Andrea Westlund

In this dissertation I argue that responsibility for self is an important feature of human agency, crucial to the autonomy of individual agents as well as to joint deliberation and the sharing of ends in relations of love and friendship. I argue that the sort of 'selflessness' involved in extreme self-abnegating deference undermines responsibility for self, and that it compromises the capacity to enter into fully reciprocal interpersonal relationships. Responsibility for self, on my view, consists in a disposition to hold oneself answerable to others as such, a dialogical form of reflectiveness that is unavailable to those entrenched in a practice of granting unconditional authority to the will of another. ;In the first chapter, I argue that self-abnegating deference constitutes a pathology of individual agency, despite the fact that it is not generally recognized as such by proponents of mainstream reflective-endorsement views such as that developed by Harry Frankfurt. In the next two chapters, I argue that this pathology of individual agency engenders a related pathology of plural agency, compromising the deferential individual's ability to participate in collective forms of practical deliberation. I develop a model of joint practical deliberation that builds on Margaret Gilbert's analysis of "plural-subjects," and I illustrate how the process of coming to share reasons and ends is compromised by certain kinds of asymmetry in perceived practical authority. In the final chapter, I draw out some implications of the earlier arguments for our understanding of how ends come to be shared between lovers and close friends. I examine the commonly held view that lovers' identities merge in ways that render inapplicable the distinction between selflessness and self-interest. I argue that this view relies on an implausible picture of what it would be to share a practical perspective. I draw on elements of the first three chapters to explain how interests and ends can be self-responsibly shared in relations of love and friendship

Autonomy seems to require that we engage in practical deliberation and come to our own decisions regarding how we will act. Deference to authority, by contrast, seems to require that we suspend deliberation and do what the authority commands precisely because he or she commands it. How, then, could autonomy be compatible with deference to authority? In his critique of Razian instrumentalism, Stephen Darwall lays the groundwork for a distinctively contractualist answer to this question: the normative force of an authoritative directive depends, he argues, on the addressee's free and rational acceptance of the reason addressed to her. But how are we to make sense of free and rational acceptance, when deference to authority requires that one relinquish deliberative discretion? I attempt to resolve this puzzle by outlining a conception of reasonable trust in authority, which, while contractualist in spirit, makes room for a core element of Raz's instrumentalist account

Right after our tragedy, my idea of forgiveness was to be free of this thing, – the anger, the pain, the absorption. It was totally personal. It was a survival tactic to leave this experience behind. It had nothing to do with the offender. The second level was realizing how the word forgiveness applies to the relationship between the victim and the offender. How it means accepting and working on that relationship after a murder. The latter is more complicated. Now I think I see that forgiveness is more of integrating the experience into my life in a controlled way, rather than letting it go or escaping it.

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy