Rethinking Relational Autonomy

ANDREA C. WESTLUND

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as

defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human
good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies
perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself
answerable to external, critical perspectives on ones action-guiding commitments.
This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer
to core feminist concerns about autonomy.

When Catriona MacKenzie and Natalie Stoljar published their anthology

Relational Autonomy in 2000, their aim was to rehabilitate the concept of
autonomy for feminist theory by focusing attention on its social dimensions
and disentangling it from suspect ideals of radical independence and selfreliance. As they point out, the phrase relational autonomy does not name a
single view, but instead designates a loosely related collection of views that
share an emphasis on the social embeddedness of the self and on the social
structures and relations that make autonomy possible (MacKenzie and Stoljar
2000, 4).1 This renewed and multifaceted focus on relational concepts has
surely enriched and deepened our thinking about the nature and conditions of
individual agency, and has opened up a point of fruitful contact between
feminist philosophy and moral psychology more generally.2
Still, it is not always clear whether relational theorists are offering a
fundamentally new approach to autonomy. After all, many mainstream
accounts of autonomy have turned out to be quite hospitable to the feminist
emphasis on relationality. Most currently influential accounts are procedural in
the sense that they treat some form of reflective endorsement of motivating
desires or values as the key to autonomous choice and action.3 While adherents
of such accounts may not have paid sufficient attention to social factors in the
past, most can accommodate the reality that the capacities needed for reflective
endorsement must be developed during a relatively long period of dependence
on parents and other caregivers. Moreover, procedural accounts of autonomy
are, by design, neutral with respect to the content of an autonomous agents
desires, preferences, and values, imposing formal rather than substantive
Hypatia vol. 24, no. 4 (Fall, 2009) r by Hypatia, Inc.

Andrea C. Westlund
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constraints on autonomous choice and action. Substantive independence is

neither necessary nor sufficient for autonomy on such accounts, nor does
substantive dependence (or interdependence) pose any special problem.5
Finally, procedural accounts do not generally require that the autonomous
agents desires or values be developed or endorsed in the absence of social
forces. Difficult as it may be to distinguish between autonomy-undermining
and autonomy-enhancing influences, procedural theorists such as Gerald
Dworkin have long acknowledged that some such distinction must be made
(see, for example, Dworkin 1988, 18). Some social influences will not
compromise, but instead enhance and improve the capacities we need for
autonomous agency. In short, existing procedural accounts seem well-equipped
to handle a range of important contributions that relationships and, more
generally, social embeddedness make to the development of autonomy.
If existing accounts of individual autonomy can happily accommodate so
much of what relational theorists have brought into focus, is there any room
left for an alternative account that is distinctively relational in nature? John
Christman has suggested that it is only views that treat relationality as
conceptually (not just causally) necessary to autonomy that are uniquely
relational. Social or relational factors are conceptually necessary if they play
an ineliminable role in the definition of autonomy itself (that is, if they are
partly constitutive of autonomy), as opposed just to making a causal contribution to the development and/or sustenance of the capacity for autonomy. Even
though Christman is sympathetic to the general emphasis that feminist
theorists place on relational concepts, he argues that we ought to approach
these stronger, constitutively relational views of autonomy with considerable
caution. Such accounts go astray, in his view, by implying a suspect
perfectionism about the human good, requiring that agents stand in idealized,
egalitarian relations with one another in order to count as autonomous. This
departure from the content-neutrality of formal accounts is worrisome: It is
one thing, he writes, to say that models of autonomy must acknowledge how
we are all deeply related; it is another to say that we are autonomous only if
related in certain idealized ways (Christman 2004, 158).
I agree with Christman that the latter sort of claim is too strong. Such
egalitarianism is undoubtedly an admirable goal for other reasons.6 But to deny
that individuals can ever autonomously engage in non-ideal relations is both
theoretically problematic and inappropriately patronizing toward at least some
individuals who endorse such lives for themselves. In this paper, however,
I argue that autonomy may be construed as constitutively relational without
building any such perfectionist ideal into the concept itselfwithout, that is,
giving up on content-neutrality. My focus is, in the first instance, on
autonomous choice and action, as opposed to autonomy as a feature of persons
or as a global feature of an entire life.7 The central question, from this
perspective, is what makes a choice or action an agents own. But I think there
are important connections between this and other notions of autonomy:

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roughly put, an autonomous person is one who has the capacities that are
exercised in autonomous choice and action, and an autonomous life is one led
by an agent who successfully exercises these capacities to a significant extent
over time.8 In my view, autonomy in choice and actionand hence,
derivatively, in its other sensesrelies (at least in part) on the disposition to
hold oneself answerable to external critical perspectives on ones actionguiding commitments. I do not argue that this disposition is sufficient for
autonomy, but I do think it is a necessary and key component of autonomy.
Autonomy, on this view, requires an irreducibly dialogical form of reflectiveness and responsiveness to others. But this type of relationality, while
constitutive, is formal rather than substantive in nature and carries with it no
specific value commitments. I close the paper with some comments on the
significance of this sort of relationality to feminist theory.
THE PERFECTIONIST THREAT
Christman cites Marina Oshanas account of autonomy as a rare example of a
relational view that is clearly constitutive in nature.9 Oshana positions herself
as a critic of what she calls internalist views of autonomy. These views, which
include the procedural, reflective-endorsement-based views mentioned above,
are distinguished by the fact that they treat autonomy as entirely a matter of the
internal, psychological condition of agents. Oshana acknowledges that such
views are friendly to some of the points that feminist critics have made. Still,
she charges, they run afoul of reasonable intuitions about cases of subservience.
A voluntary slave or other self-subordinating character may count as
autonomous, for the internalist, as long as she endorses her own subservience
in an adequately reflective manner. Oshana finds this result unacceptable
because a persons status as slave or subordinate robs her of the power to
determine how she shall live (Oshana 1998, 82), even if the constraints
under which she lives are self-chosen, and her actions and choices are in accord
with preferences that are, authentically, her own.10 In place of the internalist
account, she offers an externalist, social conception of autonomy according
to which autonomy is a matter not just of what goes on in an agents head but
also of what goes on in the world around her (Oshana 1998, 81). To be
autonomous, an agent must (among other things) enjoy a significant range of
viable options and retain authority over her social circumstances. Relationships that violate these conditions are by definition incompatible with
autonomy.11
On more than one occasion, Oshana invokes the case of fundamentalist
Muslim women in an effort to marshal our intuitions to her view (see Oshana
1998, 2003, 2006). She argues, for example, that a woman who willingly
embraced the strictures imposed by the Taliban in pre-2001 Afghanistan
should not be considered autonomous, whatever her attitude toward her social
role may be (Oshana 2003, 104).12 What to say about such a case is clearly a

