THE MEANING OF AUTONOMY Great post from Catallarchy:
Consider two men: one a lone nomadic hunter on some primitive savanna thousands of years ago, and one an ordinary, downtrodden citizen of a modern totalitarian but non-genocidal dictatorship, say the Soviet Union of Brezhnev’s time. Who has more autonomy?
On Bill’s account, it’s gotta be the Soviet. He has a wider range of professions and life-paths available to him by far; he can travel much further and know much more; he can expect to live much longer. It is true that the Soviet is heavily constrained in the sense that there are numerous innocent things which, if he does them, will result in severe pain or violent death. But that’s true for the hunter too; the only difference is that for the hunter the pain/death will come at the hands of animals, diseases, and other natural forces, where for the Soviet it will come from the officials of the State.
But I think it quite obvious that this doesn’t accord well with most people’s intuitive notion of autonomy. The hunter’s life has a distinct romance to it, a sense of open-ended adventure; the Soviet’s does not. The hunter has a degree of dignity and self-possession which the Soviet is denied. The hunter, within the admittedly heavy but morally neutral and unchangeable constraints of physical reality, may do as he pleases without asking the leave of any man. The Soviet is a slave of other men who clearly are morally wrong to enslave him, and could have chosen not to. A notion of autonomy which does not capture these differences and declare the hunter the more autonomous one is a ridiculous notion.
On the other hand, consider what result you would get if you asked people whether they would rather live in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, or on the Savannah? Autonomy-loving libertarian that I am, I would find this a tough choice. Being eaten by a lion, dying of appendicitis, and slowly expiring from malnutrition after your teeth fall out are way no fun. So of the two competing notions of autonomy, which should we build a society on, if we had to choose?
That’s the magic of the market, actually; we don’t have to choose. For which I humbly thank God every day.