Читать книгу Autonomy - Beate Roessler - Страница 11

Now it looks as if I am the victim of my own virtuosity. But then what? What would I have done? Become a flautist after all? How will I ever find out? No-one can start at the same point twice over. If an experiment can’t be replicated, it ceases to be an experiment. No-one can experiment with their life. No-one can be blamed for being in the dark.¹

That fall there had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Franklin being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.²

Autonomy is important to us because we can only take responsibility for our lives and for individual actions when we have determined them – mostly – ourselves, when it is emphatically our own actions that we perform, our own plans that we pursue, our own designs that we strive to implement. If we were manipulated or coerced, then we could not act on the basis of our own reasons. Then it would not be our own values and convictions that form the framework of our actions and intentions. What is more, we could not see ourselves as being responsible for our lives as our own, and we might then feel alienated from ourselves. Before examining all of these aspects more closely, I would first like to ask in a general sense: What is autonomy? The present chapter will briefly (1) situate the concept historically before (2) more precisely clarifying the relationship between autonomy and freedom. Drawing on this, and in light of recent debates around the concept of individual autonomy, I will then explain what “autonomy as a capability” means, thus (3) delineating the framework within which the idea of autonomy as it is discussed in this book can be more precisely located. Finally (4), I will offer a cursory description of the open questions that will have to be answered in the ensuing chapters.