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29

delicate matter. While I share Oshanas conviction that many relations of

subordination (including this one) are substantively criticizable on feminist
and other grounds, I also share Christmans concerns about building an
egalitarian ideal directly into the definition of personal autonomy. A
conception of autonomy should not imply that certain egalitarian values are,
as he puts it valid for individuals even if they (ex hypothesi) authentically and
freely reject them (Christman 2004, 152).13
Now, I would by no means suggest that all or even many Taliban
women accept their condition freely or authentically (to borrow Christmans terms), and it can be a form of intellectual and moral laziness to
assume that they do. But if (ex hypothesi) a fundamentalist woman does freely
and authentically accept a condition of social and personal subordination, it
seems equally problematic to assume that her condition as subordinate, in
and of itself, undermines her status as self-governing agent. It may be that
standard internalist views leave something to be desired in their handling of
such cases. But if we want to construct the most formidable test case for an
internalist view, we need to be more attentive to possible differences
between self-subordinating characters. We should not assume that all
individuals who willingly embrace subordinate roles will be psychologically
similar to one another. Even among those who have stood back and
reflected on the preferences they endorse, some may be far more responsive
than others to considerations that (apparently) weigh against those preferences. Responsiveness to critical perspectives on ones action-guiding
commitments is not an externalist condition in Oshanas sense, but it
should, I think, make a difference to our intuitions about relative autonomy.
A Taliban woman who is prepared to take up and respond to the critical
perspectives of others, even if she is unconvinced by their arguments, is
strikingly different from one who is not. We may find the content of her
commitments to be utterly wrong-headed, maybe even in part because we
suspect they will erode her own autonomy competency over time and
irreparably stunt the development of such competency in her daughters.
But to treat her as non-autonomous even as she speaks on behalf of her selfsubordinating commitments is to refuse to take the possibility of such
dialogue with her at face value: not only does this woman lack authority
over her social circumstances, our treatment implies, she lacks authority over
her own voice. And this flies in the face of the evidence she gives of such
authority in engaging in just the kind of critical dialogue in which one might
expect reflective, self-governing agents to engage.
One difficult feature of the case, of course, is that one might wonder whether
many (if any) Taliban women will be ready or willing to speak up on their
own behalf, since they might regard such self-assertion as at odds with their selfascribed social role. Later in the paper I consider a number of non-autonomycompromising reasons why one might be hesitant to respond to criticism, along
with a number of alternative, less discursive, forms of responsiveness that might

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take the place of a direct exchange of reasons. But I concede that some selfsubordinators may simply not show any responsiveness to alternative views, or
may just repeat pat responses that have been drilled into them over the years.
I do not mean to deny that some of the women Oshana has in mind may be like
this, nor that autonomy is compromised in such cases. My claim is just that the
examples she gives of fundamentalist women are under described, and that a
view that is externalist (in her sense) may not do the best job of handling our
intuitions about different cases within this broad category. At least some
individuals who accept a subordinate place within a social or personal
hierarchy are quite prepared to answer for their choices (and, indeed, bristle at
the suggestion that they are oppressed in virtue of them). While I cannot cite
examples of women defending such extreme conditions as those imposed by
Taliban rule, Anna Mansson McGinty describes in wonderful detail cases of
women converts to Islam who give dialogically sensitive defenses of such
apparently non-egalitarian practices as veiling, modest dress, and obedience to
their husbands (Mansson McGinty 2006).14 Similarly, Uma Narayan presents
us with the perspectives of women who live in purdah and veil in the Sufi
Prazada community of Old Delhi, arguing convincingly that once we attend to
what they actually say about their choices, it becomes clear that these women
are neither simply prisoners nor dupes of patriarchy (Narayan 2002).15
Some of these women may lack control over significant aspects of their social
circumstances, but, in reading their case studies, it is hard to see them as lacking
in personal autonomyand it would feel quite wrong to address them in those
terms.
AUTONOMY AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR SELF
Christman seems to suppose that any constitutively relational view of
autonomy will come at the price of perfectionism about the human good and
commit us to paternalistic treatment of those whose values we find objectionable.16 In this section I argue that autonomy may in fact be constitutively
relational in important respects, and yet carry with it no substantive value
commitments.
It is a widely shared starting point among proponents of different views that
personal autonomy is a matter of self-governance of choice and action. What it
is to be self-governing in these matters is a far more vexed question. A currently
dominant answer is that to act autonomously is to act on a desire (or value)
that passes a test of reflective endorsement and thereby counts as truly ones
own.17 One way of putting the general thought is that such endorsement
constitutes the agents authorization of the desires by which she is moved. In
the absence of such authorization, many philosophers speak of agents being
gripped by or alienated from their desires.18 There is reason, however, to
suspect that reflective endorsement of particular motivating desires cannot yet
be the whole story of autonomous action. Michael Bratman, for example,

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31

argues that the idea of autonomy, understood as self-governance, involves the

idea of guidance by what he calls an agents justificatory point of view
(Bratman 2003a, 169, n. 39, my emphasis). This argument begins from the
observation that we are the sort of creatures whose actions often issue from
deliberation, in which we consult considerations that seem to us to justify
acting in one way or another. Just as it is possible to be in the grip of a desire
that is not ones own, it seems possible to be in the grip of the thought that
some consideration justifies a particular course of action. The infamous
Milgram experiments, in which subjects persist in administering apparently
painful shocks despite their own discomfort in doing so, provide a stock
example of such a case. These subjects seem to be gripped by the thought that
obedience is required of them in this sort of situation, a thought that
(presumably) they themselves would not, under other circumstances, regard as
appropriately action-guiding. Surely, practical reasoning driven by such
thoughts should not count as self-governed, nor should any actions yielded by
such reasoning. In short, self-governance of choice and action seems to require
self-governance of relevant practical reasoning.19 So what does self-governance
of practical reasoning require?
One might think that we could explain the self-governance of practical
reasoning through continued appeal to structural features of the agents
psychology. Bratman himself takes this route, arguing that practical reasoning
is self-governed when it is guided by a known, self-governing policy with
which the agent is satisfied (Bratman 2003a). A self-governing policy is a
higher-order attitude that concern[s] the significance that is to be given to
certain considerations in our motivationally effective practical reasoning
concerning our own conduct (Bratman 2003a, 160). Satisfaction with a selfgoverning policy is also treated as a structural matter on Bratmans view: to be
satisfied with a self-governing policy is for that policy not to be challenged by
ones other self-governing policies (Bratman 2007, 44). On this account, a
person who decides that she should go to the gym because she is overweight
acts autonomously, in so doing, if the reasoning that leads to her action is itself
guided by a known, unchallenged policy that grants considerations of her
weight a justifying role in reasoning about her conduct.
The problem with this sort of approach is that it leaves open the
possibility that an agent may be gripped by a self-governing policy (despite
its name) in the same problematic sense in which she may be gripped by a
desire or a bit of practical reasoning. This objection is similar in form to the
now-familiar regress objection to hierarchical accounts of self-governance,
which stems from Gary Watsons early critique of Frankfurt (Watson 1975).
As applied to Bratman, however, the objection may appear to beg the
question: Bratman argues that unlike the higher-order volitions cited by
Frankfurt, self-governing policies with which one is satisfied do have a claim
to what he calls agential authority (Bratman 2007, 210). Why? Because
these policies contribute to the organization of our cross-temporal agency

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by way of continuities and connections of a sort that are highlighted by

