Young - Personal Autonomy: Beyond Negative and Positive Liberty

For Community Aid Abroadand Amnesty International

In this book, the author is very much concerned with the problems of liberty, negative and positive, although he thinks it better, in the main, to avoid such expressions. The reader may raise an eyebrow, but a considerable literature, under the rubric Autonomy, has already accumulated. In opting for Personal Autonomy as a title, Dr Young is less concerned to achieve a novel effect, than to leapfrog the conceptual inadequacies attaching to a more conventional terminology. It is hoped that the reader may pay more attention to the substantive analysis than to the terminology employed to convey its sense.

It will be contended, of course, that one persons autonomy is anothers subjection. Dr Young, however, does not view autonomy as mere freedom from constraint. More fully than heretofore, he seeks to show that conventional libertarian limitations upon autonomy are severely inadequate. He is able to do this because he regards autonomy as self-direction according to a life-plan which conforms to the individuals long-term (dispositional) nature and interests. Given as much, dispositional autonomy may require the emplacement of constraints upon inessential or short-term or occurrent acts of autonomy which seriously threaten that overarching life-plan. Traditional libertarianism, following Dr Young, takes insufficient account of the need for constraint, in varying degrees, to enhance dispositional autonomy. It is in this way that the author opens the door somewhat to a modified acceptance of paternalism as requisite to any comprehensive notion of autonomy. The argument is both novel and important.

The dispositional autonomy which interests Dr Young is not so much a Kantian notion of self-direction derived from the recognition of objective and universally valid principles. It is a self-direction, rather, which derives from the individual being apprised of his or her own nature, and thereby being able to devise a plan suitable to that nature. What is presupposed, in such individuated self-direction as this, is not the primacy of irrationality. Rather, it is that a life-plan, devised for one individual, cannot necessarily be presumed morally suitable for all or any others. Simple moral universals find the going hard in terrain so broken and difficult. The earnest conviction that others should be forced to be free (often enough associated with these universals) cannot find the going any easier. Given the centrality of personal autonomy for Dr Young, involving self-devised life-plans, the question must still arise as to whether and how we may assist other individuals in any quest for autonomy politically, economically and otherwise. Dr Young firmly excludes the notion that we may best assist others by simply standing aside, negatively deflecting external engagement in the formulation of these plans.

If libertarianism is inadequate, which in various respects it is, it does not follow that socialism, conceived as a diverse bundle of solutions, will necessarily and unqualifiedly serve us better. But the problem of autonomy (or whatever we choose to call it) remains. Dr Youngs book is probably the most readable, interesting and exciting attempt thus far made to delineate the logical and psychological nature, together with the moral value, of autonomy. He explores the sorts of limits that must be placed upon personal autonomy in seeking to promote a like autonomy for all.

There will be counter-argument to the present analysis: nothing could be healthier. What really matters here is that the author details a position that is summary, coherent, trenchant and relevant, cutting across the grain of much contemporary ideological prejudice. All sincere individualists, whether proponents or not of economic and other varieties of