Desires more truly your own : the idea of autonomy

Abstract

In the piece of work that follows, I focus exclusively on personal autonomy in the sense of self-mastery. The autonomous person is one who has, in some sense or other, mastery over their desires. Exactly what this sense is will be the subject of this thesis. With this in mind, I can state the central question of this work. It is: What relationship. would need to obtain between a person and their desires for that person to be autonomous? This can be put another way. The first part of the title of this work is a quotation from Harry Frankfurt's paper "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person".2 Taking what Frankfurt provides for us, the question we want can be put as follows: What is it to make- and act upon- a desire "more truly [one's] own"? This is the foremost problem that I mean to address in the present work as a whole. Here is the way the theme will develop. There are two conceptions, or models, of the idea of personal autonomy. Both concern the formation of desires. Yet each runs its own line about what it is to be autonomous with respect to one's desires, what it is to make one's desires more truly one's own. I introduce the first of these early on. And I hope to be on the way to providing the other conception before the end of this work as a whole. I can say in advance that, when all the arguments are in, it is the latter model which comes out looking superior to the former. Or so I shall argue. In a little more detail, here is an outline of what is to come. In chapter 1, I survey some of the literature on my topic. The literature provides us with a way into a discussion about the first of our models of autonomy, what I call the hierarchy model, for this is the dominant model to be found there. Hierarchy autonomy is based on an account of persons in terms of an hierarchy of desires- first-order desires, second order desires and so on. We will see that Frankfurt is the main player, setting the agenda for the other writers. In chapter 2, I go on to criticise the dominant model by raising three problems. In the discussion there, some attention is given to a retouching of the hierarchy model in the light of the notion of decisive commitment. However, the retouched version is shown to have shortcomings as well. In chapter 3, I discuss a revised hierarchy model. Although this revised account fares better than the original account in respect of our set of problems, it is still vulnerable to a challenge which I advance. In chapter 4, I attempt to develop an alternative. I label this the attunement model. In chapter 5, I compare and contrast it with the hierarchy model. It will be shown there that the sons of considerations which tell against the hierarchy model do not present a serious challenge to the attunement model. We will see, in addition, that the attunement model has advantages over the hierarchy model. Finally, in a short conclusion, I sum up the findings from each of the previous chapters, and I bid farewell to the hierarchy model of autonomy.