Relational Autonomy

Relational autonomy thus emerges in order to sustain the emphasis on autonomy while recognizing the realities and benefits of relationality. So John Christman characterizes relational autonomy as taking on board “relations of care, interdependence, and mutual support that define our lives and which have traditionally marked the realm of the feminine”. Andrea Westlund adds that the capacities for reflective endorsement of both one’s own acts and the acts of others as one such set of skills or abilities, noting that these “must be developed during a relatively long period of dependence on parents and other caregivers”. Moreover, autonomy itself remains relational as it “requires an irreducibly dialogical form of reflectiveness and responsiveness to others” (ibid.). Contra more strongly individualistic conceptions of freedom that stress that we are free only as we are free from the influences of and commitments to others (e.g., in early modern philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes), relational autonomy foregrounds ways in which we are more free through relationship with others: “Some social influences will not compromise, but instead enhance and improve the capacities we need for autonomous agency”. (We will also see in chapter 6 that relational autonomy, along with more traditional relational selves, is tightly conjoined with virtue ethics as an increasingly central ethical framework that complements utilitarianism and deontology in critical ways.)

Is all of this complicated? Yes, of course – especially as we keep in mind that all of this is thus continuously under further development and refinement. But as the development and expansion of Chinese- style surveillance and Social Credit Systems – largely supported by more fully relational selves – should make chillingly clear, nothing less is at stake here than how we understand ourselves as human beings, and thereby what kinds of freedoms and rights we may – or may not – have and make claim to. Thereby, nothing less is at stake than how we are best to live, including determining what social and political institutions are best suited to the best possible lives.