Joe Parsons (St Anne's College): 'A (somewhat) Kantian account of the right to personal autonomy'
Abstract: Liberals – along with many others – like to claim that each of us has a right to personal autonomy – a right, that is, to decide how we lead our own lives. According to Joseph Raz and David Enoch, this is because an autonomous life – a life shaped by the choices of the person living it – is (other things equal) an intrinsically better one. Even if Raz and Enoch are right about personal autonomy being intrinsically good for us, I argue that this doesn’t tell us the whole story of why we have a right to it. Contra Onora O’Neill, I argue that we should look to Kant – and, in particular, to his Formula of Humanity – for the rest of the story. I argue that, on a plausible reading, Kant’s “best-loved” principle tells us to respect people’s capacity for rational choice. This simple idea, I argue, has the potential to provide us with an extensionally adequate and intuitively satisfying account of why it is that we have a right to decide how we lead our own lives.
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Ockham Society Convenors: Jack Tristani, Yuxin Tang and Meredith Ross-James | Ockham Society Webpage
