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Against autonomy as an educational aim
Michael Hand a
a
Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Online Publication Date: 01 September 2006

To cite this Article: Hand, Michael (2006) 'Against autonomy as an educational aim',
Oxford Review of Education, 32:4, 535 - 550
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 Oxford Review of Education
Vol. 32, No. 4, September 2006, pp. 535–550
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Against autonomy as an educational

aim
Michael Hand*
Institute of Education, University of London, UK
Oxford
10.1080/03054980600884250
CORE_A_188350.sgm
0305-4985
Original
Taylor
402006
32
m.hand@ioe.ac.uk
MichaelHand
00000September
and
&Review
Article
Francis
(print)/1465-3915
Francis
of Education
2006
Ltd (online)

It is widely held that personal autonomy is a quality of character at which educators ought to aim.
In this paper I argue that those who hold this view are misguided. I identify two ordinary senses of
autonomy, and a range of technical senses currently popular with philosophers, and show that none
of them constitutes a defensible educational aim.

In 1972 Robert Dearden wrote an influential paper about ‘a new aim in educa-
tion’. This aim, he said, was implicit in ‘a variety of innovations in educational
practice’, including ‘the recent emphasis on individualised learning, the stress on
learning how to learn for oneself, and the widening scope for individual choice at
all ages’. It was also to be found lurking beneath the surface of educational
discourse in such fashionable terms as ‘self-direction’, ‘self-activity’, ‘indepen-
dence’ and ‘being a chooser’. The new aim was to develop in pupils a particular
‘quality of character’; and the name Dearden gave to this quality of character was
‘personal autonomy’.
In the 30 years since the appearance of Dearden’s paper, autonomy has been
elevated by many to the status of the primary and coordinating aim of all educational
endeavour. It has been the central theme of some of the most well-regarded works in
philosophy of education in recent years (Callan, 1988, 1997; White, 1990; Levinson,
1999; Brighouse, 2000). It is included in the new statement of aims for the school
curriculum in England and Wales, which requires schools to ‘develop pupils’ integrity
and autonomy and help them to be responsible and caring citizens capable of contrib-
uting to the development of a just society’ (QCA, 2000).
The irresistible rise of autonomy as an educational aim is all the more extraordinary
given the glaring inadequacy of Dearden’s original account. He claims that ‘a person
is autonomous to the degree that what he thinks and does cannot be explained

*Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK. Email:
m.hand@ioe.ac.uk

ISSN 0305-4985 (print)/ISSN 1465-3915 (online)/06/040535–16

© Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03054980600884250
 536 M. Hand

without reference to his own activity of mind’ (Dearden, 1972, p. 453). But on this
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definition a person cannot but be autonomous, since explanations of what a person

thinks and does necessarily make reference to her activity of mind.1 Mental activity is
logically built into the concepts of thinking and doing. Matters are not helped when
Dearden elaborates on his definition as follows: ‘the various activities of mind earlier
referred to as constitutive of autonomy are all essentially linked to the idea of reason,
or rather to the idea of having reasons for what one thinks and does’ (p. 456). Once
again, it is true of any action for which a person may be held responsible that she had
a reason for doing what she did. (Readers inclined to doubt this are referred to the
second of A. Phillips Griffiths’ (1972) excellent contributions to the volume in which
Dearden’s paper appears.) What distinguishes actions from events of other kinds is
precisely their susceptibility to explanation in terms of the reasons of agents.
Autonomy, as Dearden defines it, is a necessary feature of personhood and therefore
plainly will not serve as an aim of education.
It is my contention that the project of erecting autonomy as an educational aim was
wrongheaded from the start. My purpose in this paper is to show that there is no
quality of character one could plausibly call autonomy at which it is reasonable for
educators to aim.
An immediate problem here is the sheer number of competing accounts of auton-
omy currently on the philosophical market. Over the last 30 years autonomy has
acquired almost as many definitions as it has defenders. One surveyor of the literature
observes that ‘about the only features held constant from one author to another are
that autonomy is a feature of persons and that it is a desirable quality to have’ (Dwor-
kin, 1988, p. 6). Another denies that even these features are constant, on the grounds
that ‘plenty of theories of human action deny that persons can be autonomous’ and
‘there is disarray about the ethical significance of autonomy’ (O’Neill, 1992, p. 203).
This surfeit of definitions makes it difficult to construct a decisive argument against
autonomy as an educational aim. Arguing against autonomy is like trying to slay the
Hydra: as soon as one shows the inadequacy of one account, two more spring up in
its place.
Our first step, then, must be to impose some restrictions on the range of admissible
definitions of autonomy. I propose to admit for consideration only those definitions
which bear some recognisable relation to ordinary usage. Autonomy is an ordinary
English word and it seems reasonable to insist that it be used in something resembling
one of its ordinary senses. Indeed, it is tempting to remove the ‘something resem-
bling’ from the last sentence and rule out any departure from the criteria of ordinary
usage; but this would perhaps be too tight a restriction. Let us concede that the tools
with which ordinary language equips us are sometimes rather blunt and allow that
there are circumstances under which it is helpful to sharpen them up. Technical
senses of autonomy will therefore be admitted on condition that they are recognisable
as variations on one of its ordinary senses.
My procedure will be to examine first the ordinary senses of autonomy, then a
range of technical senses currently popular with philosophers, and show that none of
them picks out a defensible educational aim.
 Against autonomy as an educational aim 537

