Conclusion

From its early emergence in the discourse of classical antiquity to its expression in contemporary democratic life, autonomy has proven to be a gripping and engaging prospect. But the expansion of personal autonomy casts a long shadow across democracies, fostering unhealthy, morally defective understandings of the nature and limits of individual self-rule. Vaunted in philosophical scholarship and celebrated in the democratic mind, personal autonomy proves excessively lax in a normative sense, faulty and unworthy of endorsement in its elemental form. That problem cannot be solved by ignoring autonomy’s sinister side or by imagining personal autonomy as a singularly positive condition. Autonomy for individual human persons requires qualification and tighter moral specification in order to be worthy of endorsement and allegiance....