Abstract

This dissertation develops an approach to personal autonomy, understood as the capacity to lead one's life in a way that is one's own. Through a critical engagement with the work of Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas, I argue that there are four intersubjective aspects of autonomy. ;First, since critical reflection on one's desires, commitments, values, etc. involves accessing them interpretively, it is subject to hermeneutic constraints of public intelligibility. To understand one's commitments as worthwhile thus requires the capacity to employ shared meanings. ;Second, because critical reflection is open to error, the capacity to be self-guiding must include the reflexive capacity to correct one's critical reflection as well. If this is not to generate a regress, critical reflection must be understood as pointing beyond the confines of the reflecting agent. I argue for a nonfoundationalist, contextualist, discursive conception of the capacity for self-correction, in terms of intersubjective procedures of justification and the capacity to participate in them. ;Third, the reasons for being personally autonomous should be understood primarily in terms of the pragmatic presuppositions of social interaction. Specifically, it is partly constitutive of social cooperation that agents assume that others could, if called upon, give accounts for their actions. ;Fourth, being autonomous is inseparable from the "ongoingly accomplished" social recognition of one's ability to provide warrants for one's choices. Outside of any pragmatic social context, there is no metaphysical, transcontextual property in virtue of which agents are autonomous. ;I develop this view via discussions of Frankfurt, Taylor, and Habermas. I reconstruct Frankfurt's emerging view and criticize it for underestimating the importance of making sense of what one cares about. Though I defend Taylor's view that critical reflection involves self-interpretation that is transformative and yet subject to subject-transcending constraints, I criticize his ontological understanding of these constraints as conflicting with intuitions about authentic individuality. In my discussion of Habermas, I offer a pragmatic and contextualist reading of his theory of communicative action, which makes it plausible to view "ethical-existential" claims as admitting of discursive justification, thereby opening up space for the view sketched above.