## 1. Introduction



In Kant's famous dictum, "Autonomy of the will is the
property the will has of being a law unto itself (independently of
every property belonging to the objects of volition)" (Kant
1785, 108). Rational beings make the moral law for themselves and can
regard themselves as authors of the law. Thus autonomy is manifested
when rational agents "will" the moral law. For Kant the
moral law is a categorical, not a hypothetical, imperative. The act of
formulating a categorical imperative, and hence the moral law, is an
act of a pure autonomous will, because, unlike the formulation of a
hypothetical imperative, it is untainted by the influence of the
desires and interests that an agent may have relative to a particular
situation. (For a more detailed account, see the entry on
"Kant's Account of Reason".) A contemporary parallel
of Kant's conception of autonomy is John Rawls's
influential notion of free and rational agents formulating principles
of justice in the "original position" (Rawls 1971). Rawls
argues that rational agents formulate principles of justice from
behind a "veil of ignorance", that is, from a position in
which they are making decisions about how a society will function
before they know who in this society they will turn out to be. For
example, in the original position, agents do not know their social
status, natural abilities, or conceptions of the good (Rawls 1971,
12). Such agents, like Kantian agents, are not influenced by the
particular desires and preferences that are contingent on being
embedded in an actual situation. Because of this, their formulation of
the principles of justice is taken to be the product of a
"pure" self, and hence genuinely
*self*-originating. (For a more detailed account, see the entry
on "Original Position".)



Feminist philosophers typically reject the Kantian and Rawlsian
conceptions of autonomy. Five categories of feminist critique have
been identified (Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000b, 5-12). All of
the critiques reject both *the nature of the self* and the
*value of autonomy* implicit in the Kantian/Rawlsian account.
The notion of self implicit in the Kantian and Rawlsian accounts is
said to be "atomistic"; that is, it is abstracted from the
social relations in which actual agents are embedded. Such a
conception of the self is associated with the claim that autonomous
agents are, and ought to be, self-sufficient, which in turn is
associated with the character ideal of the "self-made
man". Feminists challenge this character ideal and question
whether self-sufficiency, or "substantive independence",
is really a value that a theory of autonomy, and normative theories in
general, should promote (Jaggar 1985; Code 1991). If autonomy is
somehow conceived as inimical to being a woman--because, for
example, being a women involves valuing social relationships of care
whereas being autonomous devalues such relationships--one denies
women, in particular, the social and political advantages associated
with the label "autonomous".



Since these initial critical reactions, feminist philosophers have
attempted to rehabilitate autonomy (e.g., Meyers 1987 and 1989; Benson
1990; Friedman 1997 and 2003; Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000a). Some
feminist philosophers have argued that articulating the conditions of
autonomous choice is vital to attempts to understand gender
oppression. The challenge facing feminist theorists is to
reconceptualize autonomy in ways that are compatible with the feminist
critiques (Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000b, 3-4).
"Relational autonomy" is the name that has been given to
feminist reconceptualizations of the notion of autonomy. The term
"relational" here may serve simply to deny that autonomy
requires self-sufficiency. If relationships of care and
interdependence are valuable and morally significant (cf. Mackenzie
& Stoljar 2000b, 8-10), then any theory of autonomy must be
"relational" in the sense that it must acknowledge that
autonomy is compatible with the agent standing in and valuing
significant family and other social relationships.
"Relational" may also deny the metaphysical notion of
atomistic personhood, emphasizing instead that persons are socially
and historically embedded, not metaphysically isolated, and shaped by
factors such as race and class. It is this latter sense of
"relational" that will be employed in the following sketch
of relational accounts.


## 2. Feminist "Hard Cases"



Why is autonomy of interest to feminists? One way to answer this
question is to examine what might be considered *failures of
autonomy* that appear to be linked to practices of gender
oppression. This section describes three examples that have been
widely discussed in the feminist literature on autonomy. These
are:


1. self-abnegation or excessive deference to the wishes of
others;
2. "adaptive preference formation" in which choices and
preferences are unconsciously accommodated to oppressive social
conditions; and
3. decisions of agents to adopt what may appear to be practices of
gender oppression--e.g., veiling--including those that seem
to produce significant physical and psychological harm to women, e.g.,
"genital cutting" (Meyers 2000a).



The examples are "hard cases" because there is
disagreement among feminists over whether (and how) the cases
illustrate diminished autonomy.


### 2.1 Self-abnegation



Several theorists (e.g., Westlund 2003, 483-4; Oshana 2006,
57-58) invoke Virginia Woolf's critique of Coventry
Patmore's poem "Angel in the House" to motivate
discussions of autonomy:



> 
> She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She
> excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself
> daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg, if there was a draught,
> she sat in it. (Woolf 1942, 59)
> 



Andrea Westlund observes that the Angel resembles Thomas Hill's
well-known example of the Deferential Wife (Westlund 2003,
485-6):



> 
> She buys the clothes *he* prefers, invites the guests
> *he* wants to entertain, and makes love whenever *he* is
> in the mood. She willingly moves to a new city in order for him to
> have a more attractive job, counting her own friendships and
> geographical preferences insignificant by comparison... She does not
> simply defer to her husband in certain spheres as a trade-off for his
> deference in other spheres. On the contrary, she tends not to form her
> own interests, values, and ideals, and when she does, she counts them
> as less important than her husband's. (Hill 1991, 5)
> 



One would think that such excessive deference would be incompatible
with autonomy. Excessive deference implies that others, not the agent
herself, are driving the agent's choice and preference
formation. However, Westlund points out that on some popular accounts
of autonomy, because the woman is *willing* to subordinate
herself or, because she *prefers* deference and values her own
opinions and interests less than she values those of her husband, she
may be considered autonomous. For example, on one influential account,
that of Harry Frankfurt, a preference is autonomous if it is one with
which the agent wholeheartedly identifies (Frankfurt 1988). As
Westlund argues, the agent here seems to identify wholeheartedly with
her preference for deference to her husband: "Hill's
character is remarkable in part because she seems so
*unambivalent* about her subservient role" (Westlund
2003, 491).



The example is of interest to feminists in the first place because the
deference and apparent preference for subservience it describes is
*gendered*. It is an outcome of systems of gender oppression
that women are expected to assume servile roles, and hence may come to
endorse, prefer or willingly adopt them. Moreover, perhaps precisely
because of the connection between these kinds of preferences and
systems of gender oppression, many feminists resist the conclusion
that the Angel and the Deferential Wife are autonomous. Thus Susan
Babbitt argues that although the Deferential Wife appears to have made
a rational judgment about what she values, and appears therefore to be
living according to her own life-plans, in fact the preference for
subservience is incompatible with her autonomy: "habitual
servility" defines her sense of self, and this is "not the
kind of self to which a concept of autonomy can be applied"
(Babbitt 1993, 250). If this is right, influential accounts of
autonomy, and those feminist positions influenced by them, will have
to be revised. (See the entry on "Feminist Moral
Psychology" for more discussion of the example of the
Deferential Wife.)


### 2.2 Adaptive preference formation



Discussions of adaptive preference formation are often found in the
literature--both feminist and nonfeminist--on rational
choice theory (Elster 1983; Superson 2005; Cudd 2006). According to
Jon Elster's classic description of adaptive preference
formation, a fox, after finding that he can no longer reach some
grapes, decides that he does not want the grapes after all. The fox
adapts his preferences to what he perceives to be the options
available to him. In order to distinguish adaptive preference
formation from preference change due to learning and other processes,
Elster proposes that the former is an unconscious process in which an
agent turns away from a preference to avoid unpleasant cognitive
dissonance that is associated with holding on to it. According to
Elster, this is a "blind psychic process operating 'behind
the back' of the person" (Elster 1983, 16; see also
Colburn 2011). Others characterize adaptive preferences as those the
agent finds herself with after "life-long habituation"
(Nussbaum 2001, 80; Sen 1995; see also Khader 2009, 2011). For
example, Martha Nussbaum describes the case of poor working women in
India who, though subjected to physical abuse by their husbands,
choose to remain in the marriage. Some women, like Vasanti, think that
the abuse "was painful and bad, but, still, a part of
women's lot in life, just something women have to put up with as
part of being a woman dependent on men, and entailed by having left
her own family to move into a husband's home" (Nussbaum
2001, 68-9).



