Arantza Etxeberria

Autonomy Theory characterizes agency as a subset of functions of an autonomous entity that controls the interactions of the living being with its environment so as to maintain its organization, considered as its intrinsic purpose. Yet, this understanding of agency faces a major philosophical and theoretical problem: there seems to be many purposive interactive behaviors that do not directly contribute to survival, or even run contrary to it, such as playing or smoking a cigarette. The challenge, therefore, is to elucidate these more complex interactive capacities within the framework of the Autonomy Theory. In this chapter, I explore three key hypotheses to address this challenge: first, the idea that such behaviors might respond to underlying biological “needs”; second, the idea that, as emphasized by the enactivist perspective, these behaviors are embedded in a sensorimotor level of organization; and third the idea that these behaviors relate to a social level of closure.

In order to maintain themselves as systems far from equilibrium with their environment, organisms must control the operation of numerous production mechanisms. Control involves mechanisms that make or are responsive to measurements of conditions within or in the environment of the organism and that operate on flexible constraints in other mechanisms to adjust their operation. A frequent assumption of humans is that control mechanisms are organized in a hierarchical pyramid. However, control in biological organisms commonly deviates from several principles of hierarchical organization and is better characterized as organized heterarchically. To provide a positive understanding of autonomy, this paper advances several features of its heterarchical organization and illustrates them using control of glucose regulation in mammals as an exemplar.

The concept of autonomy, as the capacity of a system to govern itself according to its own normativity, is central to modernity. Its theoretical significance spans across various scientific and philosophical fields. Traditionally, however, autonomy has been conceived as arising within the boundaries attributed to the individual in an abstract, internalist and self-sufficient manner. During the last decades, this conception has been challenged at different scales and requires a revision that crosses the boundaries of the individual and takes into account the material embeddedness, open interactivity, and deep interdependency of natural and social phenomena. We propose that autonomous systems are better understood as emerging-from and depending-on different scales of interactivity, collectivity, extensionality, environmentality, and through the lenses of integrativity and sustainability. This updated approach we call Outonomy.

Salutogenesis is a theory of health and disease that emphasises the promotion of beneficial measures besides the prevention of risk factors and counteracting pathogens. This paper reframes salutogenesis by situating it within the account of biological autonomy and adaptivity, drawing on recent developments in organisational accounts of living systems. By doing so, the paper provides new insights into the relational, situated and continuous nature of health, and it introduces the importance of supportive ‘salutogenic environments’ to foster adaptivity as the individual and collective capacity to change ourselves, including our environments, to promote health.

Pain science and management have long grappled with significant conceptual challenges, particularly the differentiation of pain from nociception. This chapter addresses this challenge by adopting the framework of biological autonomy, which conceptualizes living systems as self-regulating entities dynamically interacting with their environments. From this perspective, pain emerges as a context-sensitive phenomenon that protects autonomy by guiding adaptive behavior and anticipating future threats. In contrast, nociception is a mechanistic process that transduces and transmits noxious stimuli to elicit protective reflexes. By integrating insights from pain research, medicine, and philosophy, the chapter advances a relational and functional understanding of pain while outlining its practical implications.

This chapter examines mental disorders from an enactive perspective. It explores two key ontological claims—the processual and relational nature of cognition—and their implications for our understanding of mental disorders. Rather than viewing them as isolated brain disorders, mental disorders are presented as developmental sensorimotor trajectories that are shaped by embodied interactions and social contexts. It highlights the dynamic interplay between an individual’s autonomy and their social environment in the emergence of mental disorders.

This chapter redefines autonomy in bioethics by foregrounding menstrual agency as a relational and embodied capacity, rather than an isolated expression of individual choice. It argues that menstrual health has been reduced to reproductive function, excluding the psychological, emotional, and social dimensions of menstruators’ lived experience. Despite being reduced and overlooked, the way menstrual health intersects with emotional, social, and cultural dimensions reveals that even in health, autonomy can be experienced as both vulnerability and agency. Drawing on a triadic approach to ailments and the enactive concepts of autonomy, agency, and precariousness, the chapter reconceptualises menstrual well-being as a shared ethical and social concern. In doing so, it challenges dominant notions of autonomy and calls for structural transformations that support menstruators in reclaiming agency over their menstrual lives.

This chapter examines conceptualizations of the environment in biology and addresses the different organism/environment asymmetries appearing in autonomy views and evolutionary theories. It argues for recognizing the environment not merely as an external background, but also as co-constitutive and relational, insofar as life is shaped by epigenetic, exposomic, and interorganismal dynamics. Two perspectives emerge, environments as surroundings and as entanglements, both required for developing an “outonomy” framework that expands biological autonomy theory to include environmental agency and interdependence.