Two ordinary senses of autonomy

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The word autonomy, when applied to persons, has two ordinary senses in the English
language. In the first of these senses, what the word identifies is not a quality of char-
acter but a state of being. A person is said to be autonomous when she is free to deter-
mine her own actions. She is said to lack autonomy when she is deprived of this
freedom, when she is enslaved, imprisoned or otherwise obliged to submit to the
direction of others. The assertion that a person has or lacks autonomy is therefore a
political assertion rather than a psychological one; it is a claim about how she stands
in relation to others, not a claim about her dispositions or preferences. From the fact
that a person is free to determine her own actions, nothing follows about how, if at
all, she is disposed to exercise her freedom.
It is not only persons who may enjoy autonomy in this sense. We speak too of
autonomous states, by which we mean independent or sovereign states, those that are
not colonies, dependencies or occupied territories. Again, the description conveys no
information about how such states are disposed to conduct their affairs: they may
kowtow to more powerful nations or shun international alliances; they may adopt
forms of government that are democratic, autocratic, oligarchic or theocratic; they
may opt out of the business of government altogether and embrace anarchy. All such
policies are incidental; the sole criterion of autonomy, for states as for persons, is the
absence of externally imposed rule.
Let us call autonomy in this sense circumstantial autonomy, since it pertains to the
circumstances under which one lives. It is properly contrasted with circumstantial
heteronomy, with the state of being obliged by one’s circumstances to submit to the
direction of others.
Now I have no quarrel with the view that circumstantial autonomy is a desirable
state of being. But it should be quite clear that it is a state of being one cannot confer
on a person by educating her. What a person lacks when she lacks circumstantial
autonomy cannot be imparted by teaching or acquired by learning. The deficiency
lies not in her character but in the conditions under which she lives. The aim of
increasing circumstantial autonomy by liberating people from restrictive or dictato-
rial social arrangements is coherent and worthwhile; but it is a political aim, not an
educational one.
In its second ordinary sense, the word autonomy does identify a quality of character.
The quality of character it identifies is the inclination to determine one’s own actions. To
possess this trait is to have a preference for relying on one’s own judgment, to be inde-
pendent-minded, free-spirited, disposed to do things one’s own way. Autonomy in this
second sense may be termed dispositional autonomy. It is properly contrasted with dispo-
sitional heteronomy, with the inclination to submit oneself to the direction of others.
Dispositional autonomy is therefore a property of the right logical kind to be
erected as an aim of education: it is the sort of thing that teachers can teach and pupils
can learn. The question here is whether it should be so erected. Is there any advantage
conferred on pupils by the possession of this quality of character that would justify its
cultivation in schools?
 538 M. Hand

