Abstract

Colburn’s ambition in this book is to defend a ‘political morality of autonomy-minded liberalism’. Colburn defines autonomy as the ability to live in accordance with what one has deemed valuable, and to bear responsibility for this decision. There is a traditional debate that forces liberalism either to identify itself as anti-perfectionist and thus as neutral on the question of autonomy’s value , or as pro-autonomy and perfectionist. Colburn alleges that this debate is premised on a logical error. In Chapter 1, Colburn proposes a content-neutral account of autonomy in the tradition of liberal individualism espoused by Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill, and more recently by Joseph Raz and Steven Wall. In Chapter 2, Colburn offers an account of autonomy as a global phenomenon ; lives, rather than episodes of individual choice and action, are at issue. Colburn’s account is an amalgam of ideas defended by Gerald Dworkin, Harry Frankfurt, Mill, and philosophers who defend some form of a social-historical relational account of autonomy. The autonomous agent has values she would hypothetically endorse under conditions of independence, free of factors such as hypnosis or coercion that might derail her critical faculties. Colburn helpfully develops the independence condition by specifying that one’s general commitments to a way of life must be ‘content-sensitive’; they must not ‘depend on something other than the nature of that thing’ deemed valuable. Moreover, the agent must perceive the reasons for her endorsement of a value. The final condition of autonomy might be labelled the relational one of actually ‘living life in accordance with values’ and ‘putting one’s decisions into effect’ . The heart of the book lies in Colburn’s argument for his ‘Equivalence Claim’ in Chapter 3, and in his discussion of the relationship …