Autonomy: A Philosophical Capture

Humans, because they are self-conscious, have the capacity to take control over their own behaviour in a way that non-self-conscious entities, such as the local cow, do not. However, if we do not clearly understand how humans can do this, we will never be able to fully activate that potential. In what is to follow, the change in the value dynamic will be traced from the initial position in which humans respond - like any animate being - to the values in their environment, to the emergence of learned responses as a function of purposeful reinforcement, to the emergence of ‘self-control’ in which selfconscious language-users borrow values from significant others, and finally to the emergence of genuine autonomy, when selfconscious agents are able to free their practical judgements from external influence by thinking through value issues impartially. Since thinking through an issue impartially is the sine qua non mark of philosophical thinking, it would appear that learning how to think philosophically is of particular importance to agents who wish to maximise their potential for autonomy.