It is increasingly noticed that adaptive preferences are formed in the
circumstances of oppression. Theorists of oppression have pointed to
the phenomenon of "deformed desire" in which "the
oppressed come to desire that which is oppressive to them...[and]
one's desires turn away from goods and even needs that, absent
those conditions, they would want" (Cudd 2006, 181). Adaptive or
deformed desires may be the result of the internalization of an
oppressive ideology:



> 
> Consider the eighteen year-old college student who excels in her
> studies, is well-liked by her many friends and acquaintances, leads an
> active, challenging life, yet who regularly feels bad about herself
> because she does not have 'the right look'... So, on
> top of everything else she does, she expends a great deal of time and
> money trying to straighten or curl her hair, to refine her cosmetic
> technique, to harden or soften her body, and so on.... (Benson
> 1991, 389)
> 



One plausible analysis of the student's psychology is that she
has internalized the oppressive norms of the fashion industry,
according to which appearance is tied to self-worth. The student has
unconsciously turned away from values that would afford her a
healthier sense of self-worth; her desire for an excessive number of
beauty treatments is deformed because it is the product of adopting
values that are oppressive to her, and it is a desire that she would
not have had absent the oppressive conditions.



Adaptive or deformed preferences have been taken to be
"paradigmatically nonautonomous" (Taylor 2009, 71). For
instance, feminists working on rational choice theory tend to assume
that deformed desires are incompatible with rational choice and
autonomous choice, or at least that they arise only in contexts in
which autonomy is already damaged (e.g., Superson 2005, 109). However,
reactions to adaptive preferences vary in the literature on autonomy
(Stoljar 2014; Terlazzo 2016). Marilyn Friedman suggests that women
who choose to remain in abusive relationships may be autonomous. For
Friedman, adapting to an abusive relationship is in principle
compatible with the critical reflection that is sufficient for
autonomy; such women may have endorsed the preference to remain and
may have rejected competing options (Friedman 2003, 146).
(Friedman's "procedural" account of autonomy will be
discussed in detail in SS4.) Other autonomy theorists argue along
similar lines, leaving open the possibility that adaptive preferences
could count as autonomous. Andrea Westlund argues that women could
"freely and authentically" be committed to norms that
subordinate them, as long as they are answerable to others for their
commitment to these norms (e.g., Westlund 2009, 29; see SS7 of the
current entry).


### 2.3 Practices of oppression



The third set of cases that has attracted attention among feminist
autonomy theorists are those in which agents appear to
self-consciously adopt (what are alleged to be) practices of
oppression (such as the Islamic practice of veiling), participate in
practices of oppression that severely curtail women's options
(such as arranged marriages) or subject women to physical harm (such
as 'female circumcision' or clitoridectomy). Adopting such
practices need not be the result of accommodation or adaptation; it
need not be the result of an attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance
at an unconscious level, or of resigned habituation to oppressive
circumstances. Rather, the practices in question can be the explicit
requirements of a society or culture, and self-consciously promoted by
women themselves. Uma Narayan describes a community of women in India,
the Sufi Pirzadi, who "live in relative purdah (seclusion)
within the home and are expected to veil when they are in
public" (Narayan 2002, 420). These women acknowledge that purdah
severely limits their education and mobility, and has the effect of
making them dependent on male members of the community. But they also
explicitly recognize benefits, for instance, that veiling signifies
"womanly modesty and propriety" and their "superior
standing vis-a-vis other Muslim women" (Narayan 2002,
420-1).



Some theorists of autonomy (e.g., Oshana 2006) claim that severely
constraining external conditions are autonomy-undermining. Other
theorists are more circumspect, urging that women subject to
constraining practices should not be characterized as "compliant
dupes of patriarchy" (Narayan 2002, 420) and that women living
under oppressive regimes *could* autonomously accept their
conditions (Christman 2004, 152; Westlund 2009, 29). Diana Meyers
writes, for instance, that "there are women [participating in
the practice of female genital cutting] who conclude that cultural
tradition or cohesion or getting married and bearing children are more
important than bodily integrity" and that therefore "we
would need far more consensus than we presently have (or are likely to
get)...before we could conclude that women who opt for compliance
with female genital cutting norms never do so autonomously"
(Meyers 2000a, 479).



We see, then, that feminist philosophers have responded to the hard
cases in different ways. The following sections provide a more
detailed elaboration of the theoretical positions behind these
different responses.


## 3. Relational Autonomy



The cases above draw attention to the fact that there is disagreement
among theorists of autonomy, and among feminist theorists, over
whether they are examples in which the agent's autonomy is
diminished.



One way to resolve the disagreement might be to adopt what could be
called a "thin" or "minimalist" conception of
autonomy. On this conception, agents are autonomous just in case
certain minimal conditions for human flourishing obtain, because the
preferences, choices, and so forth that one adopts in this state of
well-functioning should be considered to be "one's
own". Sarah Buss, for example, advocates such a position:



> 
> The key to...self-governing agency is the distinction between a
> healthy human being and a human being who suffers from some
> psychological or physiological 'affliction' (e.g., intense
> pain, fear, anxiety, fatigue, depression, and obsession). (Buss 2005,
> 215)
> 



An agent's autonomy is impaired, therefore, *only if* she
suffers an affliction that is severe enough to distort and pathologize
her capacity for reasoning; the default position is that she is
autonomous. Narayan also suggests a thin conception of autonomy:



> 
> A person's choice should be considered autonomous as long as the
> person was a 'normal adult' with no serious cognitive or
> emotional impairments and was not subject to literal outright coercion
> by others. (Narayan 2002, 429)
> 



On minimalist conceptions of autonomy, most of the agents described in
the hard cases would be autonomous because minimal conditions for
flourishing obtain and there is no pathology, cognitive impairment, or
direct coercion present. This characterization has its theoretical
advantages. For example, Narayan is concerned to limit the
justification for state interference in individual voluntary choice; a
minimalist conception may indeed be acceptable for use in theories
that regulate relations between the citizen and the state or to
address issues of paternalism (Holroyd 2009).



But minimalism is not the norm within the feminist literature on
autonomy. It is true that oppressive social conditions do not
typically produce pathologies or cognitive impairments; neither do the
social conditions of oppression usually constitute direct coercion
sufficient to erode autonomy. However, minimalism overlooks the
complex effects of gender norms and oppressive social conditions on
agency (e.g., Bierria 2014; Liebow 2016; Johnston 2017). The hard
cases are hard because they suggest that gender norms and oppressive
conditions, *in addition* to factors such as cognitive
impairment or direct coercion, potentially undermine or erode
agents' capacities for autonomy. Yet it is not clear precisely
how this happens.



Feminist or "relational" theories of autonomy attempt to
answer the question of how internalized oppression and oppressive
social conditions undermine or erode agents' autonomy. These
theories will be sketched in SS4-8. Before turning to these
theories, some preliminary classifications should be made. Relational
theories may be classified as either


1. *procedural*, *strongly* *substantive,* or
*weakly substantive*, versus
2. *causal* or *constitutive*.