Lockean accounts of personal identity over time (Bratman 2007, 207).
That is, these policies have a claim to speak for the agent because they are
among the psychological ties that constitute a person as one and the same
agent over time.
It is not clear, however, that one could not be gripped by (or alienated
from) such a policy in the autonomy-undermining sense, despite its role in
organizing ones agency over time. Bratman himself raises this possibility,
asking whether a case in which satisfaction with a self-governing policy is
grounded in depression counts as a counter-example to his view. The case he
has in mind is not one in which depression actually undermines the
functioning of self-governing policies, preventing one from (say) getting
out of bed in time to make ones planned trip to the gym. This sort of case
would not, as he notes, pose a challenge to his account, since it would
recognize such disruptions as compromising autonomy. Instead, the objection concerns the sort of case in which self-governing-policies continue to
play their Lockean role in organizing agency over time, but do so only
because the agent experiences a depression-based lack of pressure to change
those policies. One might imagine, for example, a case in which the agent is
satisfied with a policy of treating her weight as a reason to go to the gym
every morning only because she is depressed over her bodily appearance (or,
perhaps, because her depression distorts her bodily self-image). Bratman
suggests that such a case does not in fact provide a counter-example to his
account, precisely because the policys Lockean role is still intact:
. . . in this case, the self-governing policies remain settled
structures that play these central Lockean roles in temporally
extended, deliberative agency, and they do that in the absence
of relevant pressure for change. So it seems to me that they still
have a presumptive claim to establish the (depressed) agents
standpoint. (Bratman 2007, 211)
This argument does not strike me as decisive. Even if the depressed agents
self-governing policies do contribute to the organization of her agency over
time, it is still, plausibly, a further question as to whether they do so in a way
that renders her self-governing.20 Stable organization over time may be only
one aspect of a more complex set of characteristics that mark out an agential
perspective. Ive noted elsewhere that deeply deferential agents may be satisfied
with the policies that govern their practical reasoning and yet strike us as being
merely in the grip of the concerns that motivate that reasoning (Westlund
2003).21 By deeply deferential agents, I mean those who endorse their
deference but have no basis for doing so that is not itself deferential. Pressed to
explain why they always defer, such agents simply persist in referring their
interlocutors to the perspectives of those to whom they defer. Just as it is hard

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to interpret the highly responsive converts interviewed by Mansson McGinty

as non-autonomous, it is hard to construe such unresponsive, deeply deferential,
agents as fully autonomous. (In virtue of what we might regard their autonomy
as impaired is a question to which I return shortly.) An agent whose exercise
regime is grounded in depression about her weight does not, of course, invoke
the perspective of some other person to whom she defers. But she has
something in common with the deferential agent nonetheless.22 Because
satisfaction with her reasoning-governing policy is grounded in her depression,
her reasoning on these matters seems likely to be strongly psychologically
insulated from confrontation with contrary considerations. The difficulty we
would face in engaging her in anything like genuine dialogue about her
incessant gym-going would feel very similar to that which we would face in
engaging the deeply deferential agent. It is in precisely such cases, where
nothing we say really seems to make contact, that we want to say something
like Thats the depression speaking, not you! (or, in the case of deference,
Thats so-and-so speaking, not you!). These reactions seem to depend on the
idea that one might be in the grip of a reasoning-governing policy that is not
ones own, regardless of the role played by that policy in organizing ones
agency over time.
On a structural approach to understanding agency, it may be unclear what
else it could take for an attitude to count as the agents own. This is precisely
where I think an adequate understanding of autonomy must take a relational turn. The alternative approach I want to defend looks not to internal
psychological structure but to how the agent positions herself as one practical reasoner among manyor, more specifically, to how she is disposed to
respond to the normative pressures placed on her by other agents who may call
her to account for the commitments that guide her choices and actions.23
There is, then, a sense in which I join Oshana in rejecting what she calls
internalist views of autonomy. But I do not think that one must look outside
the agents psychology to her actual social standing in order to overcome the
problematic kind of internality. Instead, we must consider whether the agent is
limited, in her reflective capacities, to essentially monological functions such as
endorsing or rejecting lower-order attitudes from elsewhere within her own
hierarchy of attitudes, or whether she has a dialogical disposition to hold herself
answerable for elements of that hierarchy in the face of critical challenges
posed by other agents. This distinction does not map onto any straightforward
distinction between what is internal and what is external to the agent. The
disposition to hold oneself answerable to others is, after all, a feature of the
agents psychology, and thus internal to the agent. But it is nonetheless a
disposition to be engaged by what is external to the agent, that is, by points of
view other than her own.24
Consider, again, the responsive Taliban woman described in the section
The Perfectionist Test. What makes it seem inappropriate to treat this
woman as non-autonomous is the fact that, despite her unwavering commit-

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ment to her own subservient role, she is disposed to answer for that
commitment in the face of critical challenges. Admittedly, what she defends
might (in part) be a commitment not to exercise her own judgment in many
significant practical matters. But even this commitment is one that may or may
not be backed by practical reasoning of the agents own. The responsive agents
readiness to answer for such a commitment in the face of critical challenges sets
her apart from more deeply deferential counterparts who cannot be brought to
feel the normative force of such queries. An agent who lacks the disposition to
answer for herself may be reflectively satisfied with her commitments, but her
practical reasoning will be strangely disconnected from, and insensitive to, any
justificatory pressures to which she, the agent, is subject. Being impervious to
critical challenge in this way is an excellent candidate for what it is to be
gripped by an action-guiding commitment or bit of practical reasoning as
opposed to governing it, which is precisely the distinction of which we need
our account of autonomy to make sense.
It might, at first blush, seem paradoxical that the status of ones reasoning as
ones own should depend, in part, on ones sensitivity to considerations raised
by others. But again, it helps to remind ourselves that we are the sort of
creatures who engage in practical deliberation, in which we consult considerations that count for or against various courses of action. A lack of
responsiveness to considerations that purport to challenge our current sense of
the justificatory landscape constitutes a recognizable form of passivity in the
face of ones commitments. By contrast, an agent who holds herself answerable
for her action-guiding commitments effectively shows that, however firmly
committed she is to certain values, she is not just passively in their sway.25
There is an important sense (to which Ill return shortly) in which she instead
takes responsibility for her commitments, and this is a stance that is intuitively
incompatible with being in their grip.
To clarify, my claim is not that the agent must actually have arrived at all of
her commitments through a process of critical reflection in order to act
autonomously. While other theorists (including, prominently, Dworkin) have
stressed the importance of the capacity for critical reflection, I think it is
important to distinguish between different ways in which that capacity might
be invoked. On the one hand, critical reflection might be seen as important to
autonomy for its historical role in the agents endorsement of certain desires or
values as action-guiding. On this construal, a choice or action may be regarded
as autonomous just when it is motivated by a desire or value that has survived a
suitably rigorous process of critical scrutiny. While attractive in some respects,
this picture has its drawbacks: though most people spend time deliberating
about their commitments at moments of uncertainty or before major, lifealtering decisions, it is simply implausible that most of our commitments have,
at any given moment, already undergone and survived such scrutiny. If only a
small number of our actions could ever turn out to be autonomous, the concept
seems to lose quite a bit of its purchase on the real cases that interest us. On the

