Autonomy Against Capitalism

Sam Pawlett rsp at uniserve.com
Sun Oct 17 18:15:29 PDT 1999


Autonomy and Politics.

In the ultimate chapter of this book The Morality of Freedom., Joseph Raz argues that a liberal conception of government follows from the notion of personal autonomy.

The concept of autonomy is a broad one with there being no widely agreed upon necessary or sufficient conditions for one's being autonomous. Raz accepts the view that an autonomous person is one who is, for the most part, the author of one's own life i.e. one who is in full control of one's actions the causes of those actions and also the consequences of those actions. An autonomous person will thus be one who is freely able to decide which course(s) of action to take in life then act accordingly on the basis of those decisions. A person's autonomy is her independence, self-reliance, and self-contained ability to decide and, to some degree, control her own destiny.

Raz's Argument.

Raz argues that the state should ensure that every person has the resources to live an autonomous life. That is, the state should ensure that for every person the state should ensure that the necessary conditions are satisfied for each person to determine the course one's life will take. The state should not,however, decide what choice a person should make, only that each person has a sufficient quantity and quality of choices to make that person autonomous. Since autonomy is the capacity to control and create one's own life, autonomy is constitutive of the good life or summum bonum. This capacity contains both mental and physical abilities and the range of options available to use and bring those abilities to full fruition.

Raz argues further that the state should promote morality. He argues this on grounds of a perfectionist interpretation of the harm principle. Raz introduces the harm principle to impose limits on the possible uses of coercion to create the conditions for autonomy. The state may create the conditions for autonomy only in so far as it respects the harm principle i.e. coercion is only justifiable just in case it is used to prevent harm ( but not when one is causing harm to oneself i.e. abusing drugs).

Comments.

Raz does not spell out exactly what the state or any other public institution should do to promote or ensure the conditions for autonomy. He assigns this to a " theory of political institutions". Fair enough, but by leaving the implications of his theory vague and not describing the impact the implementation of his theory would have on the lives of individuals, Raz weakens his theory. This is so because he leaves his theory open to many implications. By not specifying the implications Raz makes it difficult to object to his theory, since many implications can follow from it. Many different political institutions and structure can be made consistent with his theory.

Raz argues that part of being autonomous is the availability of quality options. The implications of the theory depend on exactly what range and what quality of options Raz has in mind. He does admit this is a very difficult question.

Autonomy is a matter of degree, a matter of the quantity and quality of the options a person has. Thus the greatest amount of autonomy would involve the greatest number and the best quality of options.

If Raz wants to maximize the amount of autonomy each and every person has, much stronger political implications follow than the liberal conceptions of government he mentions in passing. Maximizing the amount of autonomy each person has would involve the radical restructuring of the society we live. It would mean the abolishment of wage-labor and capitalism. The capitalist system itself is the greatest constraint on personal autonomy. Capitalism generates and needs for its survival and ability to reproduce itself as a system, propertyless proletarians and peasants. These proletarians and peasants have life options that are extremely limited such that they enjoy little and in many cases no control over their own lives. They certainly do not have the control over their lives that would answer to the idea of autonomy. This becomes especially glaring when considering the plight of the mass of the population living in the southern hemisphere of the world. Can it be said that the Haitian peasant enjoys autonomy? Could such a person come to enjoy autonomy under the present system?

Now it may be the case that an individual wage laborer may come through sheer luck or fortitude to rise in class to a position where she has greater autonomy. However, this is true for individuals but false when viewing the set or class as a whole. What is true for one member of a set is cannot be true for all members of that set simultaneously (the fallacy of composition). The capitalist system,being what it is, requires by structural necessity to have persons in positions or classes where they have little or no autonomy. As Bernard Mandeville, the greatest expositor of bourgeois ideology put it; " For how excessive soever the Plenty and Luxury of a Nation maybe, some Body must do the work."

Conservative libertarians e.g. Nozick in Anarchy,State and Utopia, argue that a person enjoys autonomy if and only if that person possesses the rights constitutive of self-ownership. Self-ownership can be defined thus; " every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself.

The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his" Locke,Second Treatise of Government.

Any attempt to force non-contractual obligations upon a person violates their right of self-ownership and is thus morally wrong. However, as autonomy is a matter of degree, it surely cannot be the case that any violation of self-ownership would render a person completely devoid of autonomy. Similarly, complete self-ownership among each and every person will certainly not maximize autonomy for each and every person. Autonomy and self-ownership do no imply each other.

Appendix " I have laid down as maxims never to be departed from, that the Poor should be kept strictly to work, and it was prudence to relieve their wants, but folly to cure them, have named ignorance as a necessary ingrediant in th Mixture of Society. From all which it is manifest that I could never have imagined, that luxury was to be made general through the every part of the kingdom. I have likewise required that property should be well secured ... No foreign luxury can undo a Country. The height of it is never seen but in nations that are vastly populous, and there only in the upper part of it, and the greater that is the larger still in proportion must be the lowest, the basis that supports all, the multitude of Working Poor." Locke, Second Treatise.p67

Bernard Mandeville. The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices,Publick Benefits. pg. 149. Penguin 1970. Robert Nozick. Anarchy,State and Utopia. pgs. 34,48-51.



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