Volume 4, Issue 1 - Symposium: Autonomy and The Morality of Freedom

There are numerous ways to conceptualize autonomy and to account for its value. Of particular poignancy is the question of whether autonomy has value for those people and cultures that apparently reject liberal principles, otherwise considered. The answer one gives to that question has implications for whether autonomy-based liberalism can or should be seen as a perfectionist political philosophy. I consider these issues by looking again at Joseph Raz’s influential account of autonomy and its relation to his liberal perfectionism. I defend a proceduralist, non-perfectionist account of autonomy that, I argue, improves on Raz’s original view but in ways that are in keeping with its general spirit.

Joseph Raz’s The Morality of Freedom (1986) is well known for defending both a perfectionist form of liberalism and an ‘externalist’ conception of autonomy. John Christman proposes that there is a logical connection between the two theses and argues that externalist accounts of autonomy should be rejected on the basis that they are perfectionist. Christman’s perfectionism argument contains two premises: (i) externalist theories of autonomy entail political perfectionism and (ii) political perfectionism is not defensible. I argue that neither premise is true. Externalist theories of autonomy do not entail political perfectionism. Further, even assuming for the sake of argument that premise (i) is true, premise (ii) is false. The strongest challenge to political perfectionism is that it is incompatible with the value of respect. I argue that those defending political perfectionism misconstrue what is required for respect. Once we see that respect is secured through features inherent in processes, the value of respect can be reconciled with political perfectionism. Political perfectionism is a defensible thesis and premise (ii) is false.

Liberal institutions should respect citizens as autonomous agents. But what does this mandate require and how should it shape the demands of liberal legitimacy? I trace the contemporary disagreement between liberal perfectionist and anti-perfectionist accounts of legitimacy back to this requirement to respect the autonomy of citizens in order to weigh up how well each approach fulfils this mandate. I argue that further reflection over the nature of respect for the value of personal autonomy gives liberals reason to favour moderate forms of perfectionism and be sceptical of criticisms of perfectionism grounded in concerns over respect.

In the early 90s, many jurisdictions adopted a special protocol in an effort to stop and punish intimate partner abuse. This article focuses on the particular form this policy has taken in the New York County jurisdiction, as it is a source of deep disagreement among feminists. In this article, I explore this disagreement in order to demonstrate two things. First, that like many other contentious issues, this controversy revolves around the question of how oppressed individuals’ autonomy should be conceived. Second, that a structural understanding of autonomy, such as the one pioneered by the philosopher Joseph Raz, can be of great use to resolve disagreements on this protocol. I offer an interpretation of his account which enables us to acknowledge the agency of ‘hounded women’ while legitimizing interventions aimed at eradicating the coercion they are victims of.

Jason Brennan’s Why Not Capitalism? provides a direct response to G.A. Cohen’s moral defence of the value of socialism, arguing that, even under the utopian conditions Cohen specifies, capitalism would be recognized as the most attractive form of social organization. Yet, in one respect, Brennan’s account of utopia seems oddly out of keeping with the capitalist system it is taken to represent: the freedom of the characters within it seems almost totally untouched by the pressure of competitive market forces. I argue that this absence cannot be explained simply by an appeal to the positive intentions of utopian individuals as, even with such motivations in place, competition would still be unavoidable. This means that, even if we agree with Brennan that people would want a utopia in which they had the greatest possible scope to pursue their own personal plans, they may still have good reason to reject his capitalist ideal in favour of a system that would secure for them fair terms on which to compete.

Stephen Hood asks a number of interesting questions about which moral norms govern competition. Pace Hood, I argue that these questions have no bearing on the debate between G. A. Cohen and me, as either one of us could answer those questions any number of ways, without this changing our view on whether a fully just society would be socialist or capitalist.

There are some things money literally cannot buy. Invariably transformable goods are such things because when they are exchanged for money, they become something else. These goods are destroyed rather than transferred in monetary exchanges. They mark out an impassable limit beyond which money and the market cannot reach. They cannot be for sale, in the strongest and most literal sense. Variably transformable goods are similar. They can be destroyed when offered or exchanged for money, but they differ in their ability to sometimes emerge from financial transactions intact. Analyzing transformable goods reveals informative and surprising results. Like other goods and commodities, they are agent relative, defined by the way particular agents value them. Inside the same transaction, a good could be transformable for one agent and not another, depending on how and what these agents value in the transaction. Applying this conceptual framework can reveal otherwise obscure facets of existing and future debates about the ethics and limits of markets. To demonstrate this, the framework is here applied to Richard Titmuss’s arguments about markets in blood, clarifying and illuminating some of his most confusing claims. Applying this framework to other debates may reveal even more striking results.

In the global justice literature, growing attention has been given to problems particular to a globalised economy such as tax competition. Political philosophers have started to reflect on how these problems intersect with theories of global justice. This paper explores the idea according to which action-guiding principles of justice can only be formulated at such intersections. This is the starting point from which I develop a ‘non-ideal theory’ of global justice. The methodology of this theory posits that principles of justice are formulated according to the practice they are intended to regulate. Individual practices provide insights about the formulation of principles, for the non-ideal circumstances that prevent the realisation of justice are only revealed through the interpretation of each practice. With regard to the content of principles, I reject the notion that non-ideal theory is applied ideal theory. I offer instead an overview of the main features of a conception of justice for a non-ideal world based on the ideas of compliance, fact-sensitivity, feasibility and path-dependence. The contribution of this paper is twofold: to provide the conceptual framework for an action-guiding non-ideal theory of global justice and to show why this theory is well-suited to address problems of a globalised economy, such as tax competition.