The procedural/substantive distinction within relational conceptions
parallels a distinction within the literature on autonomy more
generally (Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000b, 12-21). Procedural
theories have dominated the debate since the 1970s (Dworkin 1988;
Frankfurt 1988). They claim that autonomy is achieved when the agent
undergoes, or has the capacity to undergo, an internal intellectual
process of reflecting on her motivations, beliefs, and values, and
then revising her preferences in the light of such reflection. This
process is said to be "content-neutral" because the
outcomes of the process of critical reflection, whatever their
content, will be autonomous. Substantive theories claim that autonomy
is a value-laden notion. According to "strong substantive"
approaches, "the contents of the preferences or values that
agents can form or act on autonomously are subject to direct normative
constraints" (Benson 2005a, 133). A preference to be enslaved or
to be subservient cannot be autonomous on strong substantive accounts
(e.g., Charles 2010). "Weak substantive" approaches build
in normative content, and hence are substantive, yet they do not place
direct normative constraints on the contents of agents'
preferences (Benson 2005a; Richardson 2001). For example, some
accounts require that agents exhibit moral attitudes to themselves
such as self-respect or a robust sense of their own self-worth to
count as autonomous (Govier 1993; McLeod 2002).



In addition to the procedural/substantive dimension, relational
conceptions may be classified as either *causal* or
*constitutive*. Causal conceptions acknowledge the impact of
both social relationships and socio-historical circumstances on
agents' capacities. Annette Baier points out that agents are
"second persons", that is, "persons are essentially
successors, heirs to other persons who formed and cared for
them" (Baier 1985, 85). On this view, an agent's social
relationships influence the development of autonomy: "if we ask
ourselves what actually enables people to be autonomous, the answer is
not isolation, but relationships--with parents, teachers,
friends, loved ones" (Nedelsky 1989, 12). If social
relationships *cause* autonomy to develop, a lack of
appropriate social relationships can also stunt its development
(Friedman 1997). Similarly, social and historical conditions (such as
oppressive gender socialization) may promote or impede the capacity
for autonomy (e.g., Meyers 1989).



Causal accounts investigate the effects of external
"relational" factors on agents' autonomy; they do
not offer an *analysis* of autonomy using such external
factors. On *constitutively relational* accounts, however,
interpersonal or social conditions are part of the "defining
conditions" of autonomy (Christman 2004, 147). Suppose, for
instance, that an agent is subject to severely constraining external
conditions such as slavery. Marina Oshana argues that such external
conditions are incompatible with autonomy because autonomy is a
temporally extended, "global" condition of agents in which
they have "*de facto* power and authority over choices
and actions significant to the direction of [their lives]"
(Oshana 2006, 2). Severely constraining external conditions remove the
de facto power required for autonomy. Other theorists who adopt
constitutive accounts focus rather on *local* autonomy, namely,
what is required for choices, preferences, or desires *at
particular times* to count as autonomous. Suppose, for instance,
that autonomous choice at a particular time requires that agents have
available to them a "wide enough range of...significant
options" at that time (Brison 2000, 285). This account of local
autonomy is constitutively relational because no matter how robust an
agents' psychological capacities, if the relevant external
conditions do not obtain at a time, it is not possible for the
agent's preference at that time to be autonomous.



The procedural/substantive distinction cuts across the
causal/constitutive distinction. Procedural theories are typically
*causally* relational (see SS4). For instance, although the
features required for autonomy on procedural accounts--e.g.,
critical reflection--can be affected by oppressive socialization,
it is in principle possible for the critical faculties of agents in
oppressive environments, even including those who endorse oppressive
norms, to be fully intact and hence for them to be fully autonomous.
An important feature of procedural theories, however, is their
content-neutral or formal aspect. Andrea Westlund has recently
endorsed what she calls a formal and constitutively relational
position in which interpersonal conditions are included in the
definition of autonomy (see SS7). Therefore, content-neutral
theories can be constitutively relational. Moreover, weak substantive
theories can be causally relational. Weak substantive theories build
in moral self-regarding attitudes such as self-respect as necessary
conditions of autonomy. Although these attitudes may be affected by
interpersonal and other external conditions, weak substantive theories
need not employ the external conditions as defining conditions of
autonomy (see SS6). However, strong substantive theories that
place direct constraints on the contents of the preferences permitted
for autonomous agents are constitutively relational because, on strong
substantive theories, external conditions are necessary conditions of
autonomy (see SS8).


## 4. Procedural Conceptions



This section outlines two versions of procedural and content-neutral
conceptions that are well-known in the feminist literature: those of
Marilyn Friedman and Diana Tietjens Meyers.



Procedural conceptions have been prominent in the standard literature
on autonomy from the 1970s to the present day (e.g., Dworkin 1988;
Frankfurt 1988; Christman 2009). These conceptions have been adopted
in different forms by feminist theorists. The concept of
content-neutrality has been an extremely important tool in the
feminist rehabilitation of autonomy and procedural conceptions are
attractive to feminists in large part due to their content-neutrality.
Many feminists hesitate to embrace autonomy because of its
associations with "masculinist" ideals such as those
exemplified in the "self-made man", namely, substantive
independence and self-reliance, social isolation and hyper-rationality
(Jaggar 1985; Code 1991). However, on content-neutral conceptions,
there is no value or set of preferences that an autonomous person must
endorse. Preferences for relationships of care and dependency such as
those within marriage or other family structures can be just as
autonomous as preferences for self-reliance or relative social
isolation; preferences for cultural and religious norms into which
agents are born can be just as autonomous as preferences to repudiate
these norms, and so on. The device of content-neutrality also respects
feminist attempts to preserve the differences among and the
multiplicity of agents. Feminists noticed that agents'
life-plans and conceptions of the good will be influenced by a
diversity of social factors such as race, class, and gender (Friedman
2003; Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000b; Meyers 1989, 2002). Hence they
argue that theories of autonomy must be neutral with respect to
life-plans and conceptions of the good. According to some feminists, a
theory of autonomy should not "homogenize" agents (Meyers
2000a, 480), nor should it impose feminist, liberal, or any other
ideals on agents in the name of autonomy. Content-neutrality allows
that the preferences of autonomous agents could be *wrong* from
another perspective, either morally or because they do not align with
the agent's best interests. Many theorists consider that a
criterion of a correct theory of autonomy is that it distinguish
between *self*-rule and *right*-rule (Benson 2005a).
Content-neutrality ensures that self-rule does not collapse into
right-rule, and further that agents are protected from the risk of
paternalistic interference in their decisions.



Procedural conceptions characterize autonomous agents--agents
whose preferences and desires are genuinely *their
own*--as those who critically reflect *in the appropriate
way* to evaluate their preferences, motives, and desires. Such
approaches are often *hierarchical* (employing a hierarchy of
mental states to explain autonomy) as well as *structural*
(proposing conditions that an agent's *existing*
motivational state must satisfy). One well-known example of a
hierarchical and structural approach is that of Harry Frankfurt. On
Frankfurt's account, autonomy requires "wholehearted
identification" at a higher-order level with lower-order
motives, preferences, or desires (Frankfurt 1988). These structural
and ahistorical approaches have been subject to many cogent objections
(Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000b; Taylor 2005b). One important
difficulty is the "problem of manipulation" in which it is
supposed that a hypnotist inserts into an agent a mental state
structure that is sufficient for autonomy (see, e.g., Taylor 2005b).
On structural accounts, this agent counts as autonomous when she
appears not to be.



The procedural conceptions defended by Friedman and Meyers exemplify
an alternative approach in which autonomy is not tied to the
structural features of an occurrent mental state but rather is
achieved when the agent undergoes a *historical* process of
critical reflection. John Christman is an important proponent in the
standard literature of the historical approach (Christman 1991;
Christman 2009; see also Mele 1995). For Christman, as for many others
who adopt procedural conceptions, autonomous agents must be both
reflectively competent and authentic. The test for authenticity on his
account is historical and counterfactual: an agent is authentic with
respect to a certain preference or desire if and only if she did not
resist the development of the preference or desire when attending to
the process of its development, or would *not have* resisted
had she attended to the process (Christman 1990; Christman 1991, 346).
In recent work, Christman develops the notion of
*nonalienation* as the test of authenticity: an agent is
authentic with respect to a desire if and only if, were she to
critically reflect on the historical processes leading to the desire,
she would not be alienated from the desire, where
"alienation" is understood as either a negative judgment
about or a negative emotional reaction to the desire (Christman 2009,
144, 155-6).