The first living beings, prokaryotes, were endowed with an extremely complex and dynamic individual organization: a compartmentalized metabolism in which diverse molecular components and transformation processes got functionally coupled, including a selectively permeable membrane, a set of energy currencies and a translation apparatus built upon a common genetic code. Each microorganism neatly distinguishes itself from the surrounding medium and is capable of generating and modulating its own rules of behaviour (i.e., it acts on its own behalf) so it can be interpreted as autonomous in a fundamental biological sense. However, the autonomy theoretical framework only covers part of the explanation for the striking complexity observed in minimal lifeforms. In fact, all known living cells depend on other cells for their sustenance, so they engage in diverse ecological relationships without which their survival would not be feasible. Furthermore, all living cells have arisen from pre-existing cells, through reproduction, within a long-term, open-ended evolutionary process. As we will argue below, the constitution of any biological domain requires a strong –though deeply asymmetric– causal interweaving between individual (metabolic-physiological) and collective (ecological and evolutionary) dynamics, covering different spatial and temporal scales that unfold in the course of abiogenesis.

This chapter encompasses a discussion about the understanding of reproduction in the theory of autonomy, emphasizing the need to expand traditional theories of autonomous self-reproduction to account for interorganismal and ecological interactions. Drawing from recent contributions in the philosophy of biology, the chapter examines some of the limitations of self-reproduction as an endogenous process derived from self-production, highlighting cases such as sexual reproduction or symbiotic dependencies that illustrate the relational and interactive nature of reproduction. I then argue for an extended framework that integrates relational dependencies and distributed organizational processes.

The aim of this chapter is to review the criticism of the self-sufficient individual and to consider how autonomy can be thought from the subjects-in-common. As Goikoetxea affirms, “one is not born a subject, it is made”. Subjects are not autonomous owners of themselves. Instead, they are constantly overcome and dispossessed by the relationships that constitute them. If the subject is made and determined, how can autonomy be thought of? Our hypothesis is that being determined, done and dispossessed, is a precondition for autonomy instead of an external limit to it, although it is not a guarantee. The question is how to determine it. The question is not, therefore, whether one has or does not have links, but about what kind of links one has. In conclusion, against the model of autonomy understood as a pre-social property of a self-sufficient individual, we propose an alternative model of autonomy: a situated and plural capacity for self-governance developed within, through, and against social relationships.

Traditionally, autonomy has been perceived through the lens of individualism and internalism, a view increasingly challenged by contemporary philosophical approaches, as well as by the context of global sustainability. Environmental challenges underline the need to shift from Earth-imposed limits to social-ecological limitations to achieve autonomy, democracy, and sustainability. In the realm of sustainability sciences, the concept of social-ecological systems has been developed to explore the interdependencies between humans and their environments. Despite the significance of autonomy in discussions around sustainability, its exploration within this field remains limited. This chapter aims to discuss the potential contribution of the concept of outonomy for social-ecological systems and the planetary scale and, conversely, to open up the concept of autonomy to planetary-ecological dependencies.

In this chapter, we briefly present different visions of the relationships between technology and autonomy. We accomplish this by a historical and (partly) dialectical exploration of three positions. We start with the modern thesis by which autonomous humans instrumentalize tools and techniques for their own benefit and self-determination. Next, we address the antithesis: the notion that technological systems have become autonomous, subordinating people to their own self-maintenance. Finally, we explore a synthetic position, which underlines that the only space for autonomy in a technologically mediated world is a technopolitical autonomy that takes the individual beyond itself, back to the ontotechnical constitution of its being, and forward into a personal and collective, ethical and political, participation in its becoming.

This paper delves into the character concept as applied to reproduction. Our argument is that the prevailing functional-adaptationist perspective falls short in explaining the evolution of reproductive traits, and we propose an alternative organismal-relational approach that incorporates the developmental and interactive aspects of reproduction. To begin, we define the functional individuation of reproductive traits as evolutionary strategies aimed at enhancing fitness, and we demonstrate how this perspective influences the classification of reproductive characters and modes, the comprehension of shared traits as resulting from conflicts of evolutionary interest between individuals, and the explanation of reproductive diversity. After outlining the shortcomings of this framework, we introduce an organismal-relational approach grounded in evolutionary developmental studies of reproduction. This view provides a revised classification for reproductive characters and modes and offers a new understanding of interorganismal traits that takes into account their inherently relational nature. Lastly, we present the research agenda that emerges from this approach, which addresses the core explanatory gaps left by the adaptationist perspective, including the explanation of reproductive homologies and homoplasies, the developmental constraints associated with the evolution of reproductive modes, and the evolvability of reproductive characters.

Definition The authors’ definition of the autopoietic system has evolved through the years. One of them states that an autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (1) through their interactions and transformations regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (2) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network (Varela 1979, p. 13). Nearly the same formula was earlier used to define an autopoietic machine (Maturana and Varela 1973/1980, 1984/1987, p. 135)