Autonomy

Autonomy is self-governance: acting on reasons one has reflectively endorsed, rather than merely on whatever desires one happens to have. Kant made it the ground of morality. Frankfurt’s hierarchical account, read as a theory of autonomy, holds that a person acts autonomously when the desire that moves her is one she wants to be moved by. Relational theorists such as Mackenzie and Stoljar argue that autonomy is socially constituted, and that the task is to specify the social conditions under which it develops well.

Applied ethics turned autonomy into a procedure. Respect for persons became informed consent in research ethics, and the consenting patient became the data subject of privacy law. The resulting architecture is consistent: legitimacy is traced, through a chain of authorisations, back to an individual who exists prior to and independently of the system that processes her data.

My work presses on that presupposition. A labourer whose worn fingerprints fail at the ration shop is not failing to exercise autonomy over a biometric system; she is failing to be recognised as a subject who could give or withhold consent to anything at all. Relational autonomy does not rescue the consent frame here, because its move is developmental: the subject is constituted in order to become a locus of authorisation, and the question it asks is what she, once constituted, can authorise. Where the institution being assessed is itself what constitutes her operative standing, that question runs in a circle (see constitutive dependence).

None of this is a case against autonomy. The obligations I defend in place of consent are not paternalistic, since they apply only where authorisation is not conceptually available, and they require the voice of those governed in deciding which criteria and which appeals are appropriate. Her voice matters because the institution cannot discharge its obligations without it; her silence does not legitimate their breach.

The existentialist tradition treats autonomy as a task one undertakes rather than a property one has. I find that the more useful picture for thinking about systems built to choose on our behalf.