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other hand, a merely hypothetical standard of critical reflectionfor example,

one that requires that a desire or value could or would withstand some idealized
process of reflectionseems to leave the agents ability actually to exercise her
critical faculties too far out of the picture, since it doesnt really place any
requirements on her at all. Invoking the disposition to answer for oneself avoids
both pitfalls. This standard does not require that all commitments on which
the autonomous agent acts have already survived critical scrutiny. But it does
require that the autonomous agent actually have a certain kind of selfrelationnamely, one in which she holds herself answerable, for her actionguiding commitments, to external critical perspectives. This disposition
requires readiness to engage in critical reflection. Indeed, having such a
disposition means positioning oneself as always a potential member of a
reflective or deliberative dyad, which is one aspect of the relationality of the
view.
Placing answerability at the core of autonomy also offers a relational way
of understanding the idea of responsibility for self, an idea that has often
been treated as central to the concept of autonomy. On structural views in
the Frankfurtian or Dworkinian molds, responsibility for self is fundamentally about marking the boundaries of the self through the endorsement of
some motives and the rejection of others (see Dworkin 1988; Frankfurt
1988). The view of autonomy I defend here also concerns ones relation to
ones motivating desires or values, but treats that relation as having an
interpersonal or dialogical dimension. One who is disposed to hold herself
answerable to others treats her commitments as something for which she
herself is interpersonally accountable: they are neither simply brute facts
about her, nor, ultimately, assignable to anyone else. She purports to speak
on her own behalf, or to represent herself in interpersonal dialogue.
Because the autonomous agent holds herself responsible for her endorsement
of certain values and desires, and for her treatment of them as justifying
reasons for action, it makes sense to describe her as manifesting responsibility for self or self-responsibility.26 In comparison with the structural
construals mentioned above, this construal of responsibility for self draws
more directly on important conceptual links among responsibility, accountability, and answerability.
In sum, Ive argued that self-governance of choice and action requires selfgovernance of the practical reasoning that issues in choice and action, and that
self-governance of practical reasoning requires a disposition for dialogical
answerability.27 In order to count as governing ones practical reasoning, rather
than being in the grip of the considerations that drive it, one must be open to
engagement with the critical perspectives of others. Autonomy, on this view, is
constitutively relational. It does not require that one stand in idealized,
egalitarian relations with others. But the internal psychological condition of
the autonomous agent does point beyond itself, to the position the agent
occupies as one reflective, responsible self among many. For ones action-

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guiding commitments to be ones own, one must be disposed to answer for

those commitments in the face of external, critical challenges. The critics to
whom the agent answers may sometimes inhabit her own moral imagination
rather than her real social environment. Either way, responsibility for self
depends on the internalization of a very basic sort of interpersonal relation
namely, a form of justificatory dialogue that (presumably) we begin to learn in
our early interactions with parents and other caregivers and continue to
develop throughout the process of maturation.
Relations of care are causal contributors to the developed capacity for
autonomy on this view. But the concept of autonomy itself also turns out to
have a relational dimension, since self-governance of choice and action
requires a form of reflectiveness that is irreducibly dialogical in form.
Dialogue, as I use the term, is to be understood broadly. Although the
explicit citation of reasons in a conversational context is one paradigm form
that the required answerability may take, it is not the only possible form, and
perhaps not even the dominant one outside of certain special contexts. (I will
remark further on this possibility in the section Formal versus Substantive
Conditions.) But self-governance is dialogical in the sense that it requires
more than one perspective to be in play, even in its internalized forms. It is
precisely insofar as one is responsive to perspectives that are not ones own that
one demonstrates that one is not simply in the grip of ones own commitments,
but responsive to normative pressures to which those commitments are
subject.
FORMAL VERSUS SUBSTANTIVE CONDITIONS
Now, this view of autonomy may appear to smuggle in certain substantive
value commitments, and so lead to a suspect perfectionism after all. In fact,
Paul Benson has defended a somewhat similar view under the banner of a
weakly substantive conception of autonomy. On his view, taking ownership
of ones actions and will is a matter of claiming authority to speak for [ones]
intentions and conduct (Benson 2005a, 102), and ones authority to speak for
ones intentions and conduct depends on having a certain sort of regard for
oneself: autonomous agents must treat themselves as sufficiently competent
and worthy to speak for their actions (Benson 2005a, 117). Whereas strongly
substantive views of autonomy directly impose restraints on the contents of
agents desires or preferences, Benson describes his view as one on which
normative constraints enter indirectly, by way of the attitudes toward their
own competence and worth through which agents claim such authority
(Benson 2005b, 136).
Though recognizing its differences from Oshanas account, Christman treats
Bensons account as equally susceptible to the charge of perfectionism, since, as he
understands it, it does involve a substantive value commitmentnamely, a
commitment to ones own worthiness to speak and answer for oneself. Bensons

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37

view might, at least at first blush, appear to invite this charge. It requires
autonomous agents to have a certain sort of positive regard for themselves
as agents, and positive regard for ones own agential status certainly sounds
like a substantive value commitment. Benson argues that the autonomous agent
may invest authority in herself implicitly, rather than in a conscious or explicit
way. This may help to defuse the perfectionist charge, if implicit treatment falls
short of a full-blown value commitment. At the same time, however, Benson
requires that the agent understand that she would not possess authority to answer
for herself did she not treat herself as possessing it, which seems a rather strong
condition.
The question of whether Bensons view really is susceptible to Christmans
critique would require more discussion than I can give it here. On my own
view, however, we neednt encumber the autonomous agent with any
particular value judgments about herself. Answerability for oneself is a formal
relation, constituted by a disposition to respond to normative pressures on ones
commitments, not by any particular beliefs about or attitudes toward oneself.
When one holds oneself answerable for a self-subordinating commitment, ones
explicit values and beliefs about oneself may even manifest a lack of self-respect.
What marks an agent out as self-answerable is how receptive she is to the
critical perspectives of others. The autonomous agent experiences those
challenges (when they meet conditions of legitimacy that I will sketch out) as
having normative standing in her deliberations, and reacts as though she owes
a response.28 If the autonomous agent can be said to display any special sort of
self-regard at all, it should not be thought of as an independently identifiable
attitude on which autonomy depends, but rather, as a sui generis sort of selfregard that just consists in being disposed to hold oneself answerable to external,
critical perspectives. But again, being so disposed is a formal condition on
autonomous agency, akin in that respect to other conditions that reflectiveendorsement theorists place on our self-relations.
A second and perhaps more challenging objection is that this dialogical
conception of autonomy imports a substantive commitment not to ones own
self-worth but to justificatory dialogue itself. Ingra Schellenberg describes a
case, drawn from her experience as a clinical ethicist, in which a woman she
calls Betty confounds her doctors by refusing potentially life-saving skin-graft
surgery (Schellenberg, unpublished comments). Betty could not be drawn into
direct discussion of her refusal, but instead simply shut down when pressed
to give reasons. Bettys refusal to engage, Schellenberg suspects, was in part due
to her limited intellectual abilities. (Betty had a lower than average IQ and
little formal education, and may not have been capable of articulating her
underlying values or the role they played in her practical reasoning.) But in
part, Schellenberg suggests, Bettys refusal was based on something else: she
seemed to reject as unreasonable the very demand that she give reasons for her
decision. Unlike the hyper-articulate medical professionals by whom she was
surrounded, Betty did not seem to value justificatory dialogue. She had made a

