Andréa Daventry

In this paper, I develop the beginnings of a self-respect-based account of personal autonomy that conceptualizes self-respect as central to autonomous agency. On the account I develop, autonomous self-guidance involves a recognition of and responsiveness to the relevant features of our selves – our moral status, rational capacities, and individuality. In developing this account, I argue that other self-regarding attitudes that are often appealed to in discussions of autonomy – like self-trust and self-esteem – are best understood as facets of self-respect. By conceptualizing self-respect in this broader sense, we are better able to understand these various self-regarding attitudes and their relationship to autonomy. In addition, I argue that this theory of autonomy provides us with a wider range of conceptual tools than other theories have available for understanding how oppression can impact autonomy, including in cases of adaptive preferences, internalized oppression, and self-abnegation.

In this paper, I provide a novel account of gaslighting according to which gaslighting involves mistakenly failing to see oneself as a source of reasons with respect to some domain. I argue that this account does a nice job of explaining what's gone wrong in various popular examples of gaslighting, and that it captures what different instances of gaslighting have in common even when they are quite different in other respects. I also show how this account of gaslighting explains a common intuition according to which gaslighting is autonomy-undermining--something other accounts, I argue, have failed to do. And finally, I show that this explanation of why gaslighting is autonomy-undermining also shows that certain forms of oppressive socialization are autonomy-undermining as well, thus providing us with an argument in favor of more substantive theories of autonomy according to which a certain kind of self-respect is necessary for autonomy.

It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as reason to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect.