Abstract
There is a philosophical view about morality which is shared by moral philosophers as divergent as Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Royce, Hare, Popper, Sartre, and Wolff. It is a view of the moral agent as necessarily autonomous. It is this view that I wish to understand and evaluate in this essay. I speak of a view and not a thesis because the position involves not merely a conception of autonomy but connected views about the nature of moral principles, of moral epistemology, of rationality, and of responsibility.
The will is therefore not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must be considered as also making the law for itself and precisely on this account as first of all subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author).
—Kant
[Virtue] is not a troubling oneself about a particular and isolated morality of one’s own… the striving for a positive morality of one’s own is futile, and in its very nature impossible of attainment… to be moral is to live in accordance with the moral tradition of one’s own country.
—Hegel
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Notes
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 516–19.
Gerald Dworkin, “Non-neutral Principles,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 71, no. 14 (August 15, 1974).
Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
Robert Paul Wolff, The Autonomy of Reason (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 219.
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888) pp. 517–18.
Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, p. 7.
Henry Aiken, Reason and Conduct (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 143.
Aiken, Reason and Conduct, p. 143.
R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 2.
Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 238.
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© 1981 The Hastings Center
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Dworkin, G. (1981). Moral Autonomy. In: Callahan, D., Engelhardt, H.T. (eds) The Roots of Ethics. The Hastings Center Series in Ethics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3303-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3303-6_3
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