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choice, was resolute in that choice, and preferred to be left alone about it. This
preference, Schellenberg reports, appeared to be consistent with a broader
pattern of voluntary solitude and ferocious independence expressed in Bettys
life-narrative.
On the basis of Bettys independence and resolve, Schellenberg is reluctant
to conclude that she was not autonomous. Without more intimate knowledge
of the case, I must reserve judgment about the status of the individual in
question. I would not, however, regard further evidence of independence or
resolve as decisive. If (subject to qualifications I spell out below) Betty does not
give some form of genuine reflective or deliberative response to the considerations raised by her doctor and other caregivers, then, however brave she seems,
I would argue that Betty is not self-governing with respect to her decision but,
rather, in the grip of considerations concerning (for example) the value of
substantive independence or of standing up to the authority figures in her life.29
To decide autonomously Betty must hold herself answerable for the role such
considerations play in her practical reasoning, which (subject to the important
qualifications discussed below) involves being moved by the feeling that she
owes a response to the counter-considerations raised by others.
Certain details of Bettys case suggest to me that perhaps she was not in fact
as unresponsive as she seemed at first blush: even though she never changed her
mind about the surgery, Betty did, according to Schellenberg, begin to make
some concessions to the medical staff once she came to see that they were
concerned for her well-being. These concessions suggest that Betty did give
proper consideration to at least some of their arguments, adjusting her own
stance where she found she could no longer justify it. (Proper consideration
does not, after all, entail being convinced to change ones mind on all points,
nor, as I stress below, does it require a high degree of articulacy about ones
position.) But the broader point, of course, concerns not just Betty herself, but
all those who experience attempts at deliberative engagement not as a sign of
respect but as a threat or as a form of manipulationnot to mention those who
simply do not enjoy argumentation or do not feel obliged to cite their reasons
to all comers. Just as there were surely those who took cover when they saw
Socrates coming around the corner, there must be those who grit their teeth
and fantasize escape when they find themselves in a room with a philosophically trained clinical ethicisthowever sensitive and constructive that
clinician may be. Must one positively value (or at least not disvalue)
engagement in the exchange of reasons in order to count as autonomous? Does
anyone who finds the demand for reasons threatening or tedious or presumptuous, and thus refuses to engage, thereby fall short of autonomy? This is a
serious question, especially since, as Schellenberg suggests, the socially
vulnerable may fall disproportionately into the group of those who feel
threatened by justificatory dialogue.
I will argue, however, that on a proper understanding of the disposition in
question, responsibility for self does not rely on valuing any specific justificatory

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39

practice. It does not, in particular, rely on a willingness or ability to cite reasons

on demand. It does, by definition, involve the adjudication of reasons in
dialogue (of some form) with real or imagined others. But the form that both
adjudication and dialogue may take is sufficiently broad that it does not
commit the self-responsible agent to anything other than a formal condition
that may be expressed in any number of substantive ways.
As a start, it is worth re-emphasizing that one may respond to external
critical perspectives internally rather than in face-to-face conversation. Many
agents who feel threatened by a more articulate interlocutor may prefer to
consider the matter in private where they will not be disadvantaged or
disempowered by an imbalance in sheer argumentative skill. But of course this
does not fully answer the objection, for an agent like Betty may not engage in
an internal give and take of reasons of the sort her doctors hoped for, either.
Moreover, even more articulate agents than Betty are likely to rebuff dialogical
engagement in certain settings, without committing themselves to revisiting
the issues at hand on their own. When the proselytizers come to your door, or
the telemarketers call, it is probably not just that youre too busy to talk to them
now. We sometimes do not think that we owe a responseand sometimes we
are perfectly right about that. The disposition to hold oneself answerable to
external, critical challenges is not in fact a disposition to defend ones choices
and actions to all comers, but to respond (in one of a range appropriate ways) to
legitimate challenges. So what is a legitimate challenge?
I will not here embark on the task of providing a set of necessary and
sufficient conditions for legitimacy, but will instead focus on two necessary
conditions that may address the objection at hand. First, a legitimate challenge
must be situated in a way that makes relational sense of the intervention. That
is, it must be situated in a relationship that gives context and content to the
concern expressed by the critic. Some sense-giving relationships are broad: one
is a member of the moral community, citizen of the nation, inhabitant of a
community. Others are more narrow: one is a mother, husband, neighbor, or
club member. It would take me beyond the scope of this paper to specify fully
what constitutes a sense-imparting relationship. But at very least, it must be
clear why it matters to my critic why I think and act the way I do, and it must
matter to her in a way that she can reasonably expect to matter to me.
Challenges that fail to meet this conditioncall it the condition of relational
situatednessmay indeed strike the agent as inappropriate or even, in some
cases, as outrageous. If the proselytizers and the telemarketers purport to address
you under the rubric of any sense-imparting relationship at all, it is typically not
one that you acceptand in some cases it is a transparently phony one. But
even in more intuitively sense-giving relationships like the doctorpatient
relationship, highly open-ended challenges (Why are you refusing to do X?)
may sometimes fail to manifest to the agent the right form of mattering. While
medical professionals may take for granted a shared context of concern, not all
patients will conceive of such professionals as among those entitled to question

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their choices and actions (or, more precisely, as among those entitled to
answers) when it comes to their own life-and-death preferences.30 Part of the
burden of facilitating justificatory dialogue thus falls on the shoulders of
the would-be critic, who must position herself appropriately with respect to
the agent in question.
The condition of relational situatedness addresses the worry that a selfresponsible agent must (implausibly) be prepared to cite her reasons on demand,
regardless of the relationship in which she stands to her critics. A second aspect
of Bettys case, however, concerns the very idea that an autonomous agent
must be prepared to cite her reasons at all. Even in legitimate contexts, the
demand for reasons may seem to place an unreasonable burden on agents who
are relatively inarticulate or otherwise disinclined to engage in argument with
others. This concern points to a second condition of legitimacy, to which Ill
refer as the condition of context-sensitivity: a legitimate challenge must be
context-sensitive with respect to the kind of response it invites and tolerates. In
any form of justificatory dialogue, as Ive already acknowledged, reasons are in
some sense up for adjudication. But the direct citation of reasons in response to
questioning may, for some otherwise competent agents, be an alien practice in
which they do not know quite how to engage. (For others, it may feel alien only
in some contexts, such as the more personal ones.) But there are certainly other
ways of demonstrating that one holds oneself answerable to appropriately
situated critical challenges. Within the realm of the broadly conversational,
one might do any of the following: provide a life-narrative that manifests ones
reasons; provide an interpretation of relevant experiences, putting them in the
context of a wider pattern of meaning; describe the actions of an admired other
in a similar situation; tell parables or other stories that are chosen and
recounted in a way that demonstrates responsiveness to the question; and
probably much more besides. Outside the realm of the conversational, an agent
may give explicit or implicit signals that she intends to reflect on what has been
said, signs that she has re-deliberated in relevant ways or sought more
information as a result of the challenge, or that she is attempting to repair,
restructure, or terminate a relationship or practice that has come into question.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely to give a sampling of the
array of possible responses that manifest a disposition to hold oneself
answerable to external critical perspectives.
There is, no doubt, more to be said about the forms that legitimate
challenges and responses may take. But I hope it will already be evident that
neither responsibility for self nor autonomy in fact requires agents to value any
specific justificatory practice. Autonomous agents will, in one way or another,
manifest responsiveness to justificatory challenges, and their disposition to do
so is partly constitutive of their status as self-governing. But they can manifest
such responsiveness even while disvaluing and refusing to engage in certain
practices, including practices in which they are pressed to cite their reasons in
the face of direct questioning.