I contend that there is not. Dispositional autonomy would confer advantage

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only if it were always or generally the case that actions one has determined for
oneself are more effective, appropriate or worthwhile than actions performed
under the direction of others. And it seems obvious that this is not always or
generally the case. Whatever the criteria of effective, appropriate or worthwhile
action in a situation in which I find myself, there will very often be people in a
better position than me to determine the actions that will satisfy those criteria.
Where there are such people, and they are willing and able to direct me, I would
be foolish not to submit to their direction. It is difficult to see how I would be
advantaged by the possession of a character trait which regularly prompted me to
behave foolishly.
There are at least two ways in which other people may be better placed than me
to determine my actions. First, they may possess expertise which I lack. I submit
to the direction of my doctor with regard to the treatment of my medical
conditions because her medical knowledge is superior to mine. I take the advice of
my stock-broker on how to invest my earnings because she has a better
understanding of financial markets than I do. I follow the instructions of the
stranger who has given me directions to the supermarket because, unlike me, she
seems to know her way around the area. Although we each lack expertise in a
great many of the spheres in which we are obliged to act, in most of those spheres
there are experts on hand to guide us if we have the humility and good sense to let
them.
The second way in which others may be better placed than me to determine my
actions has to do not with their expertise, but with their role in an organisation to
which I belong. The success of any organisation depends on the willingness of
members to abide by decisions taken by other members on their behalf. The teacher,
for example, does not determine for herself whether she will take 7B for History on a
Friday afternoon. The decision is made for her by the member of staff responsible for
organising the timetable. The point here is not that this person is better qualified to
make timetabling decisions, but that, for schools to operate effectively, someone must
have the authority to make these decisions and everyone else must be willing to abide
by them.
Since most of us spend much of our lives operating in spheres in which others have
greater expertise than we do, and working in organisations in which others have
authority over us, it would be nonsense to say that we ought always or generally to
determine our own actions. It would be equally nonsensical to say that we ought
always or generally to submit to the direction of others: plainly there are many situa-
tions in which it makes good sense for me to rely on my own judgment or do things
my own way. It is clear that there is no useful generalisation to be made here. One
ought to act autonomously when it is reasonable to act autonomously and heterono-
mously when it is reasonable to act heteronomously; and what reason demands on
any given occasion will vary between persons depending on their circumstances,
spheres of expertise and organisational roles. The point is made with characteristic
acuity by John Wilson:
 Against autonomy as an educational aim 539

Suppose we describe—too vaguely, but it will do for now—a move as ‘putting oneself in
someone else’s hands’, or a state as ‘being in someone else’s hands’, and think of all the
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cases of this that are possible. Then it is clear that the desirability of this is something
we can hardly generalise about at all: almost everything will depend on the particular
position … [E]ven if there are no operative reasons of a social or technical kind for
making this move, it may still suit me psychologically—to a greater or lesser extent, and
in different areas of life. It is hardly clear what would be meant by saying that in general
people ought (or ought not) to make this move, or be educated to make it. (Wilson,
1977, p. 97)

If it is not generally true that actions one has determined for oneself are more
effective, appropriate or worthwhile than actions performed under the direction of
others, then the cultivation of dispositional autonomy in pupils would plainly not
be to their advantage. Certainly we want them to be capable of doing things their
own way, just as we want them to be capable of recognising and yielding to
legitimate authority; but a capacity for self-governance falls well short of an incli-
nation to it. The effect of cultivating dispositional autonomy in pupils would
simply be to make their lives more difficult in situations requiring heteronomous
action.
The defender of dispositional autonomy will perhaps respond to this line of argu-
ment by drawing attention to the dangers of dispositional heteronomy. She will point
out that heteronomously-inclined people are far more susceptible than autono-
mously-inclined ones to the perils of tyranny, oppression, manipulation and indoctri-
nation. Headstrong, self-reliant people are, to be sure, difficult to govern and to work
with; but better this social inconvenience than the injuries so often suffered by those
who deliver themselves too readily into the hands of others. A society of people with
an aversion to authority is preferable to a society of people with an aversion to inde-
pendence of mind.
Maybe all of this is true. If we had to choose, perhaps a society of rebels would
indeed be preferable to a society of submissives. But, of course, we do not have to
make this choice, for these are not the only options available to us. We can, if we wish,
try to educate pupils in such a way that they are averse neither to authority nor to inde-
pendence of mind. We may not merely refrain from imparting, but actively discour-
age the formation of, either dispositional autonomy or dispositional heteronomy. We
may aim rather at producing rational, well-balanced people willing and able to exer-
cise independent judgment, rely on expert advice or submit to legitimate authority as
the occasion demands. Until this aim is shown to be unrealisable, we may decline to
impale ourselves on either horn of the dilemma posed by our imagined defender of
dispositional autonomy.
I conclude that neither circumstantial autonomy nor dispositional autonomy will
serve as an aim of education. The former is desirable but not learnable; the latter is
learnable but not desirable. If the idea of autonomy as an educational aim has any
intuitive appeal to the lay person, it arises from a conceptually-muddled conflation of
the desirability of circumstantial autonomy with the learnability of dispositional
autonomy. As soon as the two senses are clearly distinguished, their respective
inadequacies as educational aims are plain to see.
 540 M. Hand

