Abstract

Leading accounts of personal autonomy arecontent-neutral:they insist that there are noa prioriconstraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of person who acts at the command of others. I define myself as a slave and endorse those attitudes and preferences. My autonomy consists in being a slave.” ’ John Christman similarly claims that ‘any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be’ could be autonomously formed. The same seems to apply to Harry Frankfurt's view, that actions are autonomous if they stem from second-order volitions that reflect what the agent cares about; it puts no constraints on the content of what a person might care about. All of these accounts hold that the mere content of a desire or value is never sufficient to rule out that it might be autonomously acted on by someone.