Heteronomy v. Autonomy

Kant distinguishes between autonomous and heteronomous agents. Because Kant is concerned with the nature of moral action, not its consequences, he is not concerned with whether autonomous agents achieve better outcomes than heteronomous agents. But the question of the expected outcomes of the different types of agency is an interesting one to pursue since it is not obvious up front which type of agent would achieve better outcomes. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic examination of four forms of heteronomy and their corresponding forms of autonomy. We show that in one case autonomy achieves the same payoffs as heteronomy and that in three cases autonomy outperforms heteronomy. In the course of our discussion, we find a type of moral agency that comes close to achieving the maximum possible total payoff across all possible dyadic symmetric interactions. Intriguingly, the type of agency involves a synthesis of utilitarianism and deontology.