Chapter Four: Autonomy

1. Minerva

A feral cat loiters at my open garden door. Living in the rough has made her canny; she knows the neighborhood and its opportunities. She hunts alone, she prowls. Like us, she sees her prospects through a conditioned lens: food, where it is, how to get it. Minerva has never been inside this house, but provoke her with a smell, look away, and she’ll bound inside. These are conditioned responses: DNA honed by experience. But consider any first entry into a house she doesn’t know. No established practice explains it because there is no habit specific to this house: she hasn’t been here before. Just now, she lingers outside, moving a little in response to every motion of mine, awaiting a move that would override her natural prudence. Seeing food or smelling it, seeing the doorway clear, she would enter.

Would that express a decision? No less than my decision to enter a provocative door. Would it be an act of will? It would in this respect: conditioning has shaped her response to opportunity, but she doesn’t chance entering unless a signal provokes her. Having that sign—my distance from the door—she would strike. Where is freedom? In her flexible power for responding to me and the door. No, you say, she doesn’t decide; she isn’t free; she responds to every stimulus with trip-wire efficiency. But this is a reply from the old behaviorism: we too react quickly sometimes, expressing a decision by way of an action. Describing ourselves in this way would ignore cognitive and volitional faculties for which there is abundant fMRI data. Is there equivalent evidence that cats deliberate when provoked; do they reflect and decide? Not with our complexity, but they are canny.

This one reconnoiters for minutes, circling left and right. Will I interfere? Not sure of my response, she waits. When I move, she bolts. The calculation is hers; the action is her response to an altered situation. Why call it less than free? Because she’s a cat? That underestimates her; it flatters us.

2. Semantics

Autonomy is ambiguous because of its core meaning. There are three ways to construe it: having power to decide what is done, how, and why. Each implies some degree of control. Having that power is a condition we often satisfy—calling a friend, making lunch; hence the persuasion that one is often autonomous in all three ways. That impression dissipates with the realization that control is attenuated by limits on resources, opportunities, and the array of aims that are viable and socially approved.

3. Assertion

Autonomy at its core is always personal and private. Intelligence is conspicuous in the work it does—its expressions are often available to public view—but one sees a finished product, not its genesis. Sensibility is disguised or concealed, but everywhere relevant to the history, habits, context, and tastes of the person engaged. Does everyone at a family gathering have the same feelings and opinions as every other? Are their differences exposed? Surely not. Would they be neutrally perceived if expressed? No to that as well. Yet autonomy wants resistance. Apparent success is misleading when it seems effortless: too easy, we say. Add that we lose passion if nothing opposes us. This is autonomy in its other dimension: more than a condition having ontological implications—exemption to some degree from determination by conditions distinct from oneself—autonomy is a psychological demand, one whose intensity varies with personality. Its measure is a continuum with social comfort at one extreme and the force and challenge of Nietzschean will at the other. Comfort implies safety, acceptance, and whatever benefits derive from hewing to established practices. Challenge implies risk and the intensified clarity that comes with making careful decisions quickly.

These two are principal markers of the purpose that is agency’s keel. Every living thing is self-regulating, an aim augmented in humans by the desire to wrest some degree of control and direction from the homogenizing effects of nature and socialization: how do I emerge from the crowd if only to declare myself? Ideally, one sets and sustains a path of one’s own; but circumstances often divert us. Life is the trace of successive recoveries: control reaffirmed after one or more lapses. Or opportunities and resources oblige us to make tolerable bargains for others or ourselves. Resolutions of both sorts express the insistent demand for personal control. Imagine the torture of people permitted no degree of autonomy, then the blame and anger they turn on themselves. Social policy from Locke to Rousseau, Kant, Mill, and Dewey is thought’s healing response: each a way to make space for oneself.

Autonomy expresses itself in thought, sensibility, and action. All are socialized, though socialization can’t ablate thought or sensibility because its means are inefficient—the “generalized other” can’t think or feel for me—and because individuals resist the uniformities it prescribes. Socialization reduces discord by bending us to common practices, but we resist crude uniformity. Dresses vary because women don’t believe that one style or color flatters all. Punishment has to be severe if people are to accept a regime that limits their powers. Rebellion is a moral or political response to repression, but also the will and animal spirits of people who won’t be caged.

