Autonomy: In Defense of Content-Neutrality*

Autonomy is a concept of great importance not only in the domain of philosophy, but also in
many aspects of our ordinary lives. The concept of autonomy is often related to other concepts in
ordinary language using. For instance, we often connect autonomy with responsibilities, either
moral or legal ones: we take autonomy as a necessary condition for responsibilities. We often think
that an autonomous action is a voluntary one, although we also often notice that there are some
differences between the two. And we also think that autonomy is approximately identical with the
freedom of the will, partly because they are deemed as a necessary condition for responsibilities for
roughly the same reasons. And we also believe that autonomy has something to do with personal
identity, since if one's action cannot be related to one's self-identification, it can hardly be said to be
one's own action, much less an autonomous one.

I. The hierarchical approach

Frankfurt (1969) offered a thought experiment (the Jones case) to argue for the importance of a
person's self-identification in contributing to personal autonomy. Frankfurt's case involves an agent
who is not free to choose what she is about to do, however, in some relevant, sense she still can be
justified in claiming the action to be her own, she can still claim to have the legitimate ownership of
that action. In Frankfurt's case, the environment (including other agents around her) is carefully
arranged so that it allows no other options for the agent to choose from. But because the decisionmaking process of the agent conforms to an appropriate form that makes her be responsible for the
action, the agent thus preserve her claim to the ownership of the action. Therefore, to specify the
characteristic features of that form of decision-making process becomes an important job for
Frankfurt. And he (1971) did provide an analysis of that appropriate form. His proposal has been
known as a hierarchical view on autonomy.1 In his analysis, there are layers of desires in a person's
desire system, and an action is autonomous iff that action stems from a desire which is approved of
by a higher-level desire of the person. The same process can go on to even higher-level desires,
until the agent wholeheartedly endorses her decision.
Frankfurt originally developed his analysis out of a hope to propose a framework that can

This is only a draft, do not cite.

In fact, his proposal is to provide an analysis of the conditions for moral responsibility and free will, instead of
autonomy. However, his discussions on the topic of free will overlaps largely with the discussions on the concept of
autonomy. I will explain more about this overlap later.

reconcile determinism and free will. In order to achieve this goal, he needs a theory of free will that
concerns only how an agent makes her decision rather than what an agent can choose from. For if
determinism is true, what will be chosen by an agent must also be determined. If what will be
chosen by an agent is determined, it will be pointless to base free agency on it, for there will be no
choice at all! Thus, he separated the decision-making process of an agent from the choices or
options she actually has. Once the two are separated, he can then base an agent's responsibility for
her action even when her action is determined. The point is that, as long as the agent's action stems
from decisions made in that appropriate manner, it would thus be irrelevant whether the actions
were determined or not.
Frankfurt's analysis of free will later become a paradigmatic strategy for analyzing the
characteristic features of autonomy, though his proposal was not about autonomy per se. His aim to
provide a proper understanding on free will which is compatible with determinism leads him to only
focus on a person's psychological state. And it seems that autonomy, at least at first glance, is also
only related to a person's internal state only. For autonomy seems to concern only the relationship
between an agent and her decisions. And indeed, Frankfurt did place great emphasis on the
legitimate ownership or authority an agent can have over her actions, which are exactly the core
elements of autonomy.
The hierarchical approach is later adopted by many philosophers to explain the nature of
autonomy, such as Gerald Dworkin (1988) and John Christman (1991). Because this approach
places its emphasis only on the form of the procedure by which an agent makes her decision, it is
also known as the content-neutral approach to autonomy. According to this approach, a person's
autonomy obtains as long as her decision-making process satisfies the required form, no matter
what the content of her decision is. Among philosophers who understands personal autonomy with
this approach, there are still differences. For example, Dworkin cares more about the autonomy of a
person as a whole while Frankfurt concerns whether an agent can be responsible for one of her
actions. On the other hand, Christman stresses the importance of the historical aspect of how an
agent comes to be in her current (psychological) state while Frankfurt only talks about the current
status of the agent's desire system/structure.
Instead of focusing on the higher-level desires' approval of the lower ones, Christman pays
greater attention on the historical process that a person makes her decisions and forms her desire
system. He not only requires that an autonomous person must identify her actions or decisions as
her own and truly her own, he also requires that there being no illegitimate interferers that alter or
influence a person's decision and desire system in an improper way. But what counts as improper
ways of influences or alterations? In general, they are ways that alter or influence a person's desire

