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Marina Oshana, Personal Autonomy in Society.

Article Excerpt
Marina Oshana, Personal Autonomy in Society (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), xi + 190 pp.

Marina Oshana has written a thoughtful and engaging book that sets out and defends her own novel account of autonomy, includes a rich discussion of the literature on autonomy, and also provides an informative review of related literature on individual freedom. Oshana begins with intuitions about personal autonomy and states that her task is to provide "an account of autonomy that best captures the concept the term is used to express" (1). This involves discussing the status an individual can have in society because she views autonomy as crucial to any individual in a social or political situation where there is a potential of significant coercion or manipulation. Her focus is thus theoretical, not applied; it is an attempt to provide a conceptual account of the status of adults who are bound by political, cultural, and moral frameworks. Given the Greek derivation of the word "autonomy" from auto (self) and nomos (rule), the most common understanding of autonomy has at the very least focused on self-rule or rules one sets for oneself, and one's self-directed authority over oneself and power to act on that authority. However, Oshana asks what kind of authority or power is needed for one to be judged to be autonomous.

Oshana makes clear that she is interested in a conception of autonomy that is not merely an account of what is involved in making certain kinds of choices, and that is not a local sense or property of persons and their acts and desires considered individually. In contrast, her focus is on a sense of autonomy that she calls a "global" or "dispositional" or "personal" view because it is present when an individual has "de facto power and authority to manage matters of fundamental importance to her life within a framework of rules (or values, principles, beliefs, pro-attitudes) that she has set for herself" (2). This conception of autonomy is about how an agent manages her life and not merely about what is involved in making a certain kind of choice. It is a conception of autonomy closely related to privacy because it involves an agent having authority over matters of access to and control over information about herself, her education, employment, health care, intimate relationships, and so on. Thus this "global" autonomy does not arise from a sum of episodes of self-governance. Persons have autonomy in Oshana's "global" and "personal" sense when they have (i) de facto power, namely, actual control over their own choices, actions, and goals and the capacity to have self-control in the face of competing motivations and temptations, and also have (ii) authority or authoritative control over their own choices, actions, and goals and are in command of the direction of their lives in a way that guarantees freedom from the domination of others. Autonomy in this sense requires psychological freedom as well as the mastery...

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