Purpose resembles uniform rectilinear motion, in the respect that intention, action, and cause are agency’s signature properties. The impulse is largely physiological, though encouraged or repressed by societies that sanction a range of acceptable aims. Its persistent strength is a measure of the force or reward required to satisfy or suppress it, though intensity isn’t always apparent because we’re easily distracted by status or material goods. One way of naming social pathologies lists the ways of suppressing autonomy by diverting purpose.

Action’s social control has several expressions. Some are benign: geese in flight are self-propelled; geese in formation are socially constrained. Crowd control is another example: people move left or right because directed: we go as ordered. Other versions resemble herding but differ in the degree of latitude reserved to traffic agents. Their laws constrain the choice of vehicles (cars, not horse carts), without specifying the make of one’s car or its destination. Grammarians require that poets know syntax, rhythm, and an inventory of words, all of it restricting though the poem is one’s own. These are material, social limits on autonomy when a driver’s fantasy and a poet’s control of her thoughts and feelings are their contrary. Mill’s On Liberty speaks for the artist’s residual power to romantics who conflate initiative and self-control with unqualified freedom. Yet every child grows to maturity in a society and culture where skills are acquired in local pursuits. Cricket stars are rare in Japan because the game is isn’t much played there.

Socialization enables collaboration: it exploits our differences and the autonomy they enable as we work together to produce complex effects. This is socialized autonomy; it has graded expressions. Consumers express their identity and independence by the things they buy or places they go. Control is sporadic; there may be little direction to impulses that come in no predictable order. Self-regulation is more demanding when single-minded careers never deviate from vectors established in work or school. Though we resist: we try to set a pace and direction of our own in contexts we don’t fully control. A job is taken or lost, one is pregnant without intending it; but there is autonomy in the ways that episodes are construed, coupled, and exploited. Who is fully autonomous? Ragged artists, unpublished authors, street musician playing their songs. The rest of us are compromised to some degree.

4. Self-Identification

Choosing or declaring one’s identity would seem to be one of autonomy’s inalienable powers. Given the city, religion, or school of my loyalty, am I also empowered to decide who I am? The question is vexed because the basis for personal identity is contentious. Is it established by an array of contingencies—address, body-type, memories—or by the idea and feeling that I know who I am? Do I sometimes check the contingencies to confirm the accuracy of that self-perception? For people sometimes feel that the body they inhabit is false to who or what they are. Is identity fluid and changeable, adjustable or revisable as one chooses? These issues are often decided by sociality and convention: we are as others see us when certain traits are thought to be definitive. Though there are surges of anarchy when people affirm an identity they’ve chosen.

Is there a truth to the matter, or is identity a choice or aspiration? How tall is she? There’s one answer for a measurement in bare feet, another in heels. Why is one measure determining, when both are actual readings? Because we have a practical commitment to nature unadorned: male or female, appearance or reality. People falling between these camps for reasons of mixed parentage or biology are denied the comfort of rigid designation and words signifying their differences. What are they to do? Suffer ambiguity or invent language that signifies emergent identities.

Confusion resolves if we acknowledge that personal identity has several elements: one part is material; another is social; a third is self-declared; a fourth is aspirational. (The third and fourth conflate if the identity declared is the one desired.) Why should this matter if all are free to emphasize whichever element they prefer? It matters because of the discomfort aroused when the first and subsequent factors are decalibrated. Why are we bothered? Because consensus is comforting: we’re happier when hostility abates because all agree on the classification of types regarded as consequential: gender, race, or religion, for example. These are traditional social fault lines. Rigid expectations soften as some categories vaporize (because of intermarriage, for example). Let them go; let people choose partners and identities while old ideas molder quietly. Choices founded principally in transient enthusiasms may subside; they can be respectfully acknowledged while principal expectations fall back to stable differences.