system or decisions that the person herself would not approve of. Christman took the once famous
experiment of subliminal advertisement that unconsciously generate some desires in a person as a
paradigm case for illegitimate alterations he has in mind. Daniel Nolan and Caroline West (2004)
developed a similar concept of mental mediation. They were discussing about the proper range of
the protection of the right of free-speech. They proposes that speech which influences the
preferences or desires of hearers... through a causal process other than the exercise of the rational
capacity of the hearer (195) should not be included in the protection on the free-speech ground.
The kind of speeches that are deemed as not deserving protection on the free-speech ground are
those that alter the person's desire system in a manner that harms her autonomy. The rational and
reflective part of forming one's desire system and decisions valued by Nolan and West may be seen
as exactly what Christman has in mind when he stresses the importance of the proceduralindependence.

II. Strong substantive approach

The content-neutral approach has the advantage of being pluralistic because it allows as many
kinds of personal life styles to be compatible with autonomy as possible. However, this advantage
seems too liberal and too open minded for some philosophers. For example, Jennifer Nedelsky
(1989) argues that, because persons are necessarily embedded in a society or a community (a group
of people), it is at best too naive and at worst totally wrong to think that a person can acquire
autonomy merely with her internal state conforming to certain form.
The feminist criticism on content-neutral approach brings back the problem of free choices to
the issue of autonomy as a side effect. Mariana Oshana (2001), for example, has pointed out that if
a society has deep prejudices to some groups of people and institutionalizes discriminating
practices, then people who belong to those groups can hardly be said to have autonomy even when
most of their decisions satisfy the requirement imposed by the content-neutral approach. In
Oshana's example (1998) of a voluntary slave, she seems to think that autonomy is not entirely a
subjective matter. She described a voluntary slave's situation in an objective way. She mentioned
the servility, degradation, and the expectation of punishment in a slave's general situation as signs of
the slave's failure of self-determination, and hence the slave's failure of autonomy, without
considering (and even without thinking that it need be considered at all) whether the slave approves
of, or longs for, those features (servility, degradation, expectations of punishments, etc.) that we
normally deem as undesirable. We may easily conceive of a person who, instead of merely
passively endorses her servile way of living, actively pursues or longs for it, who desires
subordination, expects punishments and enjoys obeying commands. And we may further conceive
that the voluntary slave did not come to have these desires through a discriminating socialization or

a poor childhood. It is not because that she was not allowed a wider variety of ways of living and
chose the servile way out of despair or hopelessness that she is not autonomous, it is merely because
of the fact that she lives a servile life that she is not qualified as an autonomous person.
For Oshana, even the voluntary slave may satisfy the procedural-independence requirements
for autonomy, she still lives a non-autonomous life. When one's life is filled with commands and
coercions that are imposed on one externally, indeed one may still truthfully, reflectively and
procedurally independently embrace one's servility to those commands and coercions, and chooses
the way one now lives, it is still not disputable that one has no hold of one's own life. Since a slave's
decisions are mainly given rather than self-authorized, they can hardly be said as decisions at all.
Deeming such way of living as autonomous would not make any good to any person. Autonomous
lives are valuable because persons living autonomously are allowed the capability of making their
own decisions. Ascribing autonomy to a person only to let her abandoning it later seems to utterly
misplace the value of autonomy.
Thus, feminists claim that the description of autonomy must have certain restrictions on its
content. It must be recognized that some desires or values are indeed incompatible with autonomy
conceptually. As a result, according to Oshana, no matter what is the content in one's desire system
or life plan, and no matter how one came to have one's desire system or life plan, an autonomous
agent must not be subject to the ultimate will of others. (2001: 217) What is required for autonomy
is not only that the agent's decision-making procedure satisfies certain norms, but also that the agent
lives her life in a non-coercive way, in spite of whether she endorses or longs for it or not.
Therefore, autonomy for Oshana is not a subjective or personal matter, but a relational one. A
person's autonomy consists in her relations to others rather than in her own personhood only.

