PHIL 6410 Issues in Contemporary Ethical Theory: Personal Autonomy and Personal Good
Susan Dimock
Tuesdays 2:30-5:30
This seminar focuses on two concepts that are central to contemporary normative thought (moral,
political, legal): personal autonomy (the condition of being self-directed) and personal good (the
condition of faring well). These two concepts—autonomy and wellbeing—are so pervasive,
indeed ubiquitous, in our normative lives and in multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas
of inquiry that it is little exaggeration to say that, if we do not understand them, we do not
understand much of our own and others’ normative discourse. Both are the subject of extensive
philosophical literatures, some of which we shall explore. But we will also do what others
largely have not done, namely, explore the relations between autonomy and faring well. The
relations are not so simple as, say, necessity. If we think that certain things can be good or bad
for my dog, but that my dog is not autonomous, then autonomy is not necessary to enjoy welfare
or its contrary. Likewise, though perhaps more controversially, we might think that a person
could be self-directed and yet lead a life very deficient in wellbeing. And yet, the two are
inexorably linked in our thinking across a wide range of fields: from geriatrics to public
education policy, health care and public health policy, legal standing and the measures of a just
society.
The concept of welfare, wellbeing, prudence, or of something being good for a person (or for
other welfare subjects, such as animals, if there are such) is as confused and contentious as it is
pervasive in contemporary moral and political philosophy, as well as in practice across a wide
range of purposeful human activities. Through it one can engage in questions in meta, normative
and applied ethics. G.E. Moore famously argued, for example, that good for was not a distinct
normative category but rather was fully reducible to good, thus setting the stage for two
important debates within meta-ethics: whether prudential good is a distinct kind of good, and
whether something’s being good for someone creates agent-relative or agent-neutral reasons for
action. Within normative theory, one might ask whether welfare provides a reason for certain
kinds of action or grounds certain normative claims (which would be consistent with pluralism
about values or duties), whether it is the sole value (as it might be in some versions of
utilitarianism), or whether it has normative priority within a more complex normative theory
(such as welfarists suggest). Welfare is also pervasive in practical ethics: from public policy writ
large to health care allocations, from medical and biomedical ethics to education practice, from
legal decisions about what is in the best interests of some vulnerable individual or group to
global measures of human wellbeing or development work, etc., the concept of wellbeing is so
central that practical conclusions simply cannot be reached without assessing how various
options relate to the welfare of those affected by them. And, of course, the concept of welfare as
such is ripe for conceptual analysis. There are many conceptions of welfare on offer. Welfare is
the satisfaction of our desires (raw or idealized); pleasure or happiness; the attainment of an
objective list of things that are good for persons; the fulfillment of one’s needs; what another
would want for someone she cares about, for her own sake; and more. We will examine the
competing theories of welfare on offer.
Personal autonomy (the autonomy of persons, rather than nation states, institutions like
universities, etc.) is the condition of being self-directed, of controlling the direction of one’s life,
of being the authentic author of one’s own narrative, marching to one’s own beat, etc. It has
historically been associated with the individualism of classic liberal theory, and criticized by
feminists and communitarians on that ground. But it is also celebrated, as something that
consciousness-raising can enable, as the condition upon which our claims to dignity rest, as the
feature that distinguishes human beings from all the other sentient and even social animals, as the
source of our existential freedom, and much more. The importance of the concept cannot be
doubted: like welfare, once one becomes aware of autonomy in one’s scholarly pursuits, it is
everywhere. And, again like welfare, there are many different concepts of autonomy in current
use. As with welfare, there are subjective conceptions of autonomy (e.g., wherein autonomy
consists in the satisfaction of preferences that have survived some process of introspective
reflection and endorsement) and objective conceptions (e.g., in which being autonomous depends
upon one’s conative states and actions conforming to some standard of objective rightness).
Many people defend the importance of autonomy to our normative theorizing, while others
dismiss it as a myth, or worse. Feminists have been in both groups because, on the one hand, the
ambition of consciousness-raising as a method for overcoming oppressive socialization seems to
presuppose that there is an authentic self to be recovered, while on the other hand, autonomy
seems an individualist and patriarchal value that ignores our embeddedness, our embodiment,
and our relatedness to others. Some feminists have jettisoned the notion, while others have
developed competing conceptions of it (such as relational autonomy within a relational
feminism). It is, on my way of thinking, unsurprising that many of the same areas of practice in
which welfare is important also make autonomy important. Medical ethics and educational
practice are but two obvious examples of places where both autonomy and wellbeing are of
central importance.
We will examine competing conceptions of autonomy and of wellbeing. This will require asking
what the success conditions of such theories should be, thus engaging issues of methodology in
normative theorizing. We will examine some of the meta-ethical implications of various
conceptions, as well as explore what practical implications they would have in a range of areas
of applied ethics. Thus there will be much of interest to students regardless of where their
primary interests in normative matters tend to lie: in the abstract and meta- or methodological
levels, in normative theory and conceptual analysis, or in practical philosophy.
The course will be run as a seminar and students will be expected to attend classes having done
the assigned weekly readings.