Technical senses of autonomy

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Let us turn now to consider the possibility that there is a technical sense of autonomy
which, while bearing a recognisable resemblance to one of its ordinary senses, never-
theless differs from them in picking out a defensible educational aim.
The first technical sense I wish to discuss sits midway between our two ordinary
senses. Autonomy is here defined as the ability or capacity to determine one’s own
actions. To possess this capacity a person need not be inclined to determine her own
actions, but she must have something more than the mere freedom to do so. What she
must have, in addition to her freedom from external interference, is the intellectual
competence to consider options and choose between them.
At first sight this halfway house between circumstantial and dispositional autonomy
looks like a promising candidate for an educational aim. Independent action may not
be required on every occasion but it is certainly required on some occasions, so
equipping people with a capacity for such action must surely be a good thing. And
since the capacity to act independently must presumably be acquired by learning, it
is a property of the right logical kind to be cultivated in schools.
There is, however, something odd about this suggestion. We can see easily enough
the difference between the person who is free to swim across the pool, in the sense that
no-one is preventing her from doing so, and the person who is able to swim across the
pool, in the sense that no-one is preventing her from doing so and she has learned how
to swim. But is there a parallel distinction to be drawn between the person who is free
to act independently and the person who is able to do so? Do we in fact encounter
people who, though free to do as they please, have yet to acquire the intellectual
competence to do so? And while we know well enough how to help children who
come to us without the ability to swim, what kind of educational intervention would
be appropriate for a child who came to us without the ability to act independently?
Examples of people who have the freedom but not the capacity to determine their
own actions are certainly not easy to come by. The most plausible candidates for this
description are those unfortunate human beings who, through long-term confine-
ment or systematic abuse, have been rendered psychologically incapable of indepen-
dent action. Institutionalised convicts and battered wives may regain their freedom,
in the sense of being released from prison or escaping an abusive domestic environ-
ment, without yet regaining the capacity to exercise that freedom. As Dearden
observes, ‘a long-term prisoner might be given his freedom, but have been so inca-
pacitated for ordinary life by the institutional life of the prison that he exhibits only
anxiety and withdrawal in this state of freedom, rather than the capacities of self-
direction and choice which are characteristic of autonomy’ (1972, p. 451). What is
striking about such examples, though, is that these are not people who have yet to
acquire the ability to act independently, but people who have been deprived of that
ability by years of confinement or abuse. The examples show that people can, if
treated badly enough for long enough, lose the capacity to determine their own
actions; they do not show that the plight of these unfortunates resembles even
remotely the situation of the uneducated child.
 Against autonomy as an educational aim 541

In fact it seems quite clear that the overwhelming majority of children acquire the
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ability to determine their own actions in the earliest stages of life, and certainly long
before they begin their formal education. Children, unlike institutionalised prisoners
and battered wives, are perfectly adept at considering options and choosing between
them; they have no difficulty in acting on their own judgment. The capacity for auton-
omous action, though it satisfies our twin criteria of desirability and learnability, is
redundant as an educational aim because children acquire it without need of educa-
tional intervention. Education is ‘a serious and sustained programme of learning,
designed for human beings as such, above the level of what they would naturally pick
up for themselves in their everyday lives’ (Wilson, 2002, pp. 331–332); and the ability
to act independently falls squarely into the category of what children naturally pick
up for themselves.
The capacity for autonomous action is not so much an aim as a presupposition of
educational endeavour. The problem to which we address ourselves as educators is
not that children are unable to determine their own actions, but that the actions they
determine are very often irrational, inappropriate, ill-considered or uninformed. We
know that children are able to consider options and choose between them; the chal-
lenge is to make them consider all the options, and consider them carefully, and make
wise and circumspect choices. The difference between educated and uneducated
people is not that the latter are unable to act independently, but that the former do
so with reference to a substantial knowledge base and relevant public criteria of
effective, appropriate or worthwhile action.
The next technical sense of autonomy I should like to consider is the altogether
more radical sense given to the term by Kant. For Kant, the autonomous person
determines her actions not only without reference to the guidance of others, but with-
out reference to the promptings of her own desires and preferences. Since we do not
choose our desires and preferences, but have them bestowed upon us by nature and
nurture, submission to their governance is no less heteronomous than submission to
the governance of other people. A person is only truly autonomous when her deci-
sions are not affected by what she wants or likes or cares about, but are determined
by pure practical reason alone.
Practical reason, on Kant’s view, may be either pure or empirically conditioned.
Empirically conditioned practical reason is reason in the service of desire. In one famil-
iar form, it is the process of working out effective means to the satisfaction of desires;
in another, it is the process of arbitrating between conflicting desires, of apportioning
due weight to the competing demands of passing whims and long-term goals. Such
exercises of practical reason are empirically conditioned in the sense that they are
predicated on the desires of the agent. According to Hume, all forms of practical
reason are so predicated: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,
and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’ (Hume, 1739,
p. 266). Kant’s startling claim, however, is to have identified a form of practical reason
which is pure or unconditioned. He contends that pure practical reason is capable of
supplying the rational agent with both action-guiding principles and a compelling
reason to abide by them that makes no reference to her desires and preferences.
 542 M. Hand

