Reconsidering Relational Autonomy. Personal Autonomy for Socially Embedded and Temporally Extended Selves

Most recent accounts of personal autonomy acknowledge that the social environment a person lives in, and the personal relationships she entertains, have some impact on her autonomy. Two kinds of conceptualizing social conditions are traditionally distinguished in this regard: Causally relational accounts hold that certain relationships and social environments play a causal role for the development and ongoing exercise of autonomy. Constitutively relational accounts, by contrast, claim that autonomy is at least partly constituted by a person’s social environment or standing. The central aim of this paper is to raise the question how causally and constitutively relational approaches relate to the fact that we exercise our autonomy over time. I argue that once the temporal scope of autonomy is opened up, we need not only to think differently about the social dimension of autonomy. We also need to reconsider the very distinction between causally and constitutively relational accounts, because it is itself a synchronic (and not a diachronic) distinction. 0. The Debate about Relational Autonomy The social environment a person lives in, and the personal relationships she entertains, have without doubt an impact on her autonomy. Any account of personal autonomy that negates this fact is untenable on descriptive as well as on normative grounds. Neither are we self-made or self-sufficient beings who exist in complete isolation from others; nor is an understanding of personal autonomy as self-sufficient independence an ideal to be aspired at, or a value that deserves the centrality it is given in modern Western societies. As is widely known, many of the early feminist and communitarian critiques leveled against autonomy (and liberalism) originated from this identification of autonomous agents with self-sufficient rational choosers, who create their own principles and are substantively independent of others.1 Against this picture, feminists and communitarians alike stressed the social embeddedness of persons: the identity-forming influence of others, the significance of intimate relationships 1 Jennifer Nedelsky is maybe the most prominent case in point. She attacks “the liberal vision of human beings as self-made and self-making men” (Nedelsky 1989, 8).