Let there be coherence in these two perspectives: my self-perception and—more difficult—my comfort with the idea others have of my identity. There will often be disagreement about one’s entitlements or moral posture, but people would be happier, less conflicted if they were perceived as they wish to be.

5. Collaboration/Contention

Most things we value require partners. For interdependence is the more accurate characterization of our lot; it qualifies the fantasy of being able to do all that we wish without companions. Choosing partners is one of autonomy’s prerogatives, though committing to them limits one’s freedom of action.

Collaboration is the sensitive middle ground where autonomy merges productively with socialization. There are many sites of attunement, all discovered by trial and error. We know some conditions for finding them: a corporate activity must have aims that are comprehensible and shared by participants; requisite skills must be coordinated by an efficient plan, then supported by appropriate resources and oversight. Collaboration works when participants who are skilled and mutually respectful know their aims and effects. They know when deviations are efficiently corrected; they’re gratified when effort is acknowledged. Singing in a chorus requires a trained voice and accommodation to others, hence the chagrin if a chorus member quacks like a duck in the middle of a song.

People joined in pursuit of shared or complementary aims are Mill’s third region of liberty; their reciprocities structure the privacies Dewey described.1 More than things they do or make, those relations alter the participants. One is smarter for having to answer a partner’s questions, emotionally enlarged by having to consider his or her feelings. One needs only a single friend after the age of four or five to know that autonomy is qualified by caring for a friend while wanting his or her esteem. But this is true as well of one’s socialized aims. Descartes’ Passions of the Soul characterizes a thinker who always looks within for his bearings.2 Compare the participants in Dewey’s privacies: they are centered while expressing personal attitudes that bind them to partners in undertakings they share. Parents amidst their families, team members in a game: all act autonomously when fulfilling their social commitments. Far from Cartesian isolation, this is resonant participation in communities one values, large or small. Collaboration is social glue: work is accomplished; people are transformed. Autonomy is compromised, in the respect that aims, information, and emotions—attachments—are altered. Will, too, may be subordinate to group aims—I do it because we do it—though conscience and self-regulation are a final defense against subordination. Socrates was exemplary: unable to defend either of the available options, he would do neither: “[T]he other four went off to Salamis to arrest Leon, and I went home.”3

People vying for partners, resources, and opportunities are sure to provoke the resistance of competitors. There are two problems here, each with a partial solution: how to distribute resources in proportion to need; how to make opportunities visible to all when perspectives and interests differ. Add the competitive juices that excite competition, and the vanity that comes with success. Discord is one of autonomy’s principal effects. America celebrates freedom of choice and pursuit; discord and litigation are costs we’re slow to acknowledge.

6. Regulation

Regulation is distorted by the “no-harm” principle affirmed by Mill’s On Liberty.4 It seems benign in realms where agents have nearly infinite space to pursue their aims (the implication of Locke’s phrase: “when all the world was America”), though it’s naïve and reckless in cities where crowding, scarcity, and complexity make many private choices consequential for other people. What must be added if Mill’s formulation is to be viable in societies where people in close proximity adversely affect their neighbors without knowing it? Kant’s two-part answer emphasized inhibition and a principle: let everyone inhibit doing what all can’t do without subverting the possibility of that action; no one should steal because trust and cooperation would founder, chaos would ensue if all were to steal. He characterized this rule’s satisfaction as the supreme condition for social morality, but its actual purport is more spartanly utilitarian: this is the critical condition for practical coherence in a complex society. It requires that individuals be self-restraining when a thought experiment—universalization—shows that behavior of a kind (stealing) would sabotage productivity or communication if generalized. Though we invoke inhibition much more often than those times when a maxim is discarded because it can’t be universalized without contradiction: actions are inhibited (without this test) because their effects—violence, cruelty, or dishonesty—are plainly inimical to this or that person, or because there are better moral choices.

Autonomy is restrained in both these ways: inhibition and laws. Policy is canny when it chooses one or the other because of the problem to be solved. Inhibition is the choice of agents who foresee their likely effects; they prefer having the responsibility that goes with foresight and choice. Yet those defenses aren’t always sufficient: drivers need traffic laws because they often can’t see the complexity of the traffic through which they move. A visiting Martian might conclude that we can’t be trusted en masse to regulate ourselves individually. Though we do that unproblematically in most domains where societies require that behaviors such as dress or sexuality be routinized. Those are spaces where inhibition is control enough because of convention, personal discipline, and the fear of being ostracized.

