Keywords of the Moral Life: Autonomy
The Pulling Apart, Collapse, and Retrieval of Our Moral Agency
We discuss what we mean when we call ourselves autonomous, people directing ourselves. Social media tries to pull us back together again. But the Holy Family, in this Advent season, points to a different way for us to understand our agency, our self-direction, our limits. Full post for subscribers, but month-long trials can be found here. Announcement at the end about the upcoming subscriber book Zoom.
What Is the Self? What Is the Law We Give It?
As I approach the end of the my first semester teaching medical bioethics, it’s constantly occurred to me that there are a number of black holes in our popular moral thinking, not the least of which is the notion that we have autonomy. In most circumstances, it’s simply assumed in law, policies, app agreements: in making this choice, you are a being who is making this choice freely, knowing what you’re doing. In medical ethics, the baseline of patient autonomy runs something like the following:
In choosing a course of treatment, the patient is able to make a decision, based on available knowledge, uncoerced in their choice, and unconstrained by external factors inhibiting their choice.
The established definition of the American Medical Association for autonomy is reacting against an earlier age in which medicine was practiced very paternalistically: you did what the doctor said to do. Beginning with Patient’s Bill of Rights in 1973, this model began to change dramatically, with patients assuming a lot more of the burden of medical outcomes: you have say in what courses of treatment you want and don’t want. The result was empowering for patients over against having their lives determined for them by physicians who didn’t have to live the consequences of those decisions.
But there is a lot that this summation assumes. It assumes that, in my choice-making, I understand the possible ramifications of the choice ahead: in choosing course of treatment X, I know that possible outcomes might include impairment of driving at night, or possibly death. It assumes that the knowledge available to me is fallible. It assumes that, though no one is holding a gun to my head, that my choices are made purely on the interest of my own agency. It assumes that, though I come to the physician under my own power, that there are not other invisible factors clinging to my decision-making process.
But we play along anyway, I think, acknowledging that while, in theory, each person makes their own choice, we know we don’t. Our knowledge of what we might be choosing is entirely fallible: medical knowledge advances by the year, and frequently in ways which doubles back on what might have been common sense earlier. And, as iron-clad as the Internet’s knowledge of medical diagnoses might be, my physician might know better how to read the field better than my web browser. We know that, in innumerable situations where we choose, we are forced to pretend as if we aren’t connected to anyone else, and make decisions purely as an individual, and yet, all I can think of is what my choices will mean for my children or my wife.
The notion of autonomy stretches back much further, through philosophical wranglings about what it is that makes your iteration of being human distinct from other humans, through questions of what it means that we might not just see something good but want to pursue it. And through the various discussions, this notion of what the self is, and how it moves forward pervades: you must choose, on no one else’s agency, to move.
It is at once thrilling and paralyzing, for though we can try to sort out the possible ends of our actions, we can never know them. And though we can legislate binding laws upon ourselves, we can never be sure that the law we’ve made for ourselves isn’t a good one. The term “autonomy”, coming from the Greek words of “self” and “law”, indicates to us that what’s at stake here is not really choices in isolation so much as it is binding courses of living which we adopt.
This, of course, raises the question: where do these binding courses of behavior come from? The obvious answer is that we don’t self-generate these things: there are no original ideas. We all operate off of borrowed categories and notions that we’re taught. And, though all of what we are as decision-making-beings is borrowed, we still—as you qua you—have to act. So much of our modern world is predicated on this notion: that when you acted, you acted without coercion, without constraint, and with knowledge of your action. You’re adulting from the beginning, or at least, inducted into this as the goal.
These forms of autonomy aren’t unique to 2022, and in earlier eras, families or bowling leagues or churches offered a sociological way to break down that sense of having been forced to act alone. But in a digital age, in which these physical forms are perceived to be failing us, my thought, then, is that this is what social media now offers: it senses that fragmentation, and it offers something like a hive within which to rest, and with it a hive-mind with which to think, and ultimately, a hive with whom to act.
Social Media: The Binding and Loss of the Self
Yesterday, after having been on Twitter for twelve years, I deleted all of my posts, put up a permanent “Out of Office” message, and logged out. I’ve been contemplating doing it for weeks now, and for reasons unrelated to whoever owns the platform. I joined it in 2010, and have met innumerable wonderful people there, many of whom I now count real-life friends. But it was the political discourse that happens there, and particularly around the recent legislation by Congress to protect same-sex and interracial marriage, which pushed me over the edge and out.
Here’s what I mean: social media is great for connecting. Twitter is perhaps better than many others for that, and for making sharp jokes. It’s also a place, in helping people connect with like minds, which teaches over time not what to think about certain topics, but how to think about them. We come to social media, as I suggested, because the world teaches us autonomy, a self-legislation which we know intuitively to be incomplete. We cannot possibly know all we need to know to live well; we are not self-generating beings.
And in finding other people on social media, we are given something of a people. We are given a hive for self-legislating bees to build a colony with, and with that comes a pattern of thinking, a common language. And with that comes in turn a common action: a hive-mind happens because we are thrust out into the cold, autonomous beings, and we are never meant to be so. And so, hives develop to give us common space, and over time, common thinking.
But social media becomes in this way a solution to more problems than self-legislation: it becomes a substitution for autonomy, a loss of whatever responsiveness we should have to the world, by asking us only to mirror back what is given to us. We need not add our tweets: just our likes, our re-tweets, our echoing out the voices of others. Or if not echoing out the content of another, amplifying the common thought in our own way, designed toward garnering that attention. Having left the isolating world of autonomy, social media offers us substituted thought and action.
All of this is not just to say that social media makes us dumber by fostering un-thinking in us, but that social media kills the necessary condition by which we could ever leave it: we don’t want to go back out in the cold, and so, we stay. Disconnection is its own kind of death, a de-hiving of a bee in winter. The problem, thus, isn’t so much that we must act—as a human, we do act all the time—but what it means that our action is always and ever entangled in ways which the AMA’s definition of autonomy wants to forget, and which social media wants to overcome.
The Holy Family: The Image of Encumbered Agency
Consider the image of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus: the iconic alternative to autonomy. From the beginning, as we read the Christmas narratives in Matthew and Luke, there is no place in which the futures of this family are not entangled. Mary, responsive to God, becomes the home, nurturer, and bearer of God in the world. Joseph, with the available option of running, is knit together with Mary into a future he did not choose. The infant Jesus, unable to lift his head, is fed and bundled out of town into the desert and into exile in Egypt.
These three are not singular agents, but mutually-bound-up agents. There is not dissolution of their thinking, but real deliberation (in the cases of Mary and Joseph at least) which terminates in real obedience to God and a use of one’s agency for the good of others. It is not that Joseph ceases to be Joseph, hiding in the hive, but openly acknowledges that his agency, far from being self-legislated, is borrowed and burdened. He does not give his law of action to himself, but in fact, his law of action comes to him from the angel in the dream, as it does with Mary in the day time.
Of course, all of this is God’s gift, both in the Christmas stories and for us: being alive, being alive as a moral agent, being alive as a moral agent with and for others. Whatever law we lay upon ourselves is first borrowed, originated, promulgated through God’s hand, and for the good of not just-the-self. The hidden truth of the AMA code can be spoken out loud: we must act, but we are never unburdened in that acting, and that too is God’s grace.
Our next subscriber book Zoom will be December 13th, over Abigale Favale’s The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory. It’s a real provocation about…a lot of things, and one which I’m looking forward to talking about with others. Come join us! I’ll send out an email soon with the link and to repeat the date.
And since you’ve made it this far, consider giving someone a month free of this as a virtual stocking-stuffer.