1. The document summarizes Marilyn Friedman's account of personal autonomy in her book. It discusses the basic features she argues are necessary for choices and actions to be autonomous, including various forms of self-reflection. 2. It examines her distinction between the constitutive and causal conditions for autonomy. Social relationships and cultural contexts play an important role in enabling autonomy. 3. While autonomy requires individuality, it is always grounded in social relationships and contexts. An overly individualistic view that ignores social influences can undermine autonomy.

1. Chapter one:
A Conception of Autonomy
報告人:
李瑞清 高亞筠
Marilyn Friedman Autonomy, Gender, Politics

2. Arrangement in This book
The Basic Account (1~3)
The Social Context (4~5)
Intimate Relationships (6~7)
The Larger Political System (8~9)

3. Arrangement in Chapter one
The Basic Account
Individuality and Sociality
Content-Neutral v. Substantive Conceptions of Autonomy
Severely Restricted Options and Autonomy
Counterexamples

4. Generally Use…
Choices or actions are indifferent as behavior.( p.4)
When she refers to, for example, “wants and
values,” it can stand in for the full panoply of
“pro” or “con” attitudes. Wants, desires, cares,
concerns, values, and commitments, and any other
attitudes someone may take up with regard to what
she experiences, attitudes that might influence her
goals, purposes, aims, and intentions, are thereby
relevant to autonomy.( p.6)

5. The Basic Account:
What is Personal Autonomy ?
In Ordinary People’s Understanding
Ex. “True to myself”, doing it “my way”, standing up for “what I believe”,
thinking “for myself”, being one’s “own person.”
Friedman’s Simple Definition
Autonomy is self-determination.
Personal autonomy is self-determination by an individual
self.
An autonomous person is someone who behaves
autonomously with relative frequency.
An autonomous life is one lived by an autonomous person.

6. The Basic Account:
One Worth-Mentioned Distinction
The Constitutive Conditions of Autonomy
- The nature of autonomy itself.
The Causal Conditions of Autonomy
- Required for autonomy to be realized
Importance:
Appreciating the role that social relationships and cultural context play
in the realization of autonomy. See chapter 4 and 5.
Q: How to understand this distinction in Friedman’s
autonomy basic account? Does Friedman really
need this Distinction in her theory?

7. The Basic Account:
The Features of Constitutive Conditions
For Choices and Actions to be autonomous, the
choosing and acting self as the particular self
she is must play a role in determining them.
The features constituting her identity must not
simply cause her choices and actions as isolated
links in causal chains.
They must be features that are central enough
to she herself, as a whole self.

8. The Basic Account:
Self-reflection
Self-determination is in terms of a sort of self-
reflection.
This notion of self-reflection has involved self-
monitoring and self-regulation as well.
Friedman: Self-reflection is the process in
which, a whole self takes a stance toward
particular wants and values she finds herself to
have.

9. The Basic Account:
Self-reflection in two senses
Autonomous choices and actions are self-reflective:
Attentive consideration
They are partly caused by a person’s reflections on, or attentive
•
consideration of, wants and desires that already characterize her.
When? – need not be occurred closely prior to the
•
choices.
How? – need not be conscious or extensive, narrowly
•
cognitive in nature. Need not be highly deliberate or
deliberated( p.8 )
Choices without self-reflection doesn’t involve a self in determining
•
one’s behavior.
Mirroring
To Mirror someone’s concerns is to accord with them and to promote
•
them. Choices and Actions mirror wants or valued, promoting its well-
being, or protecting it from harm.

10. The Basic Account:
Two other conditions - 1
Ex. Coercion, deception, manipulation.
To realize autonomy, self-reflection must
also be partly effective in determining
someone’s behavior.
Self-reflection must not entirely be
impeded by interfering condition.
Those interfering conditions do not entirely
preclude autonomy. The extent to which
they undermine so depends on how
effective they are.

