The Modern Ideal of Autonomy

Abstract

In contemporary society there are many different views of what an ideal person is. As I said in the preface, by ‘ideal person’ I mean the sort of person we wish to be, we aspire to. One of those ideals seems to be dominant: the ideal of a person which I roughly define as ‘the autonomous person’. Most of us want to be, and to be seen as, beings that (are able to) govern themselves and their lives. We do not like other people telling us what to do, want, or be. We wish to (be able to) evaluate, decide, and do what we want. Moreover, this ideal is often linked to the belief that being autonomous is precisely being a person in the fullest sense of that word: if we attain autonomy, we realise ourselves as persons. The personal wish to have the capacity of, and to be in the state of, autonomy, is then also the wish to be a fully realised person. For example, if I wish to decide myself about which profession to take up, I may argue that as a person I have the capacity to make this decision myself, and that if I get the opportunity to use this capacity I get the chance to realise myself as a person in the sense of becoming more fully a person. Thus, the ideal of the autonomous person is a claim about what we are and ought to be.