What is the nature of this desire-independent reason for action? The account Kant
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offers rests on a distinction between the material and the form of action-guiding
principles:
The material of a practical principle is the object of the will. This object either is the
determining ground of the will or it is not. If it is, the rule of the will is subject to an empir-
ical condition (to the relation of the determining representation to feelings of pleasure or
displeasure), and therefore the rule is not a practical law. If all material of a law, i.e. every
object of the will considered as a ground of its determination, is taken from it, nothing
remains except the mere form of giving universal law. Therefore, a rational being either
cannot think of his subjectively practical principles (maxims) as at the same time universal
laws, or he must suppose that their mere form, through which they are fitted for being
given as universal laws, is alone that which makes them a practical law. (Kant, 1788, p. 26)

The material of an action-guiding principle, then, is the set of intended consequences

of abiding by it. In empirically conditioned practical reason, one’s reason for abiding
by a principle is one’s desire to bring about the intended consequences of doing so.
What Kant suggests is that, although every action has an intended consequence, a
desire to bring about this consequence is not the only intelligible reason for acting.
One may instead choose to abide by an action-guiding principle because it has a
certain form, to make the form rather than the material of a principle ‘the determining
ground of the will’. To abide by a principle on this basis is not only rational, but more
rational than abiding by it because one has an interest in the intended consequences
of doing so. Indeed, the reason to act supplied by the satisfaction of this formal crite-
rion remains operative even if the intended consequences are thought to be positively
undesirable.
The formal criterion a principle must satisfy if it is to be binding on rational agents
is the criterion of universalisability. A principle is universalisable if one can coherently
will that it should become a universal law. It is quite possible for me to live by the
principle that goods placed in my care are mine to keep unless anyone can prove
otherwise; but it is not possible for me to will that this principle should become a
universal law: ‘I immediately realise that taking such a principle as a law would
annihilate itself, because its result would be that no one would make a deposit’ (Kant,
1788, p. 27). If everyone adopted the policy of keeping for themselves goods placed
in their care, the practice of making deposits would cease and the policy would have
no application. The principle that goods placed in my care are to be kept in trust
until reclaimed by their rightful owners, on the other hand, is readily universalisable.
There is no incoherence involved in my willing that this policy should be adopted by
everyone.
The Kantian thesis is that the universalisability of a principle constitutes a compel-
ling reason for abiding by it, and that this reason is of a different order from the desire-
dependent reasons that normally determine our actions. When we are moved to act
by our desires and preferences, we are subject to our empirically conditioned ‘sensu-
ous nature’ and are to that degree heteronomous; when we are moved to act by the
universalisable form of action-guiding principles, we break free of our sensuous
nature and thus achieve autonomy:
 Against autonomy as an educational aim 543

Nature, in the widest sense of the word, is the existence of things under laws. The sensuous
nature of rational beings in general is their existence under empirically conditioned laws,
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and therefore it is, from the point of view of reason, heteronomy. The supersensuous
nature of the same beings, on the other hand, is their existence according to laws which
are independent of all empirical conditions and which therefore belong to the autonomy
of pure reason. (Kant, 1788, p. 44)

