For Mackenzie, the self-authorisation axis of autonomy “involves regarding oneself as having the normativeauthority to be self-determining and self-governing.”33 It is thus a self-reflexive attitude in which one regards oneself as a competent moral agent in a community of other moral agents: as someone who can account for, explain, and take responsibility for her actions, and who is “authorized” to expect the same from others. Hence, being self-authorising requires that an agent think of herself as capable of explaining her actions to others in ways that are at least in principle acceptable to those others. Self-authorisation is thus relational in two senses: because it involves an agent’s perception of herself in the light of others, and because it involves reasons,
commitments, and values that are themselves socially constituted within the agent.34 Mackenzie writes that “regarding oneself as accountable involves having a sense of one’s epistemic and normative authority with regard to one’s life and one’s practical commitments.”35 The points I have raised above regarding the opacity of the self and the ubiquitous badness of the social that constitutes it serve to undermine the sense any of us could have of ourselves as normatively or epistemically competent in an authority- conferring way with respect to our own actions. Mackenzie herself observes the apparent demandingness of self-authorisation, saying that these self-evaluative attitudes “may seem to assume an unrealistically high level of confidence in oneself.” She emphasises in
33 Mackenzie 35. Emphasis original. 34 Ibid 36
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response that it only requires “appropriate” self-evaluative attitudes, and that—like the other relational theorists—she takes autonomy to be a matter of degree.36
But there are other interesting questions raised by Mackenzie’s characterisation of self-authorisation as involving a sense of one’s normative competence. There is a question, for instance, about whether successfully navigating social norms—and taking oneself to be capable of doing so—really confers or constitutes any form of autonomy in situations such as ours in which a large part of the norms are hostile to one’s well-being or self-image. For people in oppressed groups, confidence in expressing one’s reasons and one’s ability to account for oneself involves confidence in speaking the language of the oppressor. Certainly someone who feels a sense of dislocation, alienation, or
incompetence within their social milieu—who finds themselves unable to find the words to account for themselves in an oppressive tongue, and who is conscious of that—is robbed of a kind of well-being and respect. They will find the world to be a hostile place largely arranged against them. But they are right about this, and from their position of dislocation they have the potential to articulate some opposition to that world that someone who navigates it with confidence is likely to miss.
Mackenzie might simply respond that all this is true, but that someone who misses this self-confidence is nevertheless in some sense less autonomous than someone who has it. But this implies that someone who internalises bad norms, and thinks of themselves through these norms, is more autonomous than someone who cannot. This flatly contradicts Stoljar’s “feminist intuition” that internalising false norms harms one’s capacity to act autonomously. It also strikes me as a bad conception from which to attempt to construct a resistance to oppressive structures.
In his relational theory of autonomy as normative competence, Paul Benson raises a similar question regarding the norms with respect to which an agent’s autonomy
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is to be judged. Under Benson’s account, the “norms which, in fact, we must be capable of recognizing and appreciating in order to act freely are those that actually play a part in the particular personal and social relationships in which we are involved.”37 A person’s freedom is thus always judged according to the particular normative domain—made up of the people around them—in which they act, and they are free to the extent that they, themselves, appreciate and recognise those norms. “Apart from specific norms,” Benson writes, “freedom is vacuous, since those norms set the terms in which free actions may reveal pertinent features of agents.”38 And as Benson himself points out, this gives the account a supple approach to oppressive normative contexts:
If one’s freedom seems irremediably splintered because the norms that one is expected to comprehend in order to be minimally respected as a free and accountable agent are themselves contradictory or incoherent, then one is not at fault for feeling alienated from one’s agency. The cause of one’s feeling need not be some gender-specific defect in one’s inner volitional machinery. Rather, it can be attributed to the alienating, gender-bound expectations of oppressive social institutions and practices.39
Benson’s normative competence account hence allows the expression of an important feature of oppressive social structures: that they can not only frustrate one’s autonomy but can also, paradoxically, invoke one’s autonomy as a weapon to be used against one. The common norm of victim-blaming, in which a sexual assault survivor’s autonomy is invoked just so that she can be subjected to blame for her assault, is a good example of the paradoxical nature that autonomy can take on under patriarchy. The survivor is subjected to blame because she used her autonomy to flout oppressive social norms regarding modesty in women—survivors are told, sometimes by a person invested
37 Benson 56 38 Ibid 39 Ibid 59
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with significant institutional authority, that the way they were dressed, or that they were drunk, or that they invited someone in for coffee, makes them at least partly culpable for the subsequent attack. In all these ways she failed to act as someone who is
fundamentally a passive object of outside forces; she is expected always to be thinking of herself as something potentially acted upon, rather than as an agent with her own ends to pursue. She is thus blamed for failing to use her autonomy in essentially autonomy- nullifying ways.
I take contradictions like this to be a good reason to be suspicious of the utility of the concept of autonomy within current social conditions. It can easily be pressed into the service of those conditions, and turned against their most vulnerable victims. Benson, too, thinks that prevailing social norms confront women and other oppressed people with contradictory and alienating judgements regarding their freedom. He is, however, more optimistic about the possibility of moving into other normative realms in which one can be judged in less hostile and alienating ways: “many persons’
relationships,” he writes, “give rise to ways of understanding the meaning and value of human activity which diverge sharply from values predominating in the society at large.”40
I’m not sure that these alternative ways of understanding can give rise to a workable conception of autonomy as normative competence. It is certainly true that there are interpersonal relationships that appear to diverge from a large part of the oppressive social norms that structure society at large. But these alternative normative domains are subject to the same knowability question as the norms with which one identifies or one’s application of an authenticity procedure: the most insidious ways in which they are structured by the oppressive milieu in which—despite everything—they are situated are likely to be the ones that are most difficult to identify and express. For
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Benson, so long as we feel competent—are confident in our competence—within a normative domain, and our agency does not appear “irremediably splintered” within it, then our actions can rightly be taken to “reveal who we are,” and we are free.41 As I’ve said, I don’t think that confidence in navigating an oppressive normative context can be taken to track one’s freedom or autonomy, and nor do I think that one’s feeling of confidence within a particular normative context is necessarily a sign that it is not oppressive. Nevertheless, Benson’s account does give us a useful way to express an important operation of oppression, and a standpoint from which to internally critique societies that take themselves to promote autonomy while constituting it in hostile and contradictory forms.
With all this in mind, however, self-authorisation is cut adrift. Under current conditions one’s confidence in one’s ability to account for oneself to others does not lead to anything resembling autonomy. Confidence in one’s own normative competence is an important part of well-being, and we should fiercely criticise all the structures that rob people of it, but this doesn’t entail arguing that people within those structures ought to feel confident in this way. It entails that those structures ought to be destroyed.
Confidence can be misplaced; one can be wrong about one’s competence—one’s ability to self-govern or self-scrutinise—or one can be confident in the usage of the wrong norms. Self-confidence alone cannot confer or constitute autonomy. Like Stoljar, I believe that the content of the norms with which one explains oneself is important. But I am doubtful about our ability to access or know when we are using good norms within a society so thoroughly constituted by bad ones. To see how the contradiction between society and autonomy could—potentially—be reconciled, we turn next to a far older account of freedom, based upon a different conception of ethics entirely.
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