Friedman employs the related idea of *reflective endorsement*:
a process of critical reflection can result in either endorsement and
wholehearted commitment to one's preferences and desires, to
wholehearted repudiation of the preferences or desires, or to
half-hearted commitment to the preferences or desires (Friedman 2003,
4-5). Friedman says that "when an agent chooses or acts in
accord with wants or desires that she has self-reflectively endorsed,
then she is autonomous" (Friedman 2003, 5). Agents acting on
desires that satisfy this condition are acting authentically and on
their deepest commitments.



On Friedman's conception, and on procedural accounts in general,
there is no reason in principle why choosing subservience, or adopting
oppressive norms, could not be autonomous. An example considered by
Friedman is that of a preference to remain in an abusive domestic
relationship due to adherence to religious or moral norms of marriage.
The preference may be adaptive in the sense described in SS2 if
the agent has unconsciously adjusted her preferences to accommodate
the circumstances, thinking she has no other feasible options.
Friedman comments that if these religious or moral norms are the ones
the agent "really cares about", her preference to remain
is autonomous. She writes:



> 
> Someone's self-reflections and choices under those conditions
> are less likely than otherwise to be reliable reflections of what she
> really cares about. Yet it is not impossible to discern or act
> according to one's deeper concerns under coercive conditions.
> (Friedman 2003, 146)
> 



The agent may even recognize that choosing to remain in an abusive
relationship is in effect to choose a situation in which her own
future autonomy may be compromised. But, as Friedman points out,
autonomy is not the only value, and, the case could be explained as
the agent ranking her own future autonomy against other values of
importance to her. In the agent's calculations, future autonomy
is ranked below other considerations; it is not overriding.



Friedman nevertheless is reluctant to treat such agents as autonomous
to the highest degree. She proposes a "threshold" account.
That is, when the preference for a traditional role of subservience,
or to remain in an abusive relationship, reflects the agent's
deepest commitments, it meets a threshold and hence is autonomous.
However, although these agents are locally autonomous relative to
these preferences, they are *less* autonomous than agents who
altogether repudiate what Friedman calls "autonomy-devaluing
norms" (Friedman 2003, 24).



Meyers introduces the notion of "autonomy competency" to
spell out her procedural conception. In an early paper, Meyers
describes acting autonomously as "the difference between doing
what one wants and doing what one really wants. The autonomous self is
not identical with the apparent self; it is an authentic or
'true' self" (Meyers 1987, 619). For Meyers, the
authentic self emerges when a person exercises the "agentic
skills" that characterize autonomous people:



> 
> Autonomous people exercise a repertoire of skills to engage in
> self-discovery, self-definition and self-direction, and...the
> authentic self is the evolving collocation of attributes that emerges
> in this ongoing process of reflection, deliberation and action.
> (Meyers 2005, 49)
> 



She argues that the skills necessary for the authentic self to be
realized can be damaged by gender socialization. In the case of
Western women, the "emotional receptivity and
perceptiveness" that is encouraged in women is likely to enhance
the skill of self-discovery and hinder those of self-definition and
direction; whereas for men in Western cultures the opposite is likely
to be the case (Mackenzie & Stoljar 2000b, 18).



Meyers endorses the content-neutrality of the procedural account
because she considers that substantive or
"value-saturated" accounts of autonomy limit the
life-plans and conceptions of the good available to autonomous agents,
and undermine the possibility of diversity. However, in an analysis of
the practice of "genital cutting", she acknowledges that
"value-neutral" approaches to autonomy, such as her own,
should not "[neglect] the possibility that a well-integrated and
smoothly functioning self could be in need of rigorous scrutiny and
drastic overhaul" (2000a, 480). Meyers argues for the importance
in such cases of education programs that "augment
autonomy" because "[s]uccessful education programs
mobilize women's introspection, imagination and imagination
skills". For example:



> 
> One program invited women to explore their feelings about their
> sexuality...[and encouraged them] to acknowledge the complexity
> of their emotional lives and to take their own subjectivity seriously.
> Another...invited women to empathize with [women who had become
> infected] and the grief of the families of women and girls who had
> died... [Another invited] women to imagine the lives of women
> whose cultures are different but whose religion is the same as their
> own. (Meyers 2000a, 485)
> 



Meyers's account implies, then, that certain specific elements
of the critical reflection required for autonomy--namely,
introspection and imagination--can be damaged by oppressive
practices. Moreover, if agents lack self-respect due to being
subjected to oppression, they may not achieve autonomy competency.
Meyers proposes that self-respect is necessary to achieve the
self-realization required for autonomy competency, although it
"cannot be construed as a masculine or perfectionist
value" (Meyers 1989, 208; compare Dillon's feminist
conception of self-respect in Dillon 1992). Due to the presence of a
moral notion of self-respect in Meyers's account, it has been
questioned whether the account is really value-neutral. In one sense,
her account *is* content-neutral: the life-plan that an
autonomous agent can define for herself is not constrained by moral or
other requirements; it does not have to be a moral life-plan or one
that is otherwise good for the agent to undertake. In another sense,
because of the role of self-nurturing and self-respect without which
the exercise of autonomy competency would not be possible,
Meyers's account could be said to have "weak normative
substance" and hence be weakly substantive (Benson 2005a).



Friedman's and Meyers's conceptions of autonomy illustrate
four features of autonomy that have been influential in subsequent
feminist work. First, their conceptions of autonomy are (causally)
relational. Meyers considers the impact of oppressive
*socialization* on autonomy competency. Friedman considers the
impact of familial and community *relationships* (Friedman
2003, 97). Restrictive or oppressive social relationships may hamper
an agent's ability to develop the capacity for critical
reflection that is required for autonomy, or they may provide role
models, self-trust, self-confidence, and so forth, which enhance the
capacity (Friedman 2003, 97).



Second, both Friedman and Meyers claim that autonomy is a matter of
degree. On Friedman's conception, autonomy comes in degrees
because an agent's capacity for critical reflection may operate
at different levels of sophistication depending on the agent's
socialization and educational background. Meyers distinguishes
*episodic* or *local* autonomy--the capacity to
decide in particular situations--from *programmatic*
autonomy, which is the capacity to decide major life issues (e.g.,
whether to be a mother, or whether to dedicate oneself to the pursuit
of a career). Meyers thinks that oppressive socialization hampers
programmatic autonomy but not necessarily local autonomy (Mackenzie
& Stoljar 2000b, 18). For example, oppressive socialization
(which, for instance, might value marriage or motherhood over a career
or financial independence) may truncate the range of options that
girls consider to be viable, thus interfering with their programmatic
autonomy. They may nevertheless have strongly developed critical
reasoning faculties that allow them a high degree of competency to
exercise local autonomy skills. If an agent is capable of local
autonomy but not programmatic autonomy, she has autonomy only to a
degree.



Third, Friedman and Meyers reject the association of autonomy with
hyper-rationality or (overly) cognitive aspects of the self. Friedman
notes that the "self-reflections that make choices and actions
autonomous need not be conscious" and that "autonomous
choice...does not need to be highly deliberate or
deliberated" (Friedman 2003, 8). Moreover, feelings may
constitute "reasons" on Friedman's view:
"emotions and desires, as well as imagination, can constitute a
kind of reflection on or attention to objects or values of
concern" (Friedman 2003, 10). Meyers also repudiates the
"hyper-rational" construal of the skills that are
necessary for autonomy on her theory. In recent work, she has focused
on the relational and embodied dimensions of the self to ask whether
autonomy skills can be exercised by what she calls the
"self-as-embodied" and the
"self-as-relational" (Meyers 2005). There is little
discussion in the literature on autonomy of the embodied dimensions of
agency and autonomy, so here Meyers has identified a fruitful avenue
of further research (see also Mackenzie 2001).