Andrea C. Westlund

41

Having said all of this, however, it is a striking fact that we sometimes find
external challenges discomfiting even when they are appropriately situated and
context-sensitive. This is not surprising, since we do not always know how or
whether we can answer for ourselves. But insofar as it marks a practical concern
about our own apparent shortcomings, such a response actually demonstrates
real sensitivity to the normative pressures imposed on us by others. A selfresponsible agent who finds herself unable to answer will not be able to rest
content with her commitments just as they are, and the prospect of having to
confront this predicament is not always a pleasing one. Now, if discomfort in
the face of external critical challenges leads to self-deception or avoidance
instead of responsiveness, it becomes a pathology of autonomy rather than a
mark of its healthy functioning. By a pathology of autonomy, I mean a
disorder that is intimately linked to the conditions required by autonomyone
that is triggered, in the first place, by the agents sensitivity to the requirements
of autonomy, even if that sensitivity is subsequently suppressed. The aversive
response I have just described is one that would not be possible in an agent who
does not at some level understand what autonomy requires of her. But
discomfort in itself is not always pathological, nor is it necessarily a sign of
compromised autonomy. Indeed, that we are capable of feeling discomfited (or
even threatened) in this way teaches us something important about the nature
of human agency: it does matter to us, sometimes very intensely, whether we
can respond appropriately to legitimate critical challenges.
FEMINISM, FORMALITY, AND AUTONOMY
Many feminist critiques of autonomy have targeted procedural or formal views
of autonomy, and some have argued that only a substantive account of
autonomy will answer to feminist concerns about the concept.31 Substantive
accounts that have been developed by feminist philosophers thus far tend to be
constitutively relational, while formal accounts tend to point at most to
causally relational conditions. As Christman has noted, accounts that are
relational in the causal sense may still be fundamentally individualistic about
autonomy itself: the fact that a capacity has social conditions does not imply
that it is itself a social capacity.32 It can thus appear that the formal/substantive
distinction and the individualistic/relational distinction go together, such that
only substantive accounts of autonomy can be constitutively relational in
nature. If I am right, however, it is important to keep these two distinctions
separate and to recognize that a constitutively relational account of autonomy
may in fact be formal.33 But does a formal account of relational autonomy
adequately meet feminist concerns?
I argue that conceiving of autonomy as relational in a constitutive but
formal sense both meets a number of important feminist concerns and helps us
to navigate a pair of feminist intuitions about cases of self-subordination that
might otherwise seem to conflict. Autonomy as self-responsibility is in no way

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Hypatia

committed to masculine ideals of substantive independence or self-reliance.

Being self-responsible is compatible with human interdependence and, indeed,
with most forms of outright dependence on others.34 Autonomy as selfresponsibility makes room forand in fact demandsattention to caring
relations in which the capacity for autonomy is developed and sustained.
Moreover, the account highlights an important aspect of what it is to be
socially embedded: our identities and commitments are not inflexibly
determined by our social positioning, but are instead worked out on an ongoing
basis in dialogue with real or imagined others.
One form of particularly deep cognitive dependence on otherswhat I
referred to earlier as deep deferenceis admittedly incompatible with
autonomy on this view: where an agent cannot be brought to feel answerable
to external, critical perspectives on her commitments, but seems uniformly to
experience justificatory demands as aimed through her at someone else to
whom she defers, we ought to consider her autonomy impaired.35 But this is not
an exception that feminists should be worried about. Indeed, acknowledging
the incompatibility of autonomy with deep deference provides a way of
expressing a legitimate feminist worry about certain cases of self-subordination
without defining away the very possibility of autonomous adherence to nonliberal, non-egalitarian values and norms. In cases of genuinely impaired
autonomy, the question of what explains the impairment is often a morally
and politically important one, and features of the agents social environment
may be directly implicated as causal factors. But this should not lead us to think
that substantive ideals of independence, egalitarianism, and the like cannot be
rejected by autonomous agents. In defending such ideals, we ought to proceed
by treating their detractors as autonomous interlocutorsunless compelled, by
their imperviousness to critical challenge, to conclude otherwise. The
disrespectful nature of any other treatment has, in effect, been roundly
recognized within the global feminist literature, even if it is typically stated in
different terms.36 The view defended here thus accommodates two feminist
intuitions that have sometimes been hard to reconcile: first, that some cases of
self-subordination are genuinely at odds with autonomy, but second, that it is
problematic to make any general assumption to the effect that non-liberal
values are incompatible with autonomy.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that, contrary to what Christman suggests, it is possible to
construe autonomy as constitutively and thus distinctively relational without
building any troubling perfectionist ideals into our account of autonomy itself.
An account of autonomy based on responsibility for self is relational in both
the causal and constitutive senses, but distinctly non-perfectionist in form. Not
all self-subordinators (nor all independent individuals, for that matter) will be
self-responsible, but there is no contradiction between self-responsibility and

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43

self-subordination. Recognizing this, perhaps paradoxically, frees us to engage

in more constructive forms of moral and political critique, treating those
who endorse values we find objectionable as autonomous interlocutors who
deserve to be listened to, understood, and, in the case of persistent disagreement, argued withrather than as non-autonomous agents who cannot
speak for themselves.
The account of autonomy I defend is in fact well-suited to accommodate the
political concerns that motivate Christmans critique. Christman suggests that
autonomy is the characteristic of persons who are candidates for full
participation in . . . collective decision-making processes (Christman 2004,
156), and he worries that relational accounts like Oshanas risk re-victimizing
the victim by excluding many among the oppressed (but not their oppressors)
from public deliberation about their own status. The self-responsibility account
risks no such perverse result: the capacity it treats as central to autonomy is, if I
am right, one that may be shared even by those enmeshed in problematic social
relations that they themselves endorse. Not only that, but it is precisely in virtue
of the relationality of the account that it addresses Christmans concern as well as
it does: the relational capacity required for autonomynamely, the disposition
to hold oneself answerable to external critical perspectiveswould seem to be
central among those capacities required to engage in collective deliberation.
Interpreted broadly, as Ive interpreted it in this paper, the criterion of dialogical
answerability is not unduly exclusive but treats a wide range of agents, with a
wide range of skills and deliberative styles, as capable of participation. I hope,
then, that the formal but constitutively relational conception of autonomy I
defend will be appealing both on feminist and on more general grounds, and
that it will help us to make sense of strong intuitions about oppression and
autonomy that have often seemed maddeningly at odds with one another.
NOTES
I would like to thank Carla Bagnoli, Ted Hinchman, Jules Holroyd, Nate Jezzi, Ingra Schellenberg,
Anita Superson, and three anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts. I would also
like to thank audiences at Cornell University, Northwestern University, the 2007 Central Division
Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, and the 2nd Conference of the Society for
Analytic Feminism, held in April 2008, for helpful discussion.
1. See also Christman 2004, 147.
2. Relational autonomy is a concept that seems, in recent years, to have bridged feminist and
non-feminist literatures in moral psychology. While MacKenzie and Stoljars anthology was
explicitly feminist in orientation, relational theories of autonomy advanced by feminist
philosophers have also been featured prominently in collections that are not specifically feminist
in orientation. See, for example, Christman and Anderson (2005) and Taylor (2005). I do not
advance this as a criterion of success for relational theories, but merely to mark a point of fruitful
contact and conversation between feminist and mainstream contributors to the literature on
autonomy.
3. Accounts of autonomy advanced by Friedman (1986, 2003), Christman (1987, 1991,
2004, 2005), Dworkin (1988), Frankfurt (1988, 1999), Bratman (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003a, b,