Whether or not autonomy as construed by Kant is a defensible educational aim

depends on the validity of his account of pure practical reason. Is it in fact true that
the universalisable form of an action-guiding principle constitutes a sufficient reason
for abiding by it? Surely it is not. Precisely because universalisability is unrelated to
any ‘object of the will’, and therefore to anything human beings desire, hope for or
care about it is a property of the wrong logical kind to provide rational grounds for
the adoption of a principle of conduct.
Suppose that Tim is trying to decide whether or not to adopt a policy of always tell-
ing the truth. He is advised by Gareth, a Kantian, that he ought to adopt the policy
on the grounds that he can coherently will that everyone else adopt it too. Tim notes
with interest that the policy he is considering possesses this feature, but is puzzled as
to why Gareth thinks he has supplied him with a reason for adopting it. He agrees that
it is a policy everyone could adopt, but what he wants to know is whether it is a policy
he, or anyone else, should adopt. The kind of argument he is looking for is one that
addresses the consequences of adopting the policy, one that weighs the costs of telling
the truth when it is hurtful or humiliating against the benefits that accrue to groups of
people who deal honestly with one another.
Tim is quite right to be discontent with Gareth’s advice. It is by no means a self-
evident proposition that the universalisability of a principle is grounds for its adop-
tion. Yet self-evidence is just what Kant claims for it. ‘The consciousness of this
fundamental law’, he says, ‘may be called a fact of reason … since it forces itself
upon us as a synthetic proposition a priori based on no pure or empirical intuition’
(Kant, 1788, p. 31). We are asked to accept the categorical imperative not because
there are good arguments for doing so, but because it forces itself upon us as an a
priori condition of the possibility of practical reason. But, of course, it is only a
condition of the possibility of pure practical reason, the intelligibility of which is
precisely what is in doubt. From the point of view of practical reason in its ordinary,
empirically conditioned modes, the claim that the universalisability of a principle is
grounds for its adoption, far from being an a priori presupposition, is merely a piece
of bad reasoning.
This is not to deny the possibility that the class of universalisable principles is coex-
tensive with the class of defensible moral principles. If it is, Kant is to be credited with
the discovery of a useful test for moral defensibility, a reliable method of differentiat-
ing good principles from bad ones. But from the fact (if it is a fact) that universalis-
ability is a distinguishing feature of defensible moral principles, one cannot infer that
they are defensible by virtue of their universalisability. What makes a principle morally
defensible is not its universal form, but the tendency of the actions it enjoins to
advance the cause of human happiness or flourishing.
 544 M. Hand

I conclude that Kant fails to make his case for the operation of a categorical
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imperative. A person who cites the universalisability of a principle as her reason for
abiding by it does not thereby escape the empirical conditions of her sensuous nature
and embrace the autonomy of her supersensuous nature, but simply fails to offer an
intelligible reason for her principle. We must therefore reject Kantian autonomy as an
aim of education.
Of course, from the fact that we cannot teach children to transcend their desires in
the determination of their actions, it does not follow that we cannot teach them to
exercise some control over which of their desires to act on. On the contrary, the
cultivation of such control is an important educational task. We may think of this task
as having two aspects. First, children must acquire competence in the exercise of
practical reason (in what Kant calls its empirically-conditioned mode), so that they
are able to apportion due weight to the multiple and conflicting desires, preferences,
urges and aspirations jostling for their attention. Second, they must acquire such
moral virtues as temperance and fortitude, so that they are neither unduly distracted
by the immediacy and potency of carnal impulses, nor too easily discouraged by diffi-
culty and danger, from the pursuit of their more complex, demanding, long-term or
large-scale goals. But since neither competence in practical reason nor the possession
of moral virtues implies the achievement of any sort of independence of desires and
preferences, nothing resembling Kantian autonomy is involved here.
In both of its ordinary senses, and the two technical senses so far considered, auton-
omy has to do with how a person stands in relation to the determination of her
actions. Some philosophers, however, have suggested technical senses of autonomy
that relate the term not (or not only) to the determination of actions, but instead (or
also) to the determination of beliefs. Eamonn Callan, for example, writes: ‘Personal
autonomy essentially pertains to the regulation of the will. It applies to the way we
form our beliefs because that is an activity of mind amenable to the will’ (Callan,
1988, p. 26). Charles Bailey also brings belief-determination to the fore: ‘What the
liberally educated person is released for is a kind of intellectual and moral autonomy,
the capacity to become a free chooser of what is to be believed and what is to be done,
a free chooser of beliefs and actions’ (Bailey, 1984, p. 21). Let us, then, consider the
possibility that an inclination to determine one’s own beliefs is something at which
educators might usefully aim.
There is, on the face of it, a rather obvious difficulty with the idea of being ‘a free
chooser of what is to be believed’. Beliefs, unlike actions, do not appear to be the sort
of things one chooses. It is not within my power to make myself believe what I know
to be false, nor to prevent myself believing what I know to be true. Dearden remarks:
‘We do not believe anything deliberately, intentionally or on purpose’ (1972, p. 458).
And Callan himself concedes that ‘belief cannot be the immediate object of any
volition’ (1988, pp. 31–32).
The reason for the non-voluntary character of beliefs is not far to seek. With regard
to the beliefs we form about the world, we are very much at the mercy of what the
world is actually like. The facts are what they are and, unless we are suffering from a
fairly severe form of madness, it is extremely difficult to pretend otherwise. My beliefs
 Against autonomy as an educational aim 545

