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The Consent of Tyranny
Locke held that all legitimate governments rest on consent. Society is not natural to man, but rather conventional.
—Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Roots of Reconstruction (1991)
Indeed, to respect autonomy is often understood to be the chief way to bear witness to the intrinsic value of persons.
—from Amazon’s description of Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy (2012)
Against Autonomy
Since Descartes, the first tenet of humanism has been the preeminence and priority of man’s autonomy. The free human personality has been the openly declared and firmly established god of the Enlightenment’s secular religion. Where that autonomy finally rests or in what form or institution it finds final expression has been a murkier issue. But formal acceptance of the inviolability of human autonomy, particularly of the human will, has been the hallmark of secular ideology for three hundred years.
But now Sarah O. Conly, assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdwin College, has called this whole perspective into question. She is the author of Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism? (2012). Conly seriously questions whether individual autonomy is that important compared with other things humans say they want. In her blog she writes
. . . I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated—that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are.
Source: http://www.offthegridnews.com/2013/07/07/the-consent-of-tyranny/