Fourth, Meyers addresses the question of whether the authentic or
"true self" required for autonomy must be unified (Meyers
2000b). Notions such as wholehearted endorsement seem to imply a
further requirement of coherence among mental states. Indeed, Benson
suggests that coherence is a feature common to procedural conceptions
that are "identity-based", namely, those claiming that
preferences and actions are "genuinely my *own* because
they are appropriately related to my identity" (Benson 2005b,
102-3). An important theme in contemporary feminist thought,
however, is the rejection of the position that coherence is necessary
for an agent's sense of identity. Rather, identity is said to be
"intersectional": an agent's sense of self is
subject to multiple and intersecting modes of oppression, for
instance, those of class, gender, race, and sexuality (e.g., Crenshaw
1991). Intersecting oppressions can lead to ambivalence or to a sense
of self in which preferences pull in competing directions (e.g.,
Benson 2005b, 105-6). Meyers argues for a conception of
authenticity that incorporates the lessons of intersectionality
(Meyers 2000b).



The procedural theories defended by feminists have many strengths, the
most noteworthy of which is the commitment to content-neutrality.
However, procedural theories have been found wanting by critics for
two important reasons. First, they do not put enough weight on the
effects of internalized oppression on agents' motivational
states. And, second, procedural theories overlook the constitutive
role of external conditions in the definition of autonomy. Consider
agents for whom certain norms are ingrained through oppressive
socialization, such as the eighteen-year-old student described in
SS2. She treats norms about beauty and fashion as important and
perhaps overriding reasons for action because she has internalized the
idea that appearance is a criterion of self-worth. Due to the effects
of the oppressive ideology, the agent treats false stereotypes as
"natural", and formulates desires and plans based on the
stereotype. On procedural accounts, false stereotypes that have been
internalized by the agent may well be the agent's *own*
because they may be the products of reflective endorsement or the
exercise of autonomy competency. This conclusion seems inadequate to
many authors. For example, Benson has objected to Christman's
version of a historical procedural account that, in cases like that of
the student, because the norms are so deeply ingrained, it is not
plausible to think that she resisted or even *would have*
resisted the process of development of the stereotype even had she
been aware of the process (Benson 1991). Hence procedural accounts
often cannot adequately explain why cases of internalized oppression
appear to be nonautonomous. A second reason that procedural approaches
have been deemed unsatisfactory is that it has been argued that
severely constraining external circumstances, including the lack of a
sufficient number of real options, compromise agents' freedom
and autonomy (Raz 1988; Brison 2000; Nussbaum 2001; Oshana 2006).


## 5. Normative Competency Conceptions



In his early work, Paul Benson offered a *normative competence*
conception of "free agency" that, he argued, was congenial
to feminist interpretations of moral and political agency (Benson
1987; 1990; 1991). For our purposes, Benson's proposal can be
treated as an account of autonomy because the capacity for free agency
is also thought of as a capacity for exercising agency that is
one's *own*. As Benson points out, both Gary Watson and
Susan Wolf adopt versions of normative competence views. Watson claims
that endorsement is insufficient for autonomy because doing
"what one wants"--that is to say, doing what one has
endorsed--is compatible with mere *intentional* agency and
does not provide the further element required to guarantee
*autonomous* agency (Watson 1975, 205; compare Buss 1994).
Watson proposes that "if what I do flows from my values and
ends, there is a...sense in which my activities are inescapably
my own" (Watson 1996, 233; quoted in Benson 2005b, 103). This
modification of the endorsement view, although it introduces values
into the analysis of autonomy, suffers from the same objection as the
purely procedural theories discussed in the last section. For if an
agent such as the student mentioned above has so effectively
internalized oppressive norms that she values them and treats them as
her ends, then it is questionable whether they are genuinely her
own.



Susan Wolf adopts a normative competence view in which the capacity
that is essential for autonomy is the capacity to track objective
moral reasons. Wolf considers agents who have experienced a morally
impoverished or distorting socialization. For instance, JoJo is the
son of an evil and sadistic tyrant who has been raised to respect his
father's values and emulate his desires, so that he thoroughly
internalizes his father's evil and sadistic worldview. Suppose
that on procedural theories, JoJo counts as autonomous because he
endorses his desires in the appropriate ways, has the desires he
*really* wants, and so forth. Wolf proposes that he is neither
free nor morally responsible because his upbringing has undermined his
capacity to distinguish right from wrong: "[i]t is unclear
whether anyone with a childhood such as his could have developed into
anything but the twisted and perverse sort of person that he has
become" (Wolf 1987, 54). On Wolf's account, the failure of
autonomy is a failure of a capacity to track an objective aspect of
the world, namely, "the moral" or "the right".
Since for Wolf the demands of morality are equivalent to the demands
of objective "Reason", in order to be autonomous, agents
must be capable of discerning the requirements of Reason.



Benson employs a parallel notion of normative competence, though it
does not does require a capacity to track objective morality, but
rather an ability to identify and deploy norms that are appropriate to
a particular domain (1987, 486). He writes that:



> 
> [F]ree agency requires normative competence, an array of abilities to
> be aware of applicable normative standards, to appreciate those
> standards, and to bring them competently to bear in one's
> evaluations of open courses of action...At the heart of free
> agency is the power of our actions to reveal who we are, both to
> ourselves and to others, in the context of potential normative
> assessments of what we do. (Benson 1990, 54)
> 



Autonomy based on normative competence is compatible with feminist
reinterpretations of moral and political agency because it is
relational in three respects (Benson 1990, 55). First, normative
competence is "other-directed" in that "it makes
certain normative characteristics of the agent present to
others". Second, the content of normative competence
"depends on the particular norms or standards in relation to
which an agent's freedom may be determined" (Benson 1990,
55). Third, the normative standpoint relative to particular domains is
that of "persons and institutions with whom (or which) one is
concretely connected by friendship, family, work, neighborhood"
(Benson 1990, 55).



It is plausible that the oppression experienced by marginalized groups
interferes with their normative competence. The psychological harms of
oppression include false consciousness (the agent adopts as true the
false ideology that oppresses her) and deformed desires (the
agent's desires depend on the belief in the false ideology)
(Cudd 2006, 176, 182). At worst, agents in the grip of false
consciousness in a particular domain do not have the capacity relative
to that domain to latch on to alternative, applicable, or
"correct" standards and apply them to evaluate their
preferences and desires. At best, they are faced with a contradictory
set of norms:



> 
> If many of the prevailing norms which enter into what normative
> competence practically means for most women in the society are norms
> that function to suppress or trivialize women's contributions
> and experience, to deny women dignity as full participants in the life
> of the community, then free agency would seem to confront women as a
> self-destructive goal. (Benson 1990, 57)
> 



In other words, attempting to exercise normative competence (that is,
to promote autonomy) relative to the prevailing norms entails adopting
a set of norms that is oppressive to oneself. Benson suggests that, in
order to promote autonomy, members of marginal groups will need to
develop alternative norms through grassroots activities such as
consciousness-raising. 