11. The Basic Account:
Two other conditions - 2
Autonomous actions also stem from what an agent cares deeply
about.
Relative importance for a particular person is a matter of depth and
pervasiveness.
• Deep? – wants and values are “deep” when they are abiding and
tend to be chosen over other competing wants and values. Also,
when they constitute the overarching rationales that an agent regards
as justifying many of her more specific choices.
• Pervasive? – wants and values are “pervasive” when they are
relevant to a great many situations that a person faces. They are
frequently salient in someone’s life and she chooses in accord with
them often.
Q: Self-reflection has already embodied this conditions?

12. The Basic Account:
Some reminders
Every want and value could be reaffirmed, however, it’s one’s deeper concerns, not
her shallower concerns, that provide the basis for autonomous behavior. Ex.
Liking for ice cream or a TV program. X
Someone’s initial choices in accordance with any wants and values are not
autonomous. Initially she must simply come to choose somewhat consistently so
that certain wants or values guide her choices frequently or steadfastly and thereby
become “deepened” aspects of her character or identity.
Autonomy doesn’t need to be defined in terms of someone’s deepest concerns.
Deeper concerns are always open to changes in meaning and may fluctuate in
relative importance as she refines them in response to novel circumstances. A person
may deepen her prior commitments or forge new ones out of her sense of what had
already mattered to her and how the choice she makes transforms her priorities and
her identity.
Autonomy is a matter of degree. The more extensively one reflects on one’s wants
and commitments, the greater is one’s autonomy with respect to them.

13. The Basic Account:
Disagreement with John Chrisman
John Christman : If someone goes on to reaffirm her
original commitments after recognizing their socialized
origin, then, she achieves autonomy with respect to them.
This level of self-reflection, provided it motivates action, is
sufficient for autonomy.
Friedman: A self is at all minimally self-reflective has
crossed a threshold of autonomy. Those deeper wants are
the motivating concerns that form who she is and that make
the actions that issue from them “her own.”

14. The Basic Account:
A Typical Criticism
Q: Whether someone can be autonomous if her guiding wants and values are the causal
products of upbringing and other processes beyond her control, processes that are
therefore not autonomous for her.
Friedman: So long as the causes of her behavior include her self in some significant
sense( and so long as behavior mirrors that self by according with its deeper
commitments), then her behavior is autonomous.
• Need not be conscious – So long as a person’s choices reflect and issue from the
self-reflections on her deeper wants and values that she undertakes from her overall
perspective at some level of thought, they have at least a minimal degree of
autonomy
• Need not be highly deliberate – It can be occur without explicit contemporaneous
self- monitoring. It can occur casually, spontaneously, and rapidly.
• Having care, concerns and commitment that constitute a perspective. This
perspective is both( at least partly ) definitive of who she is and a ( part )
determinant of what she does. What matters to someone, what she self-reflectively
cares about, when effective in and reflected in her action, make her behavior
autonomous.

15. The Basic Account:
The Reason-emotion Dichotomy
Two traditions: reason v. emotion
According to contemporary thinking about rationality, a reason for someone
to act in a certain way is either a belief by someone that that action is right
or good, or some fact in virtue of which it is right or good. On this approach,
there is no reason why features of emotion or character could not constitute
reasons, in the sense of facts by virtue of which actions are right or good.
According to Bennett Helm, actions that express an agent’s emotions and
character can reflect what deeply and overall matters to her in case her
emotions and character traits show coherent rational patterns amounting to
concern.
Reason would no longer contrast with emotion or desire because this use of
“reason” departs substantially from its traditional cognitive sense.
Whether “ reason” is used either in the narrow or the wider sense, emotions
can constitute a kind of reflection on or attention to objects or values of
concern. They can contribute to the autonomy of a person’s choices.

16. The Basic Account:
Two Sorts of Identities
Someone can be identified by:
Perspectival identity – what she cares about or
values.
Trait-based identity – human kind categories.
What counts for autonomy is someone’s
perspectival identity. The nonperspectival kinds
or traits she instantiates or exemplifies are
relevant to her autonomy only if they matter to
her.

17. The Basic Account:
With Communitarian
Someone’s concern could be the result of
circumstances over which she has no control.
Ex. Parent, nation.
At odds: Communal attachments could not be
the basis of the person’s autonomous choices or
actions. She might easily be indifferent to some
of them.

