it is far from clear that Frankfurt holds a theory of autonomy
15. see his uses of the language of “autonomy” in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): chap. 9, 11. Frankfurt's early work was on persons and freedom of the will. In his later work, he seems to regardthe earlier work as providing an account of autonomy, which is a reasonable estimate even if it involves some creative reconstruction.
16. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in his The Importance of WhatWe Care About, 16. In his later philosophy, Frankfurt modified his early theory of identification.
17. Frankfurt “The Faintest Passion,” in Necessity, Volition, and Love: 95-107, esp. 105-106. 6.
18. Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy, 20 7.
19. Frankfurt, “Autonomy, Necessity, andLove,” in his Necessity, Volition, and Love, 137.
20. Problems of this sort were first calledto my attention by Irving Thalberg, “Hierarchical Analyses of Unfree Action,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1978): 211-226.
21. Frankfurt, “The Faintest Passion” and“On the Necessity of Ideals,” in his Necessity, Volition, and Love, 105, 110.
22. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” 18.
23. Frankfurt, “The Faintest Passion,” 105-106.
24. There are more demanding theories than these second-order theories. Some theories require extremely rigorous standards in order to be autonomous or to be persons. For example, they demand that the autonomous individual be authentic, consistent, independent, in command, resistant to control by authorities, and the original source of values, beliefs, rationaldesires, and life plans. Stanley Benn, “Freedom, Autonomy and the Concept of a Person,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1976): 123-130;
25. Benn, A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 3-6, 155 ff., 175-183
26. R. S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer, “Autonomy,” Philosophy 46 (1971): 296-301
27. Christopher McMahon, “Autonomy andAuthority,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987): 303-328.
28. Frankfurt, “The Faintest Passion,” 104-105. See esp. the account of satisfaction. A nuancedversion of this theory of nonrepudiatedacceptance (using the language of nonresistance)
29. John Christman, “Autonomy andPersonal History,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991): 1-24, esp. 10 ff.
30. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” 18.
31. Savulescu, “Rational Desires and the Limitation of Life-Sustaining Treatment,” 202 ff. (summarizedat 221-222).
32. Other philosophers have used this or a similarly worded distinction, but not as I analyze the distinction. Daniel Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” in Amelie O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976): 175-196, esp. 176-178;
33. Joel Feinberg and Barbara Baum Levenbook, “Abortion,” in Tom Regan, ed., Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1993): 197-213
34. Stephen F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987): 47 ff.
35. Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983);
36. Harry Frankfurt, “On the Necessity of Ideals,” 113-115
37. Harry Frankfurt, “Freed om of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” chap. 2, esp. p. 12;
38. Dennett, “Conditions of Personhood,” 177-179
39. Mary Anne Warren, Moral Status (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997): chap. 1;
40. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Bioethics, 2nded. (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996): chaps. 4, 6
41. Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987);
42. Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): chaps. 4, 6.
43. On the relevance and plausibility of robots and physical-mental systems that imitate human traits, John Pollock, How to Build a Person (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989);
44. Ausunio Marras, “Pollock on How to Builda Person,” Dialogue 32 (1993): 595-605.
45. For Kant, a person's dignity-indeed, “sublimity”-comes from being his or her own moral lawgiver, i.e., from being morally autonomous.
46. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Lewis White Beck, trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959): 58. Kant added that the dignity deriving from this capacity is of a priceless worth that animals do not have: “[Each person] possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) whereby he exacts the respect of all other rational beings…. The humanity in one's person is the object of the respect which he can require of every other human being.”
47. Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Part I
48. James W. Ellington, trans., in Kant, Ethical Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983): 97-98.
49. As is asserted, more or less, by Frankfurt in “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love,” 131 n. 2
50. “Freed om of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” 16-17
51. Allen Buchanan and Dan Brock, Decidingfor Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 197-199
52. John Harris, The Value of Life (London: Routledge, 1985): 9-10;
53. Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy, esp. chap. 1.
54. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” 12.
55. Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
56. Rosemary Rodd, Ethics, Biology, and Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990): esp. chap. 3-4, 10.
57. Gordon G. Gallup, “Self-Recognition in Primates,” American Psychologist 32 (1977): 329-338
58. David DeGrazia, TakingAnimals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996): esp. 302.
59. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Detroit: Gale Research, 1974): chaps. 3-4.