III. Some compromising attempts

Some feminists, like Oshana, propose that autonomy requires not only procedural
independence, but also substantive restrictions on a person's desires and values. This supplement to
the conditions of autonomy indeed deserves proper attention, but the additional relational or social
restrictions on autonomy imposed by feminists have still been criticized by some thinkers as
promoting a form of perfectionism. John Christman (2004) for one has argued that the strong
substantive view like Oshana's, though is correct about the importance of the social institutions and
the person's relations to others in a society, has a wrong conception of the concept of autonomy that
views the required social elements as definitive. On the contrary, Christman, unlike Oshana,
conceives the relational or social conditions for autonomy as only causally required to promote and
even empower one's autonomy rather than as features that constitute autonomy.

The main reason for him to reject the strong substantive view of autonomy is the worry that it
would bring about unnecessarily paternalistic institutions. Besides, such view also suffers the
danger of becoming hegemonic. Autonomy is not only a property that any person has a right to
have, and hence bestows every person the right to demand a society that helps flourishing it in
persons, it is also a property that is required for any person to have the rights to access many social
powers, and even social rights. If we put too much emphasis on how one lives one's own life when
attributing autonomy to a person, it may as a result harm, instead of protect, let alone promote, one's
autonomy. To put it in Christman's own words, the strong substantive view seems to imply that the
victims of oppression... are... less eligible for participation in democratic deliberation (if autonomy
is necessary for all these) than their oppressors. (2004: 163, emphasis his) This implication, if true,
is indeed unacceptable because it only victimizes the victims of oppressions with further
oppressions.
While Christman criticizes the strong substantive view on the basis of his content-neutral
account, he still values the importance of one's social relationships with others in a different way.
He indeed admits that one cannot be autonomous... unless one exists in environments that allow
their [the social elements constituting the self] full manifestation. (2004: 146) But the requirement
imposed by Christman on the environment one exists in only demands that it allows the
manifestation of those social elements, rather than one actually instantiates those proper social
relations wi th other persons.
However, there are still other thinkers who, though also do not agree with the strong
substantive view, give more considerations than Christman does to the social-relational input on
autonomy. For instance, Andrea Westlund (2003, 2009) proposes an allegedly content-neutral
account for autonomy that requires an autonomous person to be answerable for her own action.
What Westlund emphasizes is the ability to justify one's actions or decisions through dialogue with
others, especially when challenged by legitimate inquiry. Westlund (2003) discusses a case of a
deferent wife who, when she decided to move with her husband to a place of which the environment
she doesn't like, was asked by one of her closest friends if she has any reason supporting her
decision. She couldn't but repeat her deference to her husband as her response to the question that
challenges her deferential decision. Westlund calls this attitude deep deference because although
she endorses her deference, that endorsement has no basis that is not itself deferential. (488) A
deeply deferential person, according to Westlund, can still satisfy the hierarchical and procedural
independent requirement, but cannot be qualified as autonomous. Because one who is deeply
deferential cannot appreciate the normative force from a challenge that demands a justifying
answer. It is worth noting that the challenge that Westlund (2009) thinks as normatively demanding

must meet some criteria to be legitimate. And the criteria for a challenge to be legitimate depends
on whom does the challenge come from, what relationship is between this person who comes up the
challenge and the person who is challenged, what end is this challenge aimed for, and so on. Thus
far, we can see that what Westlund deems crucial to autonomy is not the ability to justify one's
decision when confronting a challenge but the capability to feel the normative force to respond to
the challenge when confronted.
Another similar but different approach to analyzing autonomy was proposed by Paul Benson
(1991, 1994, 2005). He argues that an autonomous person must be able to be accountable for her
own actions. For Benson, the requirement of accountability consists in an agent's recognition of
one's self-worth. In his case of a gaslighted woman (1994), and another case of a femininely
socialized college girl (1991), he described people who satisfy the procedural independence
requirement for each decision they made, but lack sufficient sense of self-worth, hence cannot trust
themselves on making autonomous decisions. These people who lack proper sense of self-worth
cannot act autonomously exactly because they have the ability to make decisions in a procedurally
independent way, and they are confident with their ability to make decisions in such way. However,
they cannot put enough faith in their confidence with themselves because they don't believe that
they are worthy of such confidence. Moreover, even the distrust itself may be gained through
processes that are procedurally independent and would not be rejected if the affected persons were
to recognize the influences on them. This possibility points out that the content-neutral account
actually does not provide sufficient conditions for autonomy. But Benson further points out that, the
conditions offered by content-neutral account are not only insufficient for autonomy, but also
unnecessary. Benson (2005) mentioned acts that are trivial but appear every now and then in our
everyday lives. These trivial acts, according to Benson, aren't worthy of reflective identification...
In fact, upon reflection, I would (and do) feel quite alienated... Yet, for all that, I am autonomous in
performing them. (104-105) Thus, if the content-neutral approach provides an adequate account on
autonomy, it seems that we would be not autonomous in most of the time. Since that consequence is
not acceptable, we have few reasons to buy it.

