Comments on: Autonomy

By: Piers Young

Piers Young — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:44:53 +0000

Interesting stuff. I’m not sure I agree with the “To have autonomy, you must be operating in an environment that is reasonably predictable and amenable to your control” bit. Autonomy, I thought, meant self-rule – in any environment, predictable, malleable, both and neither. As such, rather than control, I thought the big thing about individual autonomy is being able to choose your own actions, even though they may amount to nothing and even though you might just be kidding yourself (in a determinist’ eyes). On a group level, presumably this being able to choose has more or less to do with social participation and engagement – feeling as though you (as part of the group) are impacting on the choice. That said, I’d probably spin it, in that (the perceived) lack of choice probably does more damage than (the perceived) ability to choose. And you can choose your hierarchy can’t you? All – eek – of that said, I haven’t read the book so apologies if it’s way off base. Thanks again for the thoughts though!

By: Piers Young

Piers Young — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:35:43 +0000

By: David Foster

David Foster — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 14:10:14 +0000

Re Marx’s comment about a society in which a person could: “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, write literary criticism after dinner..”…..I wonder if Marx himself had any interest in hunting, fishing, and cattle-herding?

By: Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 13:56:46 +0000

MC commented last night… “I may be missing the point here, but: why should it be a surprise, to anyone who believes that a certain thing X generally contributes to having a successful/flourishing life – and indeed is widely believed to do so – that not having X turns out to have bad effects on health more narrowly construed?…” Part of what is surprising is how large the effects that Marmot finds appear to be. The book isn’t in front of me, but I believe the effect of the social gradient (Marmot’s term) on life expectancy is comparable to that of cardiovascular disease. “Strikes me that the more interesting aspect is at the aggregate level – that less hierarchical societies have not just less health inequality but better levels of health overall – i.e., that this is not a fixed sum game.” I think so too. One keeps hearing from the Right that reducing inequality would have unacceptable costs in overall well-being. That’s not so clear…

By: rob

rob — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 12:03:24 +0000

Abb1, you’re taking the piss, right? Micah, you’re right to say that what I said about consumerism doesn’t properly address what you said: I didn’t express myself very well. Pointing out that capitalism tends to encourage people to consume things mindlessly is not a critique of capitalism if you think that all social systems encourage people to do something mindlessly. The question is whether all social system do in fact do this, and I should point out that I am not committing myself to this thesis, but merely noting its existence. Marxists, for example, have claimed that in the communist utopia to come, the rules of the social system will become transparent in a way which means that the social system is not guilty of creating its own rationalization to sustain, reinforce and extend itself any more. Noting that capitalism offers us some negative freedoms does not show that this thesis, about a positive freedom – to be able to act according to one’s proper nature as a social and productive animal – is false, which is the critique that lies at the heart of the Marxist critique of consumerism. I think there are probably other ways of making the critique, which aren’t dependent on such strong claims about the good life for human beings, but either way, the point remains that if you can conceive of a social system which offers you more positive freedoms than the current one, then, although all social system influence preferences, they do not influence preferences in the same way, and some ways are to be prefered to others. For example, you say that people are free to set up communes and so on under a capitalist system, and they are, in a non-interference, largely descriptive sense, but what you have to do is show that that freedom is of some moral value. Sure, they have the choice in that no-one is forbidding them, but that’s not by itself the same thing as being free, in a morally relevant sense, to do it: I am free not to give my money to the highwayman who says ‘your money or your life’, but we don’t, rightly, think of that as a morally important freedom. It’s this kind of positive freedom claim that’s doing the work in most left-wing critiques of capitalism, and if you’re going to defend capitalism against such critiques, you need to address that, not just point to negative freedoms which require some argumentation to show that we should care about them. I’m not saying this is impossible, I’m just saying, do it. It’s true that there has probably never been a pure market society, but there are a number of pieces of empirical and theoretical evidence we can draw on to substantiate the claim that some people would be extremely poor under such a society. Late Victorian society, at least in Britain, was fairly close to be a pure market society: rates of income tax were more or less neglible, the welfare safety net provided was so awful that people would take any job rather than fall into it, and there was little state support of industry. Yet people starved to death. Infant mortality rates were huge. When a genuinely philanthropic factory owner, Joseph Rowntree, did a survey of his workforce, he found that large proportions of them lived in abject poverty. We can also draw on the experience of more and less laissez faire states. Sweden has had consistently high economic growth rates and one of the lowest levels of poverty in the world since the nineteen thirties, when it became a virtual one-party, social democratic, state. Although the US has had very high economic growth rates, it still has a comparatively high level of poverty in for an industrialized Western nation. As for the theoretical evidence, I’m not an economist, but what I remember of market theory says a perfect market will clear at the intersection of marginal cost and marginal revenue, that is, for labour, where the marginal utility of income meets the marginal utility of leisure. If the alternative to income is starvation, its utility is going to be vast proportionally to that of leisure, meaning that people will take very low paid jobs, so as to avoid starving. Thus, a perfect labour market may leave people extremely poor (I think). This is to say nothing of market failures, collective action problems and so on, the theoretical literature on which is quite large, I understand. I also think you are misusing the term charity: charity is by definition voluntary, so you can’t have coerced charity. This is part of a general libertarian misconception: the welfare system isn’t about charity, it’s about rights. Coercive intervention to uphold rights is justified, so libertarians can’t complain about it unless they can show that they aren’t really rights. By all means, try and show that people don’t have a right to some minimal level of income so that they can have some control over their lives, but don’t just wave attempts to instantiate that right as charity. You say redistributing autonomy is a zero-sum game: this might be definitionally true. That, however, has no direct relation to redistributing income and wealth. Redistributing income and wealth is, in autonomy terms, a positive sum game if, which seems plausible, the rate at which income and wealth are converted into autonomy is subject to diminishing marginal returns (for example, I am not autonomous if I have to beg to survive, while if I have an income of ten thousand pounds a year, I’m probably not fully autonomous, but I am substanially more autonomous than a beggar; on the other hand, the difference between an income of ten million a year and nine million a year does not make any obviously substanial difference to my ability to direct my life as I please). Of course, if you equate autonomy with property rights, redistributing income and wealth does become a zero-sum game in terms of autonomy. But that’s begging the question, because the libertarian position is that freedom is property rights. The libertarian animosity to politics has always seemed a little odd to me, because, surely, if they think they’re right, they must think that they can show others that they’re right. A more open democratic system would provide them with more opportunities to show they’re right. I’m sorry about the length of the post. I got a bit carried away.