18. The Basic Account:
Autonomy Competency
The relevant capacities include:
Capacities for having values and commitments,
Understanding them,
Taking up valenced attitudes toward them,
Making choices and undertaking actions that mirror
these commitments,
Doing the latter with some resilience in the face of at
least minimal obstacles.
An autonomous person is one who has these capacities
and exercises them at least occasionally.

19. The Basic Account:
An usual objection (see chapter 2)
Q: Since a person’s wants and values are the products of
socialization, it seems that they are not really the
agent’s “own,” and therefore choices based on them
would seem to undermine the possibility of a self
genuinely determining self.
Friedman: My goal is a conception of autonomy that
does not apply to any and all actions but that
differentiates some actions from others.
The idea of someone as the agent of her doings is not
undermined, by the fact that those doings had ultimate
causal antecedents that were other than the person
herself.

20. The Basic Account:
Respond to Harry Frankfurt
Frankfurt: “Second-order” self-reflection is
privileged over “first-order” wants.
Neither attitude has a necessary priority.
When those kind of ambivalence happen, it
means that her self does not have a clear
perspectival identity about the matter in
question. Her behavior is therefore not
determined by her self in such cases.

21. The Basic Account:
Summarization
Choices can be autonomous only if they are self-
reflective in two senses and meet at least two other
conditions.
1. Self-reflective in the sense of “attentive consideration”
2. Self-reflective in the sense of “mirroring”
3. Wants or values must be important to the actor.
4. Her choices must be relatively unimpeded by
interfering conditions.
Someone must act from deeper values she has
reaffirmed.

22. Individuality and Sociality:
Why the social relationship ought to be discussed?
No human competency can be exercised under
any set of conditions whatsoever.
The necessary enabling conditions
The possible disabling conditions
Worthily mentioned: The social relationships are necessary
causal conditions for autonomy.
The point of exploring them is to curb an
excessive individualism.

23. Individuality and Sociality:
Sociality is the Ground of Autonomy – 1~3
In 5 ways( at least), autonomy requires a social context for its
realization ( see chapter 4 ):
1. Autonomous persons are differentiated selves, they are products of
socialization by other selves into communities of interacting selves.
2. Autonomous persons must have the capacities for autonomy. These
capacities must be acquired through learning from other persons
already able to exercise them, in social practices involving
discourse and modes of self-representation.
3. Those meaningful options that autonomous persons face are at least
partly matters of social conditions. Also, options are
comprehensible to persons in virtue of shared cultural practices of
representation and interpretation.
Friedman particularly emphasizes above 3 conditions on her
account of personal autonomy.

24. Individuality and Sociality:
Sociality is the Ground of Autonomy – 4~5
4. Persons in communities or groups may enjoy
autonomy as collectivities.
5. Some philosophers argue that autonomy is a
competency the very exercise of which involves
certain particular capacities of interpersonal
engagement, such as that of being able to give an
account to others of oneself and one’s choices, itself a
mode of discursive interchange. (Friedman doesn’t
construe autonomy competency in terms of the ability
to give an account of oneself to others.)

25. Individuality and Sociality:
Individualism
Individualism is a problem when it :
Promotes selfishness and self-aggrandizement through the
domination, oppression, and exploitation of others.
Promotes mutual indifference among people by leading its adherents
to pursue their own well-being in disregard of the costs they impose
on others and to lose the concern for each other that they would
otherwise have had, had they accepted different theories about
human personality.
There may be good reasons to emphasize human individuality in an
account of autonomy so long as it doesn’t promote mutual
indifference or ruthless selfishness.

26. Individuality and Sociality:
Individuality in Account of Autonomy
Q: Why human individuality is important to an account of
autonomy?
The social matrix is constituted out of a great number
of separately embodied human beings.
The distinctness of human beings grounds the
possibility of attributing to persons a particular identity
as well as a degree of separate agency based on her
behavior.
Practices of behaving autonomously can thus make us
more distinct from each other than we are to be begin
with. Autonomy further individuates us.

