CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Jovchevski, Perica |
|---|---|
| Title | The Value of Personal Autonomy |
| Summary | This dissertation presents a comprehensive examination of the value of personal autonomy and its role within liberalism. It consists of a theory of personal autonomy instantiated in a hybrid ideal and conception of personal autonomy, an account of its values and elaboration of the implications which those values bear for the design of substantive liberal political institutions. The theory of personal autonomy I present builds upon the role of autonomy within partially comprehensive anti-perfectionism, offering at the same time a defense for this form of liberal political morality. The dissertation consists of five chapters. In Chapter One I defend the commitment of anti-perfectionists to the principle of state neutrality and to an ideal of personal autonomy and its value as necessary suppositions of a sound liberal morality. These two commitments together with the commitment to a modified or “relaxed” version of the liberal legitimacy principle, make the character of the liberal morality I defend throughout this dissertation, a partially comprehensive, anti-perfectionist one. In Chapters Two and Three, I propose and defend a hybrid ideal and conception of personal autonomy, composed of internalist and externalist requirements for autonomy, which I claim to fit the value of personal autonomy within partially comprehensive anti-perfectionism. The hybrid ideal of autonomy conceives of autonomous individuals as persons who instantiate two features: they are self-determinate, in that they form their conceptions of the good for themselves, and they exercise self-control over the pursue of their autonomously formed conceptions of the good, in that they use an access to adequate means and live according to those conceptions. The conception based on the hybrid ideal I propose is non-hierarchical, ahistorical and procedural in character and specifies five necessary conditions which in their conjunction are sufficient to account for the global autonomy of individuals: the possession of cognitive and practical capacities, a validation condition, independence conditions, a performative condition and an epistemic condition. Chapter Four “zooms” into the value of the ideal of personal autonomy and presents two arguments, one from abduction and the other transcendental, for its personal and impersonal final value, respectively. Both arguments are based on the close relation which, I claim, personal autonomy bears with personal values or “values-for”. In Chapter Five, I deal with the conditionality of the personal value of autonomy. In opposition to perfectionist accounts on its value and its conditionality of the good, I defend the view that the personal value of autonomy is conditional on the just. Moreover, I demonstrate that partially comprehensive anti-perfectionists should conceive of the value of autonomy as being of interlocked nature with the principles of justice. To the end of this chapter, I explain the content of the interlocking relation between the value of autonomy and justice. First, I specify the constrains which justice sets on the value of autonomy as being of distributive and relational nature. Second, I specify the constrains which the value of autonomy sets on the content of the principles of justice. These result in requirements for a complex of sufficientarian and egalitarian principles to govern the distribution of the adequate means for autonomy, as well as relational egalitarian principles governing vertical and horizontal interpersonal relations in a society committed to the hybrid ideal of autonomy. |
| Supervisor | Moles, Andrés |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/jovchevski_perica.pdf |
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