By: abb1

abb1 — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 08:53:45 +0000

With all due respect, I think the ‘autonomy’ thesis is crap. Personally I was feeling best (and significantly better than usual) in my life when working for a successful software start-up where: 1. I had a bunch of stock options. It gave me a (sorta pathetic) illusion that I am not being exploited. It also gave me an illusion that my wellbeing is correlated with my performance. 2. I was a respected member of the team; people were asking for my advice. 3. It was creative work. A guy at an assembly line may be very autonomous but he’ll hate it anyway. 4. The company was developing what seemed like a very innovating product, millions of people were waiting for it. I liked that. 5. No red-tape, very informal. Incidentally, there was a lot of pressure from all directions and not much autonomy at all. Unless you include all this (and probably more) into your definition of ‘autonomy’, you’re going to miss something.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 03:35:26 +0000

The people I know who worked as consultants had very mixed feelings. Not only the lack of security, but also the need to hustle up work while still working. In some cases consulting is used simply to reduce labor costs (like “independent contracting” in janitorial) so there was no real advantage. People who are doing very well in the consulting system might love the system, but that state of being is usually a fairly transient state of the labor market (diminishing margin of profit or whatever). When things go bad on them their ideologies change.

By: sars

sars — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 02:36:37 +0000

When you find yourself frustrated, angry, and upset, it’s probably because of something that happened that you could not control: even something small. The space bar on your keyboard is not working well. When you type, some of the words are stuck together. This gets frustrating, because you are pressing the space bar and nothing is happening. The key to your front door doesn’t work very well. When you try to turn it, it sticks. Another tiny frustration. These things add up; these are the things that make us unhappy on a day-to-day basis. On a lighter note (in terms of genre, not emotion), I am flashing on that scene in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik where the generic loser and hero Joe Chip is trying to persuade his apartment door to open; it won’t open unless he pays it. Every single appliance is a pay-per-use commodity that talks back. Dick, by the way, was very familiar with the poor end of the economic spectrum; he purchased autonomy by means of sleep deprivation, acquired via speed.

By: Micha Ghertner

Micha Ghertner — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 00:54:21 +0000

Rob, I don’t see much empirical evidence pro or con for the assertion that “pure market relations would leave some people in a state of extreme poverty.” Sure, people would no longer be forced to give to charity in the absence of state redistribution, but it does not follow that people would no longer give to charity voluntarily. Further, even if people donate smaller portions of their income to charity when they are not coerced, the total amount may be greater given the absence of taxation and larger growth rates. But more importantly, when you say that dependency on the charity of others weakens autonomy, it is not clear to me what you mean by this. Under any system, those who cannot produce enough to sustain themselves through voluntary relations will necessarily depend on the charity of others, whether that charity is coerced or voluntary. If you consider welfare dependency a mark against autonomy, this is true under both pure capitalism and any mix of capitalism with socialism you can think of. However, under mixed economies, not only is the autonomy of the dependent weakened, but the autonomy of the coerced is weakened as well, for all coercion is a movement away from autonomy. Redistributing autonomy is a zero-sum (if not a negative-sum) game. As for indoctrination, you didn’t address my argument that this criticism can be made of any socioeconomic system. Sure, capitalism indoctrinates people by influencing their preferences. And so does every other system. The advantage of capitalism, though, is four-fold: (1) people still have the option of choosing voluntary socialist arrangements under capitalism, whereas people do not have the option of choosing voluntary capitalist arrangements under socialism, (2) capitalism doesn’t monopolize the education system, as socialism (and our current system does), (3) capitalism doesn’t force people to pay for their own indoctrination and the indoctrination of others with ideas they strongly oppose, and (4) no matter how beautiful a celebrity spokeswoman may be, she isn’t going to make a bad-tasting cigarette a long-term market success. I’m sure I could think of many more ways capitalism is less indoctrinating than socialism if I sat here long enough. I’m confused by your last sentence. It seems to me that increased political participation is much more likely to exacerbate rather than mollify the threat of the state interfering in the minutiae of daily life. When people mind their own business, avoid politics and instead focus their daily efforts solely on civil society, they have no reason to engage in the perpetual political bickering and nosey busybodying we witness so much of today on both the right and the left.

