Autonomy - Faith In

There can be no liberalism without faith in human autonomy. Autonomy may be a factual truth – a thing in the world which would brook no controversy among the omniscient. It may be a convenient fiction – an apparition with no existence apart from the deficiencies of our limited and faulty perceptions. Yet, whatever its absolute status might be, recognition of and deference to the existence of autonomy is a critical ethical decision. The choice to believe in the existence of choice makes all subsequent choice (possible)/(intellectually coherent). This is inarguably a tautological proposition, and I can advance no argument in its defense. We hold the freedom of will to be presumptively true, because the consequences of this assumption are simply too important to surrender to skepticism and doubt. Let us call our belief in autonomy an axiom of ethical coherence.

This is not to say that there are not other choices available. Certainly, there are those who prefer to leave the question indeterminate. There are those who prefer an ideologically inchoate situationalism. There are those who advocate for a weightless relativism on the grounds of moral agnosticism. There are those who reject the notion of autonomy and rightly fear the dramatic collision between human designs and human malleability. What can we say of their ideology? Only that it flows inevitably from an assumption we do not share. Since we have rejected their premise (or since they have rejected ours), we must of necessity reject all the derivative moral conclusions flowing therefrom. What is more, since our first moral choice has been the belief in the capacity for choice, we must find that their rejection of this capacity is their first moral error. Though it may be the case that their ethical conclusions coincide perfectly with our own, such probity can only be attributed to accidental providence. Though they retain a capacity for rectitude, we cannot allow ourselves to mistake the presence of such rectitude for the presence of actual virtue.