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Hypatia

2007), and Meyers (2004, 2005) would all count as procedural or formal in the sense at issue here,
though of course they differ in their details.
4. MacKenzie and Stoljar offer the following concise characterization of procedural accounts:
On procedural, or content-neutral, accounts, the content of a persons desires, values, beliefs, and
emotional attitudes is irrelevant to the issue of whether the person is autonomous with respect to
those aspects of her motivational structure and the actions that flow from them. What matters for
autonomy is whether the agent has subjected her motivations and actions to the appropriate kind of
critical reflection (MacKenzie and Stoljar 2000, 1314). Marilyn Friedman also offers a useful
summary of this distinction in Friedman (2003, 1925). Friedman prefers the term contentneutral to procedural. I use the terms procedural, content-neutral, and formal
interchangeably in this paper, though I have a slight preference for formal (and tend to use it in
describing my own view) because of the perspicuity of the contrast between form and
substance.
5. This fact cuts both ways for feminist theorists. On the one hand, procedural accounts are
attractive insofar as they dispense with popular ideals of radical independence and self-reliance and
make room for social embeddedness and deep interpersonal commitment. On the other hand, they
are unattractive insofar as they appear to miss the fact that some forms of dependence do seem to
undermine autonomy. My own aim (which takes me beyond the bounds of this particular paper) is
to carve out a procedural account of autonomy that gives us tools for distinguishing between forms
of dependence that are compatible with autonomy and forms that are not, and for explaining whats
at stake, at the level of individual agency, between these cases.
6. Indeed, its importance may even have to do with the causal contributions that such
relations are likely to make to the development and sustenance of individual autonomy.
7. On the distinction between global and local autonomy, see Dworkin (1988, 1516).
Meyers (1987) draws a similar but more nuanced distinction among episodic, programmatic, and
narrowly programmatic autonomy.
8. The phrase autonomous person is, I think, actually ambiguous. It might simply refer to a
creature of a certain sort, who may be owed certain kinds of treatment simply in virtue of her
agential capacities. It may also be used more strongly to indicate that an agent not only has but
regularly and successfully exercises a capacity for autonomy. In the latter usage, the idea of an
autonomous person begins to shade into the idea of one who leads an autonomous life.
9. Paul Bensons view is also constitutively relational, though in a different way from
Oshanas (see Benson 2005a). Elsewhere Christman argues that the perfectionist threat arises in
Bensons case, too (see Christman 2005). I discuss this charge in relation to my own view in the
section Formal versus Substantive Conditions.
10. Oshana takes it to be a widely shared intuition that an autonomous person must be in
control of her choices, actions, and will. But she disagrees with internalist theorists over how to
construe this control. Whereas internalists such as Harry Frankfurt have argued that one may be in
control, in the sense relevant to self-government, even while lacking alternative possibilities
(Frankfurt 1988), Oshana thinks that the concept of personal autonomy includes the power to
choose and act other than one does. How best to construe control seems to be a matter of
achieving reflective equilibrium between our intuitions about various cases (including those of selfsubservience) and other, equally strong, intuitions and considered views with which those
intuitions may be in tension. While I share some of Oshanas intuitions about cases of selfsubordination, I also share Christmans worry about her positive account of control. I think we need
a different way of understanding what can go wrong in such cases.
11. Oshana is concerned, in the first instance, with autonomy as a feature of persons.
Nonetheless, I do not think we are talking past each other. Oshana seems, like me, to regard the
autonomy of persons (and, globally, of lives) as conceptually connected to the autonomy of
particular choices and actions: an autonomous person, as she puts it, is in control of her choices,
her actions, and her will (Oshana 1998, 82). Being in control of isolated choices and actions will

Andrea C. Westlund

45

not necessarily add up to a globally autonomous life if one lacks control in a more global way (for
more on this possibility, see note 12). But this is a point one can accept in principle whether or not
one agrees with Oshanas further arguments about what it is to have the relevant sort of control. In
other words, where Oshana really differs from the theorists she criticizes is not in discussing global
rather than local autonomy, but rather, in rethinking, in externalist terms, the notion of control that
figures in both.
12. More precisely, Oshana argues that a woman might make an occurrently or locally
autonomous decision to embrace such a lifestyle in the first place, but that she cannot then count
as globally autonomous (Oshana 2003). To count as occurrently autonomous, I take it that the
woman must, at the time of choice, satisfy Oshanas criteria for control and hence self-governance.
(Oshana imagines her as a successful physician who opts to give up her former independence in
favor of a life of utter dependence.) But after her choice is made, the Taliban woman no longer
satisfies these criteria, for the life she has chosen requires her to give up precisely the sort of day-today (that is, occurrent) control over her social circumstances that is, on Oshanas view, required for
autonomy. In sum, Oshana argues that one might, through an occurrently autonomous act,
undermine ones global autonomy by undercutting ones ability to be in (occurrent) control of her
actions, choices, and will in the future.
13. Oshana responds to Christmans critique with the suggestion that he is conflating personal
with political autonomy (Oshana 2006): he wants to represent the Taliban woman as politically
autonomous, and as having a moral right to a voice in the political process, but fails to recognize that
one might satisfy these criteria even while lacking personal autonomy in Oshanas sense. Whether or
not this is true of Christman, my own concern is squarely with agential authority over choice and
actionand agential authority is, in the first instance, a matter of personal rather than political
autonomy, even if there is ultimately some relation between the two. (Some comments in the
conclusion to this paper bear on their relation, but only speculatively.) In her response to Christman,
Oshana rightly points out that the Taliban woman in fact lacks a socially and politically authoritative
voice. But whether agential authority (and thus personal autonomy) requires social or political
authority is precisely the question at issue. While Oshana argues that it does, I offer an argument,
which differs from those she rejects, that it does not.
14. I say apparently non-egalitarian practices because these women do not themselves
describe the practices as non-egalitarian. Some (like the woman Mansson McGinty refers to as
Cecilia) offer their own, alternative interpretations of equality between men and women, which
in their views may be compatible with different rights and responsibilities linked to biological and
religiously ordained roles (Mansson McGinty 2006, 98).
15. While I share Narayans view that these women should be considered autonomous, I do
not share the very thin conception of autonomy that she defends, which does not include any
answerability requirement of the sort I discuss in this paper. Oshana also rejects Narayans thin
conception of autonomy, though for different reasons. See Oshana (2006, 1024).
16. Oshana claims that paternalism just is that which offends against autonomy (Oshana
2003, 116), and elaborates that Paternalism usurps autonomy because it substitutes one persons
judgment for anothers (Oshana 2003, 116). This point is an important one to keep in mind in
assessing Oshanas claim that the Taliban woman is no longer autonomous once she gives up her
substantive independence. If a person has no autonomy to usurp or offend, she cannot (properly
speaking) be treated paternalistically. My intuitions about the highly answerable women I describe
in section 2 run strongly against the idea that they cannot be treated paternalisticallythat is, that
paternalism does not describe a way in which these women can be wronged. Whether
paternalism is ever justified is, of course, a separate question, which Oshana also treats in Oshana
(2003, 2006).
17. Harry Frankfurts hierarchical account of autonomy (1988, 1999) is perhaps the most
influential of the reflective-endorsement accounts, and Michael Bratman (1999, 2000, 2001,
2003a, b, 2007) offers an important variant on that account. Gerald Dworkin (1988) and John

