Abstract
Across societies, cultures, and political ideologies, autonomy is a deeply valued attribute for both flourishing individuals and communities. However, it is also the object of different visions, including among those considering autonomy a highly valued individual ability, and those emphasizing its relational nature but its sometimes-questionable value. A pragmatist orientation suggests that the concept of autonomy should be further specified (i.e., instrumentalized) beyond theory in terms of its real-world implications and usability for moral agents. Accordingly, this latter orientation leads us to present autonomy as an ability; and then to unpack it as a broader than usual composite ability constituted of the component-abilities of voluntariness, self-control, information, deliberation, authenticity, and enactment. Given that particular abilities of an agent can only be exercised in a given set of circumstances (i.e., within a situation), including relationships as well as other important contextual characteristics, the exercise of one’s autonomy is inherently contextual and should be understood as being transactional in nature. This programmatic paper presents a situated account of autonomy inspired by Dewey’s pragmatism and instrumentalism against the backdrop of more individual and relational accounts of autonomy. Using examples from health ethics, the paper then demonstrates how this thinking supports a strategy of synergetic enrichment of the concept of autonomy by which experiential and empirical knowledge about autonomy and the exercise of autonomy enriches our understanding of some of its component-abilities and thus promises to make agents more autonomous.
Highlights
Across many societies, cultures, and political ideologies, the concept of autonomy designates a deeply valued attribute of flourishing for both individual persons and communities (Chirkov et al, 2003; Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Ryff, 2014)
Following the theoretical and methodological insights offered by pragmatism, we adopted an instrumentalist strategy to gather insights about autonomy and push forward the intent of more clearly making autonomy a tool for moral agents
We described a pragmatist account of contextualized autonomy that seizes autonomy as a broadly shared value based notably on recent findings in positive psychology and that recognizes, along with relational theories, that it is not singular in nature nor universally experienced in the same way
Summary
Cultures, and political ideologies, the concept of autonomy designates a deeply valued attribute of flourishing for both individual persons and communities (Chirkov et al, 2003; Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Ryff, 2014). AThis enrichment is described as “synergetic enrichment” (Racine, 2017) because a refined understanding of how the component-abilities work and what are facilitators and obstacles is a promise of greater exercise and experience of autonomy for the moral agent based on that knowledge; and greater knowledge empowers more effective exercise of autonomous decision and actions.
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