This essay focuses on particular aspects of ‘public individualism’: autonomy and political rights. It analyses the significance of political rights in conditions of subordination and argues for a non-individualist formulation of moral agency. By ‘public individualism’, I refer to the public view of the person that informs the functioning and maintenance of political institutions that defend or guard specific rights of the individual. Political institutions informed by public individualism presuppose the autonomy of individuals or of (public) citizens who are expected to exercise the ‘rights’ maintained by these institutions and be responsible for the choices that they make. However, this public individualism is often in conflict with social doctrines that sanction private freedoms. There is thus a tension between individualism as a public view of the person informing the rights of persons, and the narrow agreement on social freedoms that characterise the private person.

Feminist theorising has shown the inadequacy of conventional philosophical conceptions of autonomy for both feminist philosophical practice as well as feminist politics, and has offered reconstructed accounts of autonomy. This essay builds on these reconstructed understandings while contributing an additional argument. It asks how we can understand agential capacities of persons within conditions of subordination. It suggests that ‘free action’ accounts of autonomy, i.e. the accounts of autonomy that privilege an agent's ability to commit free action, constitute the principle obstacle to this exercise. We argue that action does not exist in a social vacuum, and that there are reasons why people act in certain ways which are not always expressive of one's preferred judgements.