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Hypatia

Christman (1987, 1991, 2004, 2005) also accord a central role to reflective endorsement, and for
Diana Meyers (2004, 2005), critical reflection is among those capacities required for autonomy
competency. See MacKenzie and Stoljar (2000) and Westlund (2003) for detailed discussion of
various reflective-endorsement accounts and the differences among them.
18. I borrow the language of being gripped by a desire from Gibbard (1990), and follow
Bratman (2003a) in applying it to the discussion of autonomy. The concept of alienation appears
frequently in the work of Frankfurt, Bratman, and others.
19. See Bratman (2003a) and Westlund (2003) for further discussion of this point.
20. Immediately following his discussion of the depressed agent, Bratman does consider the
idea that some further endorsement of self-governing policies functioning might be required for
full-blown self-governance (Bratman 2007, 211). Bratman argues that a hierarchical theorist can
address this worry without falling into a familiar regress. On his view, no further endorsing attitude is
needed because self-governing policies already reflexively endorse their own functioning. He
emphasizes, however, that Lockean role and satisfaction, not reflexivity, are the primary ingredients
in agential authority. The appeal to reflexivity does not seem designed to address the sort of worry I
raise about agential authority in depressed and deferential agents, which is not, in any case,
motivated by an intuition that further endorsement is required.
21. Henceforth I will refer to policies concerning the appropriate functioning of various
considerations in ones practical reasoning as reasoning-governing policies rather than as selfgoverning policies in order to leave open the possibility that acting on a reasoning-governing policy
with which one is satisfied may nonetheless not add up to full self-governance.
22. The fact that the deferential agent inherits her policies from someone else is not
ultimately crucial to the case. Mansson McGintys converts to Islam may well in some sense be
taking their reasons from other sources, as well. But, I will argue, they enjoy a form of self-relation
that both the deeply deferential and the depressed agent seem to lack.
23. I develop this account at greater length in Westlund (2003). Paul Benson has defended a
similar approach, on which I comment briefly below.
24. I have been tempted to describe the disposition to hold oneself answerable to others as
outward-looking, in contrast to inward-looking, reflective dispositions that are central to
hierarchical, or structural, views of autonomy. An anonymous referee points out, however, that the
distinction between inward- and outward-looking dispositions is hardly a straightforward one, since
on some views (notably, Kantian ones), answerability to others is grounded in the authority of the
agents own will. I agree that an unqualified contrast between inward- and outward- looking
dispositions is overly simple, and for this reason I no longer think that the contrast between my
account and the structural accounts I criticize is best captured in those terms. In light of this point,
however, a few words about how my argument relates to the Kantian project may be in order:
Kantian views derive our moral accountability to one another from the autonomy of the will, which
is in turn grounded in the reflective structure of our own consciousness. What Im arguing is that the
autonomy of the will must itself be understood in terms of a disposition to hold oneself answerable to
others, and not in purely structural terms.
25. It may be difficult to tell, in some cases, the extent to which an agent really is dialogically
responsive. Some rather articulate agents might be utterly impervious to dialogical engagement,
shielding themselves with pat answers designed to deflect further questioning rather than respond
to it. Less articulate agents may be receptive to external critical perspectives in ways that are harder
to detect. I consider this possibility further in the section Formal versus Substantive Conditions.
For this reason it may be advisable to employ a healthy principle of charity in assessing an agent as
autonomous or not.
26. For more on both self-representation and self-responsibility, see Westlund (2003).
27. My position is that dialogical answerability is a necessary condition for autonomy.
Whether it is sufficient is a question on which I remain neutral here.

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28. Reacting as one who owes a response may take various forms, some of which I discuss
below. Also, as indicated in note 25 above, in some cases it may be difficult for an observer to be
certain whether an agent is being receptive to external critical perspectives or not. But this is,
perhaps, just as we should expect: after all, it is not always easy to tell whether an agent is acting
autonomously or not. One might be tempted to think that a philosophical account of autonomy
should make it easier for us to tell. But it may simply be a fact of life that the characteristics upon
which autonomy depends are themselves sometimes hard to identify with confidence. As suggested
in note 25, this is one reason for employing a principle of charity in assessing the autonomy of
others.
29. Later in this section I argue that genuine reflective or deliberative response may take
more than one form, and I give several examples of forms it may take.
30. I suspect that Betty at first took the medical staff to fail to meet this condition. She did
begin to make some concessions to them once she began to see that they were genuinely concerned
for her well-being (though she never did change her mind about the surgery).
31. These feminists include not only Benson and Oshana, whom I discuss in this paper, but
also Natalie Stoljar (2000) and Sigurdur Kristinsson (2000). Christman describes Diana Meyerss
competency view of autonomy as non-procedural (Christman 2004, 155), but following
MacKenzie and Stoljar, I would instead categorize it as procedural. As I understand Meyerss view,
however, it is one on which autonomy is causally, but not constitutively, relationalso it is a
formal but non-intrinsically relational account.
32. See Christman (2004, 148). Christman cites Friedman (1997) as making a similar point.
33. It is also worth reminding ourselves that a substantive account of autonomy may be
individualistic in nature, as were the popular notions of autonomy initially rejected by feminists.
These conceptions of autonomy required substantive independence and non-conformity of the
autonomous agent. As Christman points out, Oshanas own account is somewhat paradoxical in
this respect. Though constitutively relational in the sense that it treats autonomy as dependent on
the existence of certain idealized social relations, these idealized relations are in fact ones in which
each party enjoys a significant degree of substantive independence from the other(s).
34. See the next paragraph for one important exception.
35. I argue elsewhere that cases of deference or self-subordination are not the only cases in
which such an impairment may arise (Westlund 2003). Some apparently independent characters
may likewise fail to be responsive in the right way to justificatory pressures.
36. Chandra Talpade Mohantys influential paper Under Western Eyes (Mohanty 1991),
for example, charges Western feminists with othering third-world women and treating them (in
virtue of their cultural, religious, or familial commitments) as generally less in control of their
bodies and decisions than Western feminists presume themselves to be. Her paper offers a forceful
critique of such treatment. Similarly, Uma Narayan offers a powerful critique of the tendency to
treat third-world or other women as either prisoners or dupes of patriarchy (Narayan 2002).

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