Benson is careful to point out that a requirement of normative
competence should not be conflated with a strong substantive
conception of autonomy in which the theory places direct normative
constraints on the contents of the preferences of autonomous agents.
Even on Wolf's position, in which normative competence is the
ability to track objective moral norms, normative competence is
nevertheless a *capacity*. It does not require that the content
of agents' preferences correspond to the content of the
applicable norms. As Benson puts it, "normatively competent
persons can choose what is unreasonable or wrong or value what is bad,
because competence lies some distance short of perfect evaluative
perception or responsiveness" (Benson 2005a, 133-4).
However, there are controversial issues raised by normative competence
accounts. The first is that of the status of the moral and other norms
that are employed to explicate normative competence. Wolf's
claim that there are objective moral reasons that rational agents have
the capacity to track is controversial despite being a well-known and
widely supported position. Benson's normative standpoints are
not derived from objective moral reasons but rather are
intersubjective standpoints--those derived from "persons or
institutions to which the agent is concretely connected". The
problem here, as we have seen, is that such standpoints may be
oppressive to the group in which the agent is a member. Indeed, as a
result of internalized oppression, the agent may competently deploy
these standards to evaluate her own actions. It seems, for example,
that the eighteen-year-old student is competent to evaluate her
actions using oppressive norms such as "beauty is a component of
self-worth". She is normatively competent with respect to the
prevailing set of intersubjective norms (those of the oppressive
ideology). If the student is to be characterized as lacking autonomy,
she must be judged lacking in normative competence from some other
normative standpoint--but where does this other standpoint come
from on Benson's account? A final difficulty for normative
competence accounts is the charge that they conflate autonomy with
moral responsibility. In the case of JoJo, for example, although it is
plausible that the comprehensiveness of his socialization absolves him
from full moral responsibility for his acts, it may be too quick to
conclude that his acts are not the product of his own (autonomous)
agency. The wish to maintain a conceptual distinction between
responsibility and autonomy has led Benson to revise his early
normative competence approach (Benson 1994, 665).


## 6. Emotions and Self-regarding Attitudes



The accounts of autonomy surveyed so far offer necessary and
sufficient conditions of autonomy that are, broadly speaking,
rationalistic. On Friedman's procedural and content-neutral
approach, an agent's preference is autonomous if and only if
certain processes of critical reflection have been followed. On
Meyers's competency account, an agent is autonomous when the
authentic self emerges as a result of the exercise of the cognitive
skills of self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction. On
Benson's normative competence account, an agent must have the
intellectual capacity to discern applicable norms in order to count as
autonomous. Although these accounts are nuanced and recognize the role
of emotion in critical reflection, none explicitly treat emotions as
necessary conditions of autonomy.



This section sketches a family of approaches that argue that the
reasoning processes and the intellectual competencies described above
are not sufficient for autonomy (even assuming that they are
necessary) (Govier 1993; Benson 1994). These approaches propose that
certain emotional states and attitudes to oneself are further
necessary conditions; autonomy is undermined when these emotional
states are damaged. There is a close connection between the
undermining of such states and oppression. The indirect effects of
oppression include the harms of shame and loss of self-esteem (Cudd
2006, 176-8; compare Benson 1994, 657-9), which in turn
can lead to self-doubt, and the loss of self-confidence and
self-trust.



Both Trudy Govier (1993) and Carolyn McLeod (2002) argue that
self-trust is a necessary condition of autonomy. Govier claims that
"[p]rocedural autonomy has as its necessary condition a reliance
on one's own critical reflection and judgment, and that reliance
is possible only if one has, and can maintain against criticism, a
sense of one's own basic competence and worth" (1993,
103-4). Govier proposes that other self-regarding attitudes,
such as self-respect and self-esteem, are integral components of
self-trust. She looks at the experiences of rape and incest victims to
illustrate the ways in which self-trust can be eroded. Women who are
the victims of rape or incest "tended to blame themselves,
de-value themselves, and to have a diminished sense of their own
competence and judgment after the sexual assaults..."
(Govier 1993, 101). Govier concludes that lack of self-trust and a
diminished sense of one's own competence undermine the
reflection required for autonomy.



Carolyn McLeod focuses on medical contexts to elaborate how self-trust
is necessary for autonomy. Consider Anna, who suffered a miscarriage
at six weeks gestation and afterwards felt considerable emotional
turmoil (McLeod 2002, 53). McLeod analyzes Anna's sense of
incompetence to articulate her emotions as in part a result of
others' lack of sympathy for her grief and corresponding failure
to reinforce her feelings: "[O]ften women and their partners are
pressured not to grieve after miscarriage because people tend not to
view the fetus's death as an event that warrants grief"
(McLeod 2002, 53). Comments such as "it was a blessing in
disguise" or "it could have been worse; you could have
lost a baby" fail to "give uptake to [women's]
feelings" (McLeod 2002, 55). The attitudes of others affect
agents' sense of competence, self-worth, and self-trust. When
these self-regarding attitudes are diminished, so is an agent's
autonomy.



For McLeod, self-trust is an "attitude of optimism about our own
competence and moral integrity" (McLeod 2002, 6). McLeod's
account differs from Govier's in that her conception of
self-trust is explicitly *moral*: in "acting
autonomously, we strive to meet moral responsibilities to the
self" (McLeod 2002, 122). Being autonomous requires treating
oneself well in a moral sense (McLeod 2002, pp. 121-126). Thus
although Govier's notion of self-trust seems to be compatible
with value-neutral procedural accounts of autonomy, McLeod's is
not. Rather, McLeod's account is "'weakly
substantive" because she claims that certain moral attitudes to
oneself--for example, attitudes affirming one's own moral
worth--are necessary to acting autonomously. Moreover, on
McLeod's account, the self-trust necessary for autonomy is
(epistemically) "justified self-trust": for instance,
self-trust or self-distrust is not justified if agents overestimate or
underestimate their competence in certain contexts (McLeod 2002, 104).
Hence, for McLeod, there are epistemic as well as moral constraints on
autonomy.



McLeod's examples illustrate the ways in which interpersonal
conditions affect agents' abilities for self-trust and hence
their autonomy. Benson (1994) develops a similar line of thought. He
describes a case of a woman with a certain personality type (Benson
1994, 555-7): she is excitable, imaginative, and passionate, and
is "prone to emotional outbursts in public" (Benson 1994,
556). The woman's husband, whom the woman trusts, is a
physician, and his response is to "medicalize" his
wife's personality type as psychologically unstable and
"hysterical". The husband treats his wife as if she were
crazy. As Benson describes it, the woman's response is
helplessness and disorientation leading to lost self-worth. The
husband's and the establishment's attitude to the woman
radically affect her self-conception; it becomes destabilized and her
self-confidence is eroded. Moreover, the woman does not resist the
process through which she loses her self-worth because "she
arrives at her sense of incompetence and estrangement...on the
basis of reasons that are valued by a scientific establishment which
is socially validated and which she trusts" (Benson 1994, 657).
Benson argues that although the woman's critical reasoning
faculties are intact, she nevertheless lacks autonomy because of a
diminished sense of self-worth.



Govier, McLeod, and Benson introduce new tools for thinking about the
hard cases described in SS2. Agents in oppressive circumstances
may have excellent skills of critical reflection, yet in these
circumstances they are subject to others' attitudes according to
which they are suited only for subservient roles, that they are of
inferior worth, that they are not capable of being full participants
in society or in a decision-making process, and so forth. These
attitudes have the effect of eroding their self-trust,
self-confidence, and sense of self-worth. For example, although the
reasoning skills of the Deferential Wife may be intact--she may
have reflected on her wish to always cater to her husband, and
endorsed it--she may nevertheless have a diminished sense of
self-worth as a result of the subtle effects of gender oppression. If
she does not treat herself as worthy of being the "author of her
own conduct", she will lack autonomy (Benson 1994, 659).



Govier's position is *causally* relational: interpersonal
conditions affect the emotions, which in turn affect the capacities
for critical reflection required for autonomy. However, McLeod's
and Benson's positions are constitutively relational because the
self-regarding attitudes necessary for autonomy are themselves
understood as constitutively relational. We saw that McLeod adopts a
*moral* notion of justified self-trust as necessary for
autonomy, which makes hers a weak substantive position. Her position
is also constitutively relational because agents can be wrong to trust
themselves, for example, when they overestimate their own competence.
Hence features of the world--facts about the agent's
competence--are necessary for justified self-trust that in turn
is necessary for autonomy. Benson claims that although what is
required for a sense of self-worth will be different in different
agents, nevertheless there is a common feature: "the sense of
worthiness to act that is necessary for free agency involves regarding
oneself as being competent to answer for one's conduct in the
light of normative demands that, from one's point of view,
others might appropriately apply to one's actions" (Benson
1994, 660). The definition of self-worth required for autonomy on
Benson's analysis employs interpersonal relations and hence his
account is constitutively relational.


