Reason has co-opted our conception of autonomy. My purpose is to set
autonomy free. Here is the problem: some philosophers, Kant most notably,
have said that governing your life by reason or by being responsive
to reason is the source of autonomy. But there is a paradox concealed
in these plausible claims. On the one hand, a person can be enslaved
to reason and lack autonomy because of this kind of bondage. On the
other hand, if reason has no influence, then it appears that one would
be the slave of one's passions, and, however eloquently Hume might
have written about reason being the slave of the passions, there is
something odd about the idea that a person who is enslaved by his passions
is autonomous. The paradox, which I shall call the paradox of
reason, is that if we are governed by reason in what we choose,
then we are in bondage to reason in what we choose, and we are not
autonomous. Yet, if we are not governed by reason, then we do not govern
ourselves in what we choose, and again we are not autonomous.