IV. A pragmatistic and content-neutral approach

Discussions on autonomy in philosophy can roughly be divided into above three positions.
Each wants to give an account that can identify autonomy as successfully as possible. They often
raise counter examples to point out defects of other approaches, and then provide some
improvements or even replacing theses to overcome those defects. But it seems, at least to me, that
none of the proposal is capable of capturing all the advantages each approach has.

The content-neutral account cannot account for many situations where autonomy of a person is
truly impaired, like the situation where the malevolent socialization decreases a person's sense of
self-worthiness. Such situation impairs a person's autonomy without interfere directly the person's
decision making process.
While the strong substantive view of autonomy can avoid problems the content-neutral
approach must face, it is itself susceptible to the danger of being hegemonic. And it is also not clear
for this view that how should we treat a person who can't live an autonomous life. On the one hand,
if it is required by this view that we, for instance, the government, ought to change a person's way
of living if her way of living is autonomy-inhibiting, it would be difficult to accomplish this without
invading the very same person's autonomy in the first place, and hence victimizes the victims
further. 2 On the other hand, if we are not allowed to change her way of living even on the
autonomy-protecting ground, it would seem to be pointless to deem her way of living, even not
acceptable to most of the others, as autonomy-inhibiting.
As for positions between these two poles, like that proposed by Westlund and that by Benson,
they seek to complement the deficiency of the content-neutral approach without committing too
strongly to any conception of value that would result in a value hegemony. But they seem to be too
demanding in certain circumstances respectively.
For Westlund, when she stresses the importance of one's answerability for one's actions, she
correctly notices the importance of one's ability to recognize one's relations, and one's actions'
relations, to others in order for one to be autonomous. But who can decide whether one recognize
the relations properly? Take Westlund's deeply deferential wife for example. She cannot recognize
her relation to her close friend, and the relation of her decision to move away to her close friend.
Westlund thinks that her apathy to her interpersonal relations indicates her inability to correctly
recognize the normative force of her friend's legitimate challenge. However, Westlund provides no
further reason to exclude the possibility from consideration that, instead of not recognizing properly
her interpersonal relations to others, she simply doesn't think that her reasons (that her husband likes
it that way) need any further justification, even when it is her close friend who is questioning,
because she takes those reasons as so basic that she couldn't understand why she need any further
reason. For different people there may be different reasons that one takes to be the most basic ones
For instance, for the voluntary slave I describe in section II who does not merely passively endorses the servile way

she lives, but actively pursues and longs for such way of living, it would be a disrespect for her self-identification if
we ought to change her servile way of living on grounds of protecting her autonomy. For when the change is
normatively demanding, it would mean that her chosen way of living is socially, and even morally, not acceptable
even if it would not affect anyone but herself in a morally relevant way.