## 7. Dialogical Conceptions



A discussion of self-regarding attitudes raises the question of the
interrelation between self-interpretation and interpretation of the
self by others. Charles Taylor comments on the dialogical nature of
the social self. Taylor writes that "we define our identity
always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our
significant others want to see in us" (Taylor 1994, 28; compare
Oshana 2005, 78). In the same vein, several authors pursue
"dialogical" conceptions of autonomy in which an
agent's *answerability to others* is the key condition.
As we saw above, Benson explicates the notion of self-worth as in part
a requirement of "regarding oneself as being competent to answer
for one's conduct" (Benson 1994, 660). He develops this
idea in recent work to argue that autonomous agents are those who
treat themselves as answerable for their conduct, who claim the
authority to speak for themselves (Benson 2005b, 111 ff.) Catriona
Mackenzie also proposes an account based on agents'
answerability to others. For Mackenzie, being self-governing is to
have "normative authority" over one's decisions,
which means that an agent must "regard herself as the legitimate
source of the authority, as able, and authorized, to speak for
herself...[S]uch attitudes towards oneself can only be sustained
in relations of intersubjective recognition" (Mackenzie 2008,
4).



Andrea Westlund has developed a dialogical approach in some detail
(Westlund 2003; 2009; 2012; 2018). For Westlund, autonomy is neither a
structural nor a historical capacity of critical reflection, but
rather a disposition of an agent to "hold herself answerable,
for her action-guiding commitments, to external critical
perspectives" (Westlund 2009, 35). Westlund notes that
"Autonomous agents will, in one way or another, manifest
responsiveness to justificatory challenges and their disposition to do
so is partly constitutive of their status as self-governing"
(Westlund 2009, 40). Excessively deferential agents such as the
Deferential Wife will almost certainly fail to have this disposition.
These agents will not treat *themselves* as authoritative and
answerable for their conduct; rather, the way in which they answer for
themselves (if they do so at all) will be governed by the reasons of
the agents to whom they defer. Westlund argues, however, that it
should not be assumed that the women described in the hard cases above
are "psychologically similar to each other" (Westlund
2009, 29). For example, Westlund wants to allow that agents who adopt
oppressive practices that significantly inhibit their equality may do
so autonomously and believes that if a "fundamentalist woman
does freely and authentically accept a condition of social and
personal subordination, it seems...problematic to assume that her
condition as subordinate, in and of itself, undermines her status as a
self-governing agent" (Westlund 2009, 29). Westlund
distinguishes between two (hypothetical) fundamentalist women, both of
whom accept their condition of subordination but only one of whom
"is prepared to take up and respond to the critical perspectives
of others, even if she is unconvinced by their arguments"
(Westlund 2009, 29). The latter exhibits dialogical autonomy whereas
the former does not. (For a critical discussion of Westlund's
account, see Stoljar 2018.) 



Like accounts that employ self-regarding attitudes, dialogical
accounts can be either content-neutral or substantive. Westlund
characterizes her own view as "formal" (i.e.,
content-neutral) because it does not require an agent to endorse or
reject any specific justificatory practice. Benson's position,
however, is weakly substantive for the reason that a condition of
answerability on his view is that the agent treats herself as
"*properly*...fit and worthy to possess such
authority" (Benson 2005b, 117). Indeed, he is skeptical that
Westlund's account can maintain its neutrality and contends that
"[t]o hold oneself answerable, in any concrete situation, is
to...to be disposed to apply in that situation some normative
expectation to oneself" (Benson 2011). However, the different
proponents of dialogical accounts are in agreement that their position
is *constitutively* relational. Westlund explains that the
autonomy disposition requires "positioning oneself as always a
potential member of a reflective or deliberative dyad" so that
the psychological perspective of the autonomous agent "[points]
beyond itself, to the position the agent occupies as one reflective,
responsible self among many" (Westlund 2009, 35). The idea of
answerability employs interpersonal relations in the definition of
autonomy and hence is constitutively relational.



Dialogical accounts potentially suffer from the objection that they
are too weak to capture agents whose autonomy appears to be
compromised by oppressive socialization or circumstances. Suppose an
agent acquiesces in and endorses a set of circumstances or an ideology
that is oppressive to her. As Westlund's account explicitly
acknowledges, she may nevertheless have the capacity for
answerability. In Benson's terms, she may "regard herself
as being competent to answer for her conduct in the light of normative
demands that, from her point of view, others might appropriately apply
to her actions". Consider the eighteen-year-old student who is
concerned to uphold dominant beauty standards. In one sense, she may
lack a sense of self-worth; but on Benson's notion of the
self-worth required for free agency, she may exhibit self-worth
because, with respect to the norms she believes to be applicable to
her, she may regard herself as competent to answer for her actions in
terms of those norms. She may be engaged in an attempt to enhance her
sense of self-worth through beauty treatments precisely because she
believes that it is appropriate that the norms of the fashion industry
apply to her (Stoljar 2000, 108). Indeed, when an agent has acquiesced
in and embraced a set of oppressive norms, she will often have the
self-confidence required to articulate her commitment to these norms
to others. Hence, agents who have adopted oppressive practices will
often be autonomous on dialogical accounts.


## 8. Strong Substantive and Social-relational Conceptions



A strong substantive theory of autonomy was defined earlier as one in
which "the contents of the preferences or values that agents can
form or act on autonomously are subject to direct normative
constraints" (Benson 2005a, 133). On strong substantive
approaches, certain preferences and values are deemed to be
incompatible with autonomy, not because of how they are formed, but
rather because of their content. For example, choosing slavery or
subservience would not be autonomous on a strong substantive approach
because the contents of the choices would violate the normative
constraints introduced by the theory. The conceptions of autonomy that
employ *normative competence* (SS5), *self-regarding
attitudes* (SS6) and *dialogical features* (SS7)
should be distinguished from those in the strong substantive category.
These conceptions may "incorporate normative substance" in
different ways and hence may be weakly substantive (Benson 2005a,
133). However, none of these approaches invoke direct normative
constraints on the content of agents' preferences as necessary
conditions of autonomy.



Strong substantive accounts come in various forms. One account
characterizes autonomy as a moral notion: choices with criticizable
*moral* contents are deemed nonautonomous. For example, Thomas
Hill characterizes the failure of autonomy in the case of the
Deferential Wife as a moral failure of self-respect, a failure to
treat oneself as a moral equal (Hill 1991, 15). Agents who choose
subservience are nonautonomous because they make a special kind of
moral mistake (see also Superson 2005). An alternative proposal says
that agents cannot manifest autonomy in a "thick" sense
unless their choices are consistent with what is objectively in their
interests. The Deferential Wife is making a mistake because it is in
her interests to choose a life of autonomy, rather than a life of
subservience. Susan Babbitt notes that "the effects of
oppression may be such that people are psychologically damaged,
possessing interests and desires that reflect their subservient
status" (Babbitt 1993, 246). She argues that even if the
Deferential Wife were a Rawlsian ideal reasoner, making choices under
ideal epistemic conditions--those of "adequate instrumental
reasoning abilities, full and complete information and the capacity to
vividly imagine the consequences of her actions" (Babbitt 1993,
247)--she still would not choose autonomy over deference. Rather,
"it is part of her social and historical identity to be inferior
to men" (Babbitt 1993, 250), and hence she would have to undergo
a conversion in her sense of self, so that "habitual servility
is not what defines it", to be able to makes the choice that is
in her objective interest.



