This is the third post that attempts to respond to comments on my 3/15 post Some Values Matter More Than Others And Are Ignored Anyway.  

One person (Dan K.) asked what I meant by “autonomy.”  Obviously, a fair question.  And, also obviously, there is much disagreement about this.  Here’s my take, for what its worth.

Autonomy is the effective ability to act on one’s voluntarism.  Voluntarism, in turn, is the (psychological) ability to distance oneself from one’s ends (commitments, loyalties, etc) to choose between them.  This requires a degree of independence, where that is understood as follows: if X is independent of Y, Y is not essential to X.  Putting all of that together, I would say that autonomy is the effective ability to act on a (psychological) ability to distance oneself from one’s ends (commitments, loyalties, etc) to choose between them, from which one must then be independent. 

This is pretty complicated and it gets more complicated still since I think there are stronger and weaker forms of independence, voluntarism and autonomy.

To complicate it still further, I actually think that its rational autonomy that is the real value.  I would define rationality as the ability to evaluate available ends.*  So rational autonomy is the effective ability to act on a (psychological) ability to distance oneself from one’s ends (commitments, loyalties, etc) to evaluate and choose between them (one must be independent from them).

 So, my answer to John and M: Joe is not autonomous because he has no focus and is incapable of effectively acting at all.  Putting this point a different way: what matters is having an autonomous life and Joe isn’t capable of having any life whatsoever.  If he keeps changing his mind the way I indicated, he never gets to do anything!

*Note: I mean this definition of rationality to be in accord with Henry Richardson’s claim that "Reasoning is thinking that sifts discursively expressible reasons and arguments either in order to ascertain the truth of certain propositions or to derive new true propositions from ones that are initially believed to be true" (Henry Richardson 2002, 76).