27. Individuality and Sociality:
an Doubt about Atomistic selves
Q: Would the individuating tendency of autonomy
promote the concept of the atomistic self?
Atomistic selves, lacking any prior social relationships to
other human beings, are not the bearers of autonomy.
Autonomy can not emerge except out of social relationship.
It’s individuating in its effects on persons, it never loses its
social rootedness.

28. Individuality and Sociality:
Autonomy is a matter of degree
Minimally autonomous selves are minimally differentiated and
individuated.
Someone might have autonomy competency yet not be an
autonomous person.
The ideal of autonomy thus gives us a normative standpoint for
critically assessing oppressive social condition that suppress or
prevent the emergence of autonomy:
Limiting one’s options at the time of choosing.
Damaging one’s capacity to care about what is worth caring about
and deforming the nature of a person’s concern for herself.

29. Content-Neutral versus Substantive
Conceptions of Autonomy
Substantive one=d.f. one “must choose in
accord with the value of autonomy itself, or,
at least, choose so as not to undermine that
value.”
Content-Neutral one=d.f. with no reference
to “the content of what a person must choose
in order to be autonomous” and “so long as
she has made her choice in the right way or
it coheres appropriately with her perspective
as a whole.” (p.19)

30. On Friedman’s view, they differ only in
degree.
Substantive one is content-neutral with
“attitude,” namely, “a stable and enduring
concern of the agent.” (p.20)
THE REAL CONTROVERSY is not which
qualifies as the ONLY conception of
autonomy; rather, it is over whether the
more minimal, content-neutral autonomy
counts as genuine autonomy at all.
=> Where to draw a line that indicates a
minimal threshold for autonomy being
crossed along the continuum.

31. Reasons why Content-Neural
account is more preferable
CN acknowledges the minimal
threshold in self-determination, that
is, “her behavior reflects what deeply
matters to her.”
S is implausibly cumbersome. (p.21)
CN is sufficient for practice of
responsibility and due respect.
CN has valuable political implications

32. CN versus feminist intuition
What is feminist intuition? “Preferences
influenced by oppressive norms of femininity
cannot be autonomous.” (p.24)
CN and FI is compatible: diminishing degree
of autonomy only.
Adaptive preferences does not make
autonomous choice and action impossible.
Another FI: “however oppressive their
conditions might be and however much
change is morally required, traditionally
subordinate feminine lives nevertheless can
and do often nonslavishly embody and
express values worth caring about.” (p.25)

33. Different Conceptions of Autonomy
Frankfurt’s model: second-order identification with
first-order desires.
G. Dworkin: procedure independence.
Substantive ones:
(A) Strong: “places normative restrictions on the
preferences or values that persons can form or act upon
autonomously.” (e.g. Oshana-perfectionism)
(B) Weak: “autonomy’s normative substance resides in
agents’ attitude toward their own authority to speak and
answer for their decisions.” (Benson, 2005)
Benson: one’s assertion of her authority to speak for her
actions. Answer for potential challenges.
Christman: Value-Neutral

34. Benson: Answer for potential
challenges
(1) embedded in social/interpersonal context.
(2) rational capacity to speak/answer
• (A) one’s own recognition of possessing the
position to speak (self-regard 自重)
• (B) others’ recognition **problem: social
death& internalization of social invisibility.
• ADEQUATE SOCIAL
CONDITIONS=SOCIALLY SHARABLE
NORMS

35. Christman: Value-Neutral
(1) Adequate reflection:
(A) Cross out specific contents of motives and
intentions (second-order reflection)
(B) Rule out simply replication of oppressive
social conditions
(2) Embrace/Speak for oneself (“I commit
myself to views I judge to be right by
expressing them” Christman, p.350)
(3) Social context: Mutual empathic respect

36. Difference between Benson and
Christman
Benson is skeptical about higher-
order reflective endorsement as the
core element of autonomy, whereas
Christman thinks that autonomy as
self-reflection is crucial in the context
of liberal political theory.