Autonomy, Oppression, and Feminist Philosophical Methods

Le résumé fourni par la source

Feminist autonomy theorists disagree about how best to characterize the harms of oppression. Relational autonomy theorists believe that a central harm of oppression is that it undermines autonomy. To vindicate this intuition, relational theorists engineer the concept of autonomy to be substantive and socially constitutive. Nonideal autonomy theorists, on the other hand, question whether the harms of oppression are best understood as harms to autonomy. They argue that conceiving autonomy in a substantive or socially constitutive fashion can negatively impact oppressed agents. In this chapter, we argue that the differences between these two approaches can be traced to a difference in philosophical methodology: relational autonomy theorists employ ameliorative analysis, while nonideal autonomy theorists utilize feminist reflective equilibrium. We believe that the feminist downsides of relational autonomy are, in part, a result of the ameliorative method. Focusing on the diagnostic role that autonomy can play allows relational autonomy theorists to pay insufficient attention to the harms to oppressed agents a re-engineered concept of autonomy might justify. We therefore suggest that feminist reflective equilibrium is a better methodological approach for feminist theorizing about autonomy.

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