By: mc

mc — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 23:54:27 +0000

Sebastian – you ask: ‘don’t you think that autonomy and what you call “security/predictability” are almost logically opposed concepts? Or if not that they have strongly inverse relation?’ I take autonomy to be the ability to make choices based on reasons, from a set of worthwhile options. As such it is a precondition of a certain ideal of a good life – one where someone is able (both because of their capacities and their situation) to see their life as a story they help construct, a story whose evolving shape reflects, among other things, the good and bad choices they made along the way. But so too is some degree of predictability. Severe unpredictability limits (though does not remove) people’s ability to construct their lives through reasoned choices. So both autonomy and predictability are preconditions of a certain ideal of a good life. Which I guess is why they had both already featured in this thread before my post – I was just trying to link them. If they also have a “strongly inverse relation” – well, I’m not sure they do – I think this may be superficial – but if so, then as John Q says, that just makes it more interesting.

By: rob

rob — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 23:36:42 +0000

Micah, I was going to say this in my earlier post, because I thought that you might be going on to say something like this, but anarchism is also a restriction of autonomy, particularly if you equate it with pure market relations, which it is a pretty weird thing to do anyway. Pure market relations would leave some people in a state of extreme poverty, and people in extreme poverty do not have autonomy, because they are dependent on others to provide them with the material resources to do anything. Thus they cannot be self-directing, because they must do what others want in order to get the resources to do anything, in some cases, even survive at all. The state’s coercive apparatus is not the only source of the loss of autonomy: poverty and indoctrination can also cause the loss of autonomy, because they prevent people from acting on their own reasons, rather than someone else’s. The Nozickean libertarian claim about freedom is a negative liberty type claim, and while there may be something to said for the view, equating that type of freedom with autonomy is quite misleading: autonomy implies some level of control, and negative freedom is not about control, but freedom from interference. Speaking of indoctrination, this is the root of the worry about consumerism. The claim is not that people are not, in a negative liberty sense, free to not be consumers in the sense that worries the left and some conservatives, but that, at least for the left, they are indoctrinated into relentless consumption by a culture of consumerism. If this claim is true, which I am not claiming it is, then consumerism is a loss of autonomy, because it is heteronomous: rather than being directed by your own reasons, you are being directed by the reasons of the capitalist economy. You are right, though, to identify a conventional liberal ambivalence about democracy. Complete control of people’s lives by law, whether enacted by a democracy or some other system of government, would be severely autonomy restricting, and thus liberals tend to advocate either serious constitutional restrictions on democracy, or hold out the hope of increased participation removing the threat of the state interfering in the minutae of daily life.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 22:46:45 +0000

Somewhere I saw a study that analyzed stress against two axes: demand and control. A job with fairly high demand but very little control (say, working in a call center) might actually have less stress than a job with very high demand but also with considerable control (air traffic controller). Don’t remember the source, though.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:55:12 +0000

And a lot of it comes down to individual temperament or choices not likely to be captured in government rules. I know some people who would be great consultants, but temperamentally they prefer the stability of a corporate job. Others are merely good consultants, but they like the risks related rewards of living outside the corporate bubble. Some people have children, and want to skew toward security for that reason. Some people might dislike their wives and take consulting work to make it easier to stay away from home. That kind of stuff is pretty much beyond useful legislative capability.

By: Zarquon

Zarquon — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:17:15 +0000

Sebastian wrote: These people have much greater autonomy (as I think you are using the word) than is normally found in a corporation. That would depend on how much choice they have in their assignments. You can say that they are perfectly free to accept or reject any particular offer, but there exists a window of time inside of which they must accept some offer, or starve (or more likely, evicted). The smaller the window, the less autonomy they have. For that matter, a regular employee, who has access to severance pay and unemployment compensation, may well have a larger window of job selection available than an equivalent consultant. As you note later, of course, this comes at a price that those billed are becoming increasingly unwilling to pay, so the increased prominence of the consultant is certainly explicable.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 20:54:01 +0000

The fact that security and liberty are commonly conflicting goals, but both contribute to autonomy is part of what makes the idea interesting to me. If there were an easy way of making more autonomy for everyone, presumably we would have found it by now. Or, if you prefer, all the easy ways have been found, and we’re now left with the hard ways and the trade-offs. On democracy, it’s true that interference by a state in matters that individuals can decide for themselves violates autonomy. That’s a central point of liberalism in all its variants. But lots of things can’t be decided in this way, and in such cases, having a voice in the necessary collective decision gives more autonomy than having the decision made for you by others. Democracy maximises autonomy in this sense.