that grass is green and blood is red were not determined by me or anyone else; they
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were determined by the greenness of grass and the redness of blood. If I were to try
to believe that grass is red or blood is green, I should find my efforts confounded at
every turn by my perceptual experience. Our beliefs are a function not of our agency
but of our consciousness; they are a mark of the way in which the world impresses itself
upon us, not one of the ways in which we impress ourselves upon the world.
This is a powerful objection to the idea of independent belief-determination, but it
is not quite the end of the story. For we cannot separate so neatly the world’s impact
on us and ours on the world. What the world obliges us to believe depends in part on
how we interact with it and how closely we attend to it. While it is true that there are
many facts which are inescapable, which no sane person could fail to believe, there
are many others which are rather less intrusive, which can be uncovered by patient
investigation but just as easily ignored or discounted because of their minimal impact
on our everyday lives. We do have some choice about our beliefs in the sense that we
have control over how seriously or halfheartedly we undertake factual investigations,
and how sceptical or credulous we are about information supplied by others.
Thus, while it is true that ‘belief cannot be the immediate object of any volition’, it
is not true that we are wholly at the mercy of the world with regard to the determina-
tion of our beliefs. And at least one of the distinctions to be drawn here bears a recog-
nisable relation to distinctions ordinarily marked by the terms autonomy and
heteronomy. Just as we may choose between acting independently and submitting to
the direction of others, so we may choose between examining evidence for ourselves
and relying on information supplied by others. We may refuse to give our assent to a
proposition until we have seen the evidence with our own eyes, or we may accept it
on the authority of someone who seems to know what she is talking about. Scepticism
and credulity about information supplied by others might plausibly be described as
autonomy and heteronomy in the arena of belief-determination.
But it will be clear that, as in the arena of action-determination, there is no useful
generalisation to be made here. We do not confer advantage on children by making
them either generally sceptical or generally credulous about information supplied by
others. Sometimes it is foolish to believe what we are told; sometimes it is foolish not
to. It scarcely needs pointing out that a great many of the beliefs each of us holds
about the world are held on good authority, on the basis of evidence vouched for by
appropriately qualified others. We are no more obliged to choose between a society
of doubters and a society of believers than we are between a society of rebels and a
society of submissives. We may educate children in such a way that they tend neither
towards autonomy nor towards heteronomy in the determination of their beliefs, but
are equally comfortable assessing evidence for themselves and accepting the word of
others.
If autonomy is scepticism about information supplied by others, it must be rejected
as an educational aim. This is not, however, the only way in which philosophers have
tried to relate autonomy to belief-determination. Callan apparently wants to use the
terms autonomy and heteronomy to mark the distinction between the ‘realist’ and the
‘fantasist’, between the person who is serious about facing up to reality and the person
 546 M. Hand

who prefers to indulge her fantasies wherever her immediate experience does not
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prevent her from doing so. He writes:

Beliefs are the product of mental activities which are to a large extent within the control
of the believer. An individual can make a conscious effort to face disagreeable facts or
engage in wish-fulfilling fantasies instead, and the course she takes will have a deep influ-
ence on what she ultimately comes to believe. We are all aware (or should be) of the
extent to which our wishes about the world and ourselves can distort our beliefs, and the
extent of this distortion is not an immutable fact of normal human nature. We can do
something about it. Thus one might say, stretching language a bit, we choose our beliefs
in part indirectly insofar as we choose to curb the natural tendency to fantasise. (Callan,
1988, p. 32)