Strong substantive accounts are constitutively relational because they
claim that preferences are autonomous if and only if their contents
correspond to morally permissible or correct features of the world. A
related constitutively relational conception is exemplified in Marina
Oshana's "social-relational" approach in which the
presence of certain external conditions is necessary for autonomy
(Oshana 2006). Up until now the theories of autonomy surveyed have
treated autonomy as a psychological feature of agents. Procedural
theories and Meyers's competency approach employ psychological
processes of critical reflection. Similarly, normative competence
theories rely on an agent's psychological capacity to discern
substantive norms. Dialogical approaches invoke agents'
psychological states, such as the sense of one's own
answerability, although they analyze these states as related to
external interpersonal conditions. Strong substantive accounts require
that agents' psychologies hook onto the world in the right ways.
On all these positions, in principle, autonomy "can be
achieved" by the agent as long as her psychology changes in the
right way or is aligned in the right way with features of the world.
(Compare Meyers's distinction between autonomy as
"something a person accomplishes" and autonomy as
"something that happens to a person": Meyers 1987,
626).



Oshana's social-relational view proposes that autonomy can be
undermined by conditions in the world that do not necessarily affect
the agent's psychology. Autonomy (or lack of it) is
"something that happens" to the agent. Other theorists
also invoke external conditions. For instance, Joseph Raz argues that
a woman living on a desert island who is hounded by a wild animal is
not capable of autonomy because her options in this situation are so
severely curtailed (Raz 1988, 374). And Susan Brison claims that
"if one has an inadequate range of significant options to choose
from, one's autonomy is diminished and the extent to which
significant options are available to someone depends on the kind of
society she lives in" (Brison 2000, 285).



Oshana's social-relational analysis is explicit that agents who
are reflective and psychologically competent can have their autonomy
undermined by finding themselves in--or deliberately
adopting--a situation in which their "practical
control" is removed: "We correctly attribute autonomy to a
person when the person has de facto power and authority to direct
affairs of elemental importance to her life within a framework of
rules (or values, principles, beliefs, pro-attitudes) that she has set
for herself" (Oshana 2007, p. 411). For Oshana, no matter the
degree of subjective self-realization or subjective endorsement of
their situation, agents living under conditions of severe social
constraint have limited autonomy. Consider, for example, serfs living
under the protection of the lord of the manor in feudal times. On the
social-relational conception, serfs would be considered lacking in
autonomy due to a social structure in which the "general and
routine" aspects of a serf's life are not under his or her
own control but rather under that of the lord of the manor. To the
extent that agents today live under parallel social conditions, they
lack or have significantly diminished autonomy. Oshana writes of the
Deferential Wife that "she fails to be autonomous--not
because she wants to be subservient, but because she is subservient.
Her lack of autonomy is due to her personal relations with others and
to the social institutions of her society" (Oshana 2006, 62).
Similarly, Oshana's example "Taliban Woman" is not
autonomous because external circumstances deny her practical
control:



> 
> She is not permitted to support herself financially. She does not have
> legal custody of her children--that remains in the hands of their
> father and in his male relatives should he die. She has no voice in
> the manner and duration of any schooling that her children,
> particularly her daughters, may receive. She must remain costumed in
> cumbersome garb--a burqa--when in public. She cannot travel
> unless accompanied by a male relative...and can travel only when
> granted permission by a male relative or religious elder. She knows
> that any transgression, any show of independence counts as heretical
> defiance and invites punishment both swift and harsh. (Oshana 2006,
> 60)
> 



According to Oshana, the external conditions to which this woman is
subjected render her passive and her "life-plan remains in force
[only] because of the will of another" (Oshana 2006, 62). Even
if the woman endorses the situation she is in, she lacks *de
facto* control over routine aspects of daily life and hence cannot
be autonomous.



Oshana's conception of autonomy should be distinguished from the
strong substantive views identified above: on her approach, the
contents of preferences and conceptions of the good are irrelevant to
autonomy. Agents may have autonomy-promoting conceptions of the good,
yet may fail to be autonomous because constraining external conditions
rule it out. Moreover, the converse case is also true. Consider a
newly liberated prisoner who we will suppose satisfies the rational
competency conditions that are also necessary for autonomy on
Oshana's account (Oshana 2007, p. 419). For Oshana, once the
prisoner is released into autonomy-compatible external conditions, he
is autonomous despite the content of his desires. The prisoner may
prefer to return to prison, yet this preference will not nullify his
autonomy. Although an agent may desire to be directed by the will of
another, it is only if she *is actually in* the external
conditions in which she is so directed that her autonomy is impeded.
Thus, Oshana's conception is in a sense content-neutral.



There is an additional sense in which the social-relational conception
differs from other conceptions of autonomy: it is "global"
not "local". Oshana's theory provides an analysis of
the condition of the autonomous agent rather than the conditions under
which an agent's particular desires and preferences at
particular times count as autonomous. This means that agents
--for example, those living under conditions of slavery--
could lack global autonomy but nevertheless have local autonomy with
respect to particular preferences and desires. A question arises then
about the relationship between local and global autonomy.



Strong substantive and social-relational approaches are perhaps the
most controversial of those surveyed and have as a result attracted
trenchant critiques. The first is conceptual. It has been suggested
that strong substantive theories conflate autonomy (defined as
*self*-rule) with morally *right*-rule (Benson 2005a,
132). In other words, on these accounts, agents are autonomous
*only if* they make morally correct choices or choices that
coincide with their objective interests. But, it is argued, being
autonomous is not conceptually identical to being moral, or to always
acting in ways that promote an agent's interests. Second, it has
been suggested that social-relational views are objectionable because
they permit paternalism or are implicitly committed to perfectionism
(Holroyd 2009; Christman 2004; cf. Mackenzie 2008; Stoljar 2017). For
example, Christman argues that Oshana's position is implicitly
committed to an egalitarian ideal; he claims that on her account, no
other political arrangement is consistent with personal autonomy
(Christman 2004; Christman 2009). Third, it has been alleged that
these accounts are too quick to treat oppression as always impeding
autonomy. For instance, Meyers claims that certain agents are
"firebrand, adventure-loving resisters", who thrive and
flourish when they have the opportunity to oppose social norms (Meyers
2000a, 479). If this is so, autonomy would be possible even in the
circumstances of the extremely constraining regime described by
Oshana.

 Catriona Mackenzie has recently argued that autonomy is a
multi-dimensional concept, and that the different conceptions of
autonomy surveyed here correspond to different dimensions of the
concept, namely *self-determination*, *self-governance*,
and *self-authorization* (Mackenzie 2014; Mackenzie 2015).
Oshana's social-relational approach provides an account of
self-determination because it identifies the external
"opportunities necessary to make and enact decisions of
practical import to one's life" (Mackenzie 2015, 55). The
procedural approaches of Meyers and Friedman fall under the dimension
of self-governance because of their focus on the "skills and
capacities necessary to make and enact decisions and to live one's
life" (Mackenzie 2015, 55). And dialogical theories of autonomy
that employ answerability correspond to the dimension of
self-authorization, which "involves regarding oneself as having
the normative authority to be self-determining and
self-governing" (Mackenzie 2015, 55). Mackenzie's
multi-dimensional approach illuminates the different concerns of
relational autonomy theorists, but raises further questions. How do
the three dimensions of autonomy intersect? Are any or all of the
different dimensions necessary or sufficient conditions of autonomy?
Is it possible for an agent to be fully autonomous is she satisfies
only one dimension of autonomy?

## 9. Conclusion



Feminist theories of autonomy analyze the effects of internalized
oppression and the circumstances of oppression on agents' global
and local autonomy. There is no consensus as to which theoretical
position is correct. To some extent, the answer depends on intuitions
about which view best captures the notion of agency that is
*one's own*. There is considerable consensus, however,
that oppressive socialization and oppressive practices diminish
autonomy and perhaps undermine it altogether. The relational
conceptions of autonomy surveyed here are important contributions to
theoretical debates on the nature of autonomy as well as to our
understanding of how oppression interferes with the psychological
states and social conditions required for autonomy.