Autonomy as a Social Role and the Function of Diversity

Abstract

In the ambit of the debate on “personal autonomy”, we propose to intend “personal autonomy” in a social sense. We undertake this move because we think that autonomy is compatible with socialization and we will give reasons for this claim. Moreover, we must consider the role of the wide variety of informational sources we are exposed to that influence our behavior. Social background represents the ontological ground from which we develop the capacity for autonomy; at the same time, interaction with others (real or virtual) enlarges the possibility for autonomous judgements. Our attempt is, first, to try to sketch a social notion of personal autonomy and, second, to elucidate the connection between autonomy and the exposition to informational and social diversity.

Autonomy and the Ownership of Our Own Destiny: Tracking the External World and Human Behavior, and the Paradox of Autonomy

“…(4) Are adaptive preferences connected with autonomy when wellbeing is promoted through the novel ways of enhancing human capacities that biosciences are expected to produce? (5) Many problems regarding autonomy are also opened by the adaptive preferences that are linked to situations of self-deception-facing death and serious diseases, people are inclined both to deceive themselves about their chances and, thus, to adapt their preference to what they consider conceivable for them. That is, are people completely autonomous with respect to the choices they adopt on the basis of adaptive preferences resulting from self-deception?…”

“…Giovagnoli [2,4,5] usefully notes that a person is autonomous not only when he is capable of rationally recognizing reasons and motives for acting, but also when the responsibility of his choices is adopted for "subjective" reasons; autonomy requires the potentiality of "taking deontic attitudes" in order to make subjectively unequivocal and patent the material structure of the content of the reasons of our actions:…”

“…We consider a non-oppressive deontic social, moral, legal, and institutional framework as the best we can have for favoring human personal autonomy. Giovagnoli [5], to overcome this problem, which still resorts to the paradox of autonomy I have illustrated above, distinctly advocates an idea of "personal autonomy" in a social sense as the one that flourishes in discursive practices, but also at the prelinguistic or non-linguistic (model-based, cf. Magnani and Bertolotti [19]) level.…”

“…6 These external resources-new data about some potential choices, for example-can easily become internal when they are stored in memory and are, therefore, representable in our own brains. By picking 5 The reliability of moral knowledge is indeed circumscribed to more or less extended collectives, in which sharability of moral rules and behaviors is affected (and jeopardized) by both the presence of free riders and by the frequent changes of moral frameworks adopted by individuals, which create unexpected outcomes and thus a loss of autonomy. Something similar can be said in the case of general knowledge, whose reliability, contrarily to science, suffers from possible fuzziness and recurrent and more or less patent modifications.…”

Personal Autonomy in a Post-Secular Society

“…Substantive theories of personal autonomy rest on the importance of social norms for individual choices, and there are several authors who are discussing the topic in social epistemology (Hardwig, Welbourne, Schmitt, Baier, Webb, Goldman, Jones, Fricker Faulkner, Lipton, Kusch, Lackey). They observe that community is fundamental for knowledge and autonomy [26]. In this sense, epistemic agents mostly rest on testimonial transmission for their knowledge, and there exists a wide range of information together with a division of epistemic labor (Putnam, Kitcher).…”