Now it seems to me that cultivating in children a disposition ‘to curb the natural
tendency to fantasise’ ought to be a central, perhaps the central, aim of education.
Certainly this disposition is both desirable and learnable, and one which we cannot
assume that children will ‘naturally pick up for themselves in their everyday lives’.
What is bizarre about Callan’s proposal is not his advocacy of this quality of character
as an educational aim, but his use of the term autonomy to designate it.
If one had to describe either the realist or the fantasist as autonomous, it is presum-
ably the fantasist who would have the stronger claim on the description. She at least
may be said to choose her own beliefs, to exercise freedom from the constraints of
evidence and argument. The realist is precisely someone who gives up this freedom,
who allows her beliefs to be dictated by the way the world is. But even this sounds like
sophistry. The fact is that the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy simply
does not fit here. Neither realism nor fantasism remotely resembles what is ordinarily
meant by autonomy, so neither meets our criterion of admissibility for technical
senses of the term.
Callan’s use of autonomy is all the more eccentric given the availability of a familiar
stock of intellectual virtue terms that have their natural home in talk of close attention
to evidence and argument and resistance to the distorting influences of fantasy and
prejudice. Such terms as rationality, objectivity, truthfulness and seriousness serve
just the purpose for which Callan tries to appropriate autonomy: that of identifying
the quality (or qualities) of character associated with facing up squarely to the way
things are.
The final technical sense of autonomy I should like to consider relates the term to
the determination not of actions or beliefs, but of desires. A person is autonomous when
she is inclined to determine her own desires, wants or preferences. Thus for Harry
Brighouse autonomous people are either those who have selected their preferences
‘through careful and rational weighing of reasons’, or those whose non-rationally
acquired preferences have survived being reflected upon ‘with an appropriate degree
of critical attention’ (Brighouse, 2000, p. 67). The same idea is to be found in John
White’s discussion of autonomy in Education and the good life:
Some of the desires we acquire have been bred into us by our parents and teachers, or
picked up imperceptibly from our culture. When we come to reflect on these we find some
of them unacceptable and desire no longer to desire them. Higher-order desiring of this
 Against autonomy as an educational aim 547

sort enables us, if it is successful, to rid ourselves of our unwanted desires and thereby to
make our desire-structure more authentically our own. (White, 1990, pp. 91–92)
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Here we are struck immediately by the same prima facie difficulty as we encoun-
tered in relation to belief-determination: desires do not appear to be the sort of
things one chooses. I cannot just choose to have a desire to climb Mount Everest,
or an interest in poetry, or a preference for jam over marmalade. And while I can
choose not to indulge my passions for cigarettes and alcohol, I cannot choose not
to have those passions. Desires, like beliefs, cannot be the immediate objects of
volitions.
Again, however, it is plausible to maintain that there is an indirect sense in which
persons can exercise control over their desires. The case for such indirect control is
made in a well-known paper by Harry Frankfurt (1971). Although I discover rather
than choose my desires, having discovered them I may subject them to scrutiny and
decide whether or not to endorse them. I may choose either to identify with or to with-
draw from the various desires nature and nurture bestow upon me. And through these
acts of identifying with and withdrawing from my desires, I exercise some influence
over their long-term survival.
Certainly this influence does not amount to direct control. In withdrawing from a
desire I do not thereby dispel it, nor does my identifying with a desire guarantee its
survival. My not wanting to want something does not, in itself, stop me from wanting
it. Frankfurt describes the case of the unwilling drug addict who, though he has
repudiated his addiction, is nevertheless still in its grip:
The unwilling addict identifies himself, through the formation of a second-order volition,
with one rather than with the other of his conflicting first-order desires. He makes one of
them more truly his own and, in so doing, he withdraws himself from the other. It is in
virtue of this identification and withdrawal, accomplished through the formation of a
second-order volition, that the unwilling addict may meaningfully make the analytically
puzzling statements that the force moving him to take the drug is a force other than his
own, and that it is not of his own free will but rather against his will that this force moves
him to take it. (1971, p. 18)

Nevertheless, desire evaluations are not irrelevant to the survival of the desires in ques-
tion. When I withdraw from a desire and make a concerted effort to find my happiness
in the pursuit of other interests, the strength of the repudiated desire will, in the
normal run of things, gradually diminish. This does not happen overnight, and no
doubt each of us has desires we can never be wholly free of, but the more I shift the
focus of my life away from the satisfaction of an unwanted desire, the less brightly that
desire is likely to burn. Correlatively, by endorsing a desire and thus acknowledging
it as part of my identity, I tend to strengthen and sustain it.
There is, then, an intelligible sense in which we may be said to exercise control over
our desires. We influence the long-term survival of our desires, wants and preferences
by identifying with them or withdrawing from them. Now it is clear that these acts of
identification and withdrawal may be either autonomous or heteronomous: when we
endorse or repudiate desires, we may do so either independently or under the
direction of others. Autonomy in the arena of desire-determination is therefore the
 548