7. Oversight

There is no apparent way to release the talent and spontaneity of all a society’s members. Social complexity and our material needs guarantee that most people will remain cogs in an economic machine. Yet the interdependencies making us productive are altered by technology, social policy, and circumstantial changes in climate and resources. Clarity about our values gives us leverage when changes are made. Three such values are determining: i. control of one’s actions and effects; ii. freedom to enjoy the sensibility and skills that distinguish us; and iii. the coherence, productivity, and safety of our relations to one another. These values would be conspicuous in communities more like the trees in a copse or glen, but they are no less desirable in our hardscrabble industrial societies. 7i. Control of one’s actions and effects: Find ways to organize productive activity so that adults exploit their powers for self-regulation; anticipate and defend their resistance to overseers who ignore personal abilities and differences. Technology facilitates these aims by automating tasks that are arduous, boring, or demeaning; by distributing managerial authority to small affiliated bands of self-organizing workers; and, when feasible, by enabling people to do their work from afar. Let people decide when and how to work, if they can quickly transmit what they’ve done to those needing to see it. Liberate workers from conditions that make them less productive by breaking up the routinized spaces where work is done. These are familiar solutions to chronic problems.7ii. The discovery and expression of one’s sensibility and skills: Everyone has several or many talents, most of them unknown because there is no opportunity to discern them. How many potential musicians never learned to play an instrument because none were available? Expose children to opportunities, support them as they search for ways and means suitable to their abilities: know that everyone who speaks any language could have learned every other. Expose children to tasks and experiences that cultivate their tastes. Trust them when they respond to some things, never to all. Don’t assume that adults have outgrown their earlier enthusiasms. People too stiff and embarrassed to sing or dance may renew passions long forgotten. 7iii. The coherence, productivity, and safety of one’s relations to others: These are virtues that mustn’t be compromised by too scrupulous a regard for autonomy: we sacrifice some degree of self-control for these other values. But this is often a two-edged sword: lose yourself in regimented social bonds or retreat into an isolation that sucks one’s energy and self-regard. This is a puzzle created by our principal forms of employment: most of us can’t make ourselves financially secure without surrendering the autonomy we prize. Our industrial economies have run away with us; recovering control of them is a condition for having control of ourselves. But this isn’t news.

Where is oversight in this picture? It comes in two ordered thoughts: how do current economic and political organizations affect the lives of their worker/citizens; what would suit us better? These are the questions of every economic and political reformer since the eighteenth century. This book has a narrower focus: where agency implies freedom, what should count as stable expressions of autonomy? Three seem critical: discovery and cultivation of one’s principal talents and inclinations; ample chances to use one’s skills; and the opportunity to know and enjoy the collaborations of like-minded people. Are these aims frustrated, sometimes strangled, by social and economic realities? Some people know these frustrations, and work to reduce them. It would be a good thing if everyone were mindful of the obstacles and committed to their reduction. But this implies social mobilization and action by people who are already busy and, in our time, not always unhappy.

8. In Itself, For Itself

One feels centered when activity is a personal choice unrestrained by rules or roles, though one may feel it, too, when satisfying a law’s requirements or a manager’s demands. How do we know that the sense of acting on one’s judgments and choices is an expression of personal autonomy, not the comfort experienced by satisfying laws, roles, or a superior’s approval? There isn’t a sure sign of the difference, though a reliable sign is the observation that family members, colleagues, friends, or neighbors have priorities and trajectories different from one’s own. Having made our choices, we go our separate ways. Yet autonomy—freedom to and from—is so avidly affirmed that people are convinced they have it when a closer look would show that our claims to freedom are often rhetorical. People who come to understand this are prey to political cynics. We want to save freedom from their suspicion that autonomy is a chimera, short of the heaven where On Liberty is the biblical text and duties to others are always limited and chosen.