Autonomy

Autonomy is the capacity of a rational being to give itself the laws by which it acts, rather than submitting to passing inclinations or to an external authority. Its most precise sense comes from the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, for whom the term essentially means self-legislation.

The word comes from the Greek autonomos, made up of autos (self) and nomos (law or governance). In ancient Greece it designated cities that were governed by their own laws. Kant transferred it to the domain of the will: an agent is autonomous when the law it follows is one that its own reason recognizes as valid. Its opposite is heteronomy, that is, acting on desires, interests or commands imposed from outside.

Kant distinguished between hypothetical imperatives, which apply only if one wants something ('don't speed on the motorway if you don't want to be stopped by the police'), and categorical imperatives, which command regardless of personal desires ('it is wrong to break the law'). For him, morality presupposes that the agent can submit to such commands, and from this comes the dignity of the person and their responsibility for what they do. This is why he held that punishment designed to override the offender's will, for instance through brainwashing or drugs, would be immoral, since it would fail to respect their autonomy.

The concept has spread well beyond ethics. Cornelius Castoriadis understood it as a society's capacity to give itself its own laws and to revise them consciously. Robert Paul Wolff argued that obedience to the authority of the state is incompatible with moral autonomy. In the history of religious thought, Elia del Medigo and Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus defended the autonomy of reason against revelation and dogma. In developmental psychology and bioethics, personal autonomy refers to a patient's right to decide about their own body.

Current debate centres on whether autonomy can ever be complete or is always conditioned by society, the economy and relations with others. Some authors, such as André Gorz, hold that individual liberation and social transformation condition each other, so that autonomy cannot exist without a society that makes it possible.