Autonomy, Agency, Liberty, Freedom, and Responsibility

by Lael Ewy

At some level, we all want agency and autonomy. Individuals want them; governments, NGOs, and businesses want these as well. We might call some formulation of autonomy and agency “freedom,” a word that has been abused almost to the degree that “love” has been. “Liberty” might be a better word, with its associations with throwing off tyranny and its deeper resonances with the liberal arts—the skills we need to practice agency and autonomy. But this word, too, has been stretched around specific civil liberties, “libertarianism,” and the like, and is trending toward the uselessness “freedom” has taken on.

“Agency and autonomy” more clearly and completely express what I mean, and they better reflect what people desire when pursuing “freedom” however expressed. We like being able to do things and seeing that action make an impact in our world. We like to have power over our decisions, to not be coerced or forced by circumstance to do things. We like the feeling of some degree of control over our destinies.

We can align agency and autonomy along traditional notions: autonomy = “freedom from,” and agency = “freedom to.”

The problems arise when we exercise agency and autonomy in ways that negatively impact others’ lives.

The most basic cases are of the “freedom to swing my arm ending where your nose begins” types and need not be enumerated here. Things get more complicated when the damage is not quite so obvious, when the damage is collective, when the damage takes place over time, or when the dangerous behaviors are part of a system we rely on for other basic needs like shelter, safety, and food.

Pollution and environmental degradation provide ready real-world applications of these problems. Oil spills, for instance, are readily seen, but other types can be more insidious: water pollution, air pollution, contamination of food often show up first as symptoms rather than visible effects. These problems can be long-term and cumulative: carcinogens can take many years to sicken us and may not affect everyone equally. And the collective impact can be dire: by the time systemic harm is done to a population or an ecosystem, it is often too late to “fix” the problem.

Forms of accountability in these cases require regulation and monitoring, and those things impinge on the agency and autonomy of those engaged (and often enriched) by the dangerous activity. And so our notions of political liberty clash with our ability to live safe, healthy lives in a clean and productive environment.

But, of course, the polluting activities are often tied to the immediate livelihoods of those engaged in them: we rely on industry and fossil-fuels to give us remunerative work and to power our civilization. Put in terms of “liberty,” we see few options other than to continue as we are; the “freedoms” we enjoy, such as driving where we want to and being employed seem to depend on maintaining the status quo, and the “freedom” of the industry to continue as it always has therefore seems an affront to our basic rights.

If we parse things out in terms of agency and autonomy, though, we can begin to see our way to the third element, which is responsibility. If we are completely autonomous, we have no one to rely on but ourselves when the consequences are dire. But we also must acknowledge that we are fallible beings, prone to error. To assume the capability of full responsibility is also to assume either omniscience or self-destruction. One is absurd and the other untenable.

Likewise, complete agency assumes omnipotence and total unaccountability: the ability to act without restriction either physical or social. This is physically impossible, of course, but it is also limited by our social situation. We have already seen cases of reasonable social restriction: when harm is caused to one’s person. But we must also acknowledge that our actions can sometimes hamper others’ agency and autonomy. I become less able, for instance, to ply my trade as a shoe salesman when Wal-Mart moves to town and is able to undercut my prices. My autonomy of movement is restricted by others’ ability to put fences around their property.

But we are also faced with other restrictions: my ability to ply my trade of poet is restricted by the cultural reliance on the idea of market value, and so I must pursue other work to support my writing habit.

Right now, some 30 million people find their ability to act with agency within their chosen professions is hampered by our reliance on an ailing economic system.

The manner in which we formulate agency and autonomy is determined by culture; in fact, a major feature of a culture is what the people who comprise it consider necessary or worthwhile to do and what of that is up to discretion and what is a matter of compulsion.

Responsibility is only meaningful within this framework, and is renegotiated when the cultural environment, or when the environment within which a culture exists, changes. “Taking care of yourself and those you love” looks very different in a hunter-gatherer society than it does in a modern industrial society or in whatever society we’re becoming. As we become that new society, it behooves us to be intentional about how we practice agency and what autonomy we find proper. No culture can function unless the majority of people agree on that relationship.

To botch that renegotiation is to make the suffering of the last few years look like relative luxury.