Abstract

I offer an account of personal autonomy, highlighting sociality and affectively informed rationality. I emphasize, first, Harry Frankfurt's hierarchical model of the self and, second, social and psychoanalytic theories, especially Jessica Benjamin's. ;Following Frankfurt, I depict autonomous acts as genuinely a person's own. Ownership consists in higher-order "identification" with desires that move one to act. Against Frankfurt, I contend that autonomous identification entails motivation by reasons. To identify with a desire is, in part, to deem it a good reason to act. ;An autonomous act must, additionally, be rational in the externalist sense that the agent correctly intends it to contribute to her good. A good life includes the agent's continued sustenance of involuntary needs and key capacities, including those contributing to autonomy itself. These include affective self-awareness and self-recognition, normative self-guidance, recognition of the wills of other persons, and loving. ;Normative competence is socially derived. The onset of reflective, normative selfhood is contemporaneous with internalization of others' standpoints. Self-knowledge, necessary to autonomous decision-making, is essentially social. An individual first normatively directs himself because she cares about addressing the expectations of those she loves. Love is a necessary spur to normativity. ;An autonomous agent must tend to his emotional needs by sublimating his drives. We sublimate when we serve what we love, simultaneously ensuring that our acts square with our norms. Love and autonomy each synthesize voluntary and involuntary motivation---activity and passivity. ;Mutual recognition facilitates autonomy. Self-recognition enables a person's oneness identity with his decisions and identifications. Its development requires that he first be an object of recognition by another. But he must also recognize the other for her recognition of him to have meaning and serve as incentive to his normative self-regulation. ;While distinct from moral motivation, personal autonomy entails related competences. Loving any one person, required for autonomy, teaches us respect for the human will as such. Thus, the capacities required for personal autonomy also prime us to act ethically