RIGHTS, NEEDS AND WANTS

It was Kant who popularized autonomy and identified it with the power of practical reasoning, and in the last chapter I considered some of the weaknesses of Kantian schemes and treated briefly of post-Kantian developments. However, it is not primarily Kant's autonomy which can be discerned in contemporary debate – let alone in contemporary assumptions – but something more like the autonomy of Mill: that is, autonomy viewed as the ability, in the absence of an overriding account of the human good, to pursue one's preferences. That is commonly subject to two constraints, one of which is a remnant of Kantianism: that our preferences should be subject to criticism, that they should be rational preferences. The second has a longer history, going back at least as far as Locke: namely that we should work out our preferences subject to the allowance of a similar opportunity to others. The latter position is often phrased in the language of rights: the right, that is, to as much liberty, viewed as freedom from interference, as is compatible with a similar freedom for others. I shall consider both these constraints, and not least how far they are or could be effectively constraining.

If we leave aside the Kantian claim that autonomy is the functioning of the practical reason, we must understand it in terms of our wants or of our needs, and if the latter, then claims about autonomy are the more easily connected with rights both positive and negative.