and doesn't have further justification to give. I chose philosophy as my career because I like the
challenge of thinking difficult problems, but even the choice I make for my career has great impact
on my life, I still do not think I can give any further justification for the reason I currently
appreciate. If my inability to give further justification does not indicate my inability to recognize
properly the relations I have to other persons, for example, to my disappointing father, it seems that
the deeply deferential wife's inability to further justify her decision to her close friend does not
immediately indicate her inability to recognize her relations to others. Thus, it is still possible that
she is indeed autonomous although she's not able to answer for her friend's challenge. For her
inability to answer challenges does not consist in her inability to appreciate the normative force of
the challenge that she should appreciate, but consist instead in her belief that, for example, her
decision needs no further reason to justify, or that the challenge does not have the normative force
that she ought to appreciate. If, in this case, we deem the woman as not autonomous, it seems that
we're ignoring her right to form her self-identification in her own way.
And for Benson, a proper sense of self-worthiness is indeed important, and even crucial, for
autonomy. In his case of the femininely socialized college girl who cares so much about whether her
appearance is feminine enough according to the society's standard that she can't rationally evaluate
her self-worth on the basis of all her merits. Her care for her appearance was internalized by
socialization she receives so deeply that she can't even justly evaluate her appearance (because, in
fact, she's quite beautiful comparing to her peers). For Benson, this girl's obsession with her
appearance (or weight, too) is actually not autonomous for it is irrational and incorrect. A person's
value does not wholly consist in her body figure or face appearance, it also consists in her
intelligence, working ability, sensitivity and empathy and so on. Putting too much weight on
appearance and ignoring other characteristics would result in an imbalanced personality. However,
this kind of personality forming process can be procedurally independent, since most of the
socialization are deemed as procedurally independent. If we do not have a stand-alone criterion that
helps us distinguishing socialization compatible with autonomy and which not, we're then unable to
judge whether a person (or one of a person's decision) is truly autonomous or not. And the criterion
Benson provides us is whether the influence alters our self-recognition or self-evaluation in a way
that render us unable to value ourselves properly. Although Benson's proposal has its advantage that
the content-neutral account itself seems unable to take care of, it seems to have a similar weakness
as Westlund's proposal. Consider a radical feminist who, in spite of seeing thoroughly through the
patriarchal socializing effects, values herself mainly on the basis of her body figure and face
appearance. She pays so much attention on her appearance not because she was so deeply
influenced by the socialization she receives or because she couldn't resist the pressure the society
gave her, but because she simply likes herself to be pretty. If every one can have his or her own

most valued personal character, no matter it is the achievement one gains by working, studying, or
making lots of friends, etc., it should also be fine that one wants to value one's appearance most.
Thus, it is still a problem for Benson that what are the criteria for determining a correct or
appropriate sense of self-worth? On what basis can we conclude that one's self-evaluation is
incorrect or irrational without being hegemonic?
So far, we've seen that there always seem to be counter examples to approaches to autonomy. I
think that, instead of trying to develop a single account, a more plausible view should be that there
is no single set of conditions that are sufficient and necessary for autonomy. The account for
autonomy that we seek should be context-dependent.
In the very beginning of this essay, I've mentioned that autonomy is a concept that appears in
many contexts in our everyday lives. We often connect the concept to other concepts when needed.
It should be natural to think that under different contexts, we may need different account for
autonomy. For under different contexts, the concept of autonomy may be related to and embedded
in different networks of concepts, and hence require different conceptions. Thus, for example,
there's no doubt that a voluntary slave who procedurally independently endorses her servile lifestyle
may not, in Oshana's sense, be autonomous with respect to many of her decisions because of the
discriminating and subordinating social institutions of racism or sexism. But it is not because she
lacks the ability to make her own decisions under an otherwise more equal society. Therefore, the
fact that she is not autonomous does not give anyone any right to change her chosen way of living
in any way against her own will, at least her will that is procedurally independently formed. Since
in Oshana's case, the problem does not stem from the agent but from the society or the environment.
It is the society that should take the responsibility for any consequence it brings about to the
individual member. Therefore, what really ought to be done is not altering the agent's beliefs or
value system, but changing the social institutions and eliminating the discrimination. As for the
agents that did not live autonomous lives because of the unfriendly social conditions, we should let
them know explicitly that they can now try anything they may want to try and pursue, and give
them more resources to accommodate the errors they may encounter in the process of determining
their own end.
It is true that procedural independence cannot alone guarantee autonomy, however, it doesn't
mean that other requirements need to be also implemented into the concept of autonomy. We may
view those requirements as necessary extrinsic conditions that allows a person's autonomy to
flourish, and still maintain that only the content-neutral requirement of procedural independence as
the core conception of the concept of autonomy. And encountered situations where some other
features are also involved, e.g. the discriminating social conditions that blocks a persons access to

some life options, we need only to incorporate those other conditions, and those conditions
relations to the content-neutral conception of autonomy, then form a new context-dependent
conception of autonomy. In this way, when facing different situations where the realization of
personal autonomy encounters problems, the content-neutral conception of autonomy always retain.
The only difference are what other conditions are also incorporated into the conception, and how
are those other conditions incorporated into the conception of autonomy related to the contentneutrality idea under those contexts. Then, the only problem left is to explain why content-neutral
conception of autonomy plays such an important role?
Before answering this question, I would like to introduce Isaiah Berlins (1958) argument for
the negative concept of liberty and against the positive concept of liberty. Isaiah Berlin
distinguishes negative liberty and positive liberty as two different concepts rather than two
conceptions of the same concept. He believes these are distinct concepts because he believes that
the positive concept of liberty is really not a concept about liberty, but only a pretense. According to
Berlins definition of the two concepts, the negative concept of liberty refers to the area within
which the subject is or should left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by
other persons, while the positive concept of liberty refers to the state that a person is the source of
control or interference that determines someone to do, or be, this rather than that. Berlin notices
that, because the positive concept of liberty allows that a person not be the source of control that
determines herself to do or be this rather than that even when no other people were there to interfere
with what she is about to do or be. This indicates that there are times where an agent may be the
cause of her action but not the source of control. Therefore, Berlin concludes, the positive concept
of liberty presupposes the possibility of a persons self splitting into two, one is the self that
determines what one truly aims at, the other is the one who defies the former true self because of the
distraction from desires or other limitations. If there can be a conflict between a true self and a
limited empirical self within one person, then a person has positive liberty only if her empirical self
conforms to her true self. However, since the empirical self of a person is her actual status, it would
be a problem to properly characterize the true self to be that persons self even if that self is not
actual. Berlin examined many attempts to cope with this problem and finds that all of them
presuppose that value is objective. The true self always pursues what is objectively valuable, hence
always has authority of the limited empirical self. However, Berlin points out, if the true self is thus
understood, then the negative concept of liberty has no value at all, the freedom to choose only
provide the options for a person to depart from her true self. Therefore, he concludes, the positive
concept of liberty is in fact contradict with the concept of liberty itself.
If we accept Berlins argument for the negative concept of liberty and against the positive

concept of liberty, we are left with another difficult problem, which is why the negative concept of
liberty is valuable? If those who promotes the positive concept of liberty are correct about value,
then it would be question begging if Berlin simply denies that view of value on the ground that
negative liberty has intrinsic value. I believe, what Berlin need is a content-neutral conceptions of
the positive concept of liberty. Consider how Joseph Raz (2001) reconcile the apparent conflict
between objective value and personal value. It is often believed that if value is objective, then the
conflict between what different people value cannot be explained. This is because objective truths
cannot conflict with each other, therefore, if two person have conflicting value belief, there must at
least be one of them who is mistaken. However, given the fact that there are many conflicts between
different peoples value beliefs, it would be contentious to claim that there are many people who
make mistakes about value. In order to reconcile this apparent conflict, Raz claims that, while the
value of various objects that different people may pursue is indeed objective, the value of some
object to a particular person is personal. People have different goals and value different things
because they attach themselves to different objects by their own choice. In this way, a person may
imbue personal value onto the objectively valuable objects. This distinction made by Raz shows the
importance of the content-neutral conception of autonomy -it is just when a person autonomously
chooses to attach oneself to certain object that makes that object valuable to that person. And here
the concept of autonomy needs to be a content-neutral one because if the concept of autonomy
being applied here is not content-neutral, then no person could ever make any mistake on value
autonomously, which is no less bizarre than the idea that people makes mistakes most of the time.
Now, since the content-neutral autonomy determines what is valuable to a person, and thus
creates authority over oneself, it is no problem at all to explain why the true self is indeed ones own
self, for it is also the actual one. The conflict between the true self and the empirical self consists in
what the empirical self actually does and what the true self actually wants. And since the contentneutral autonomy imbues personal value onto those objects one autonomously choose to pursue,
then it is valuable to allow an agent to freely pursue what she autonomously choose to pursue.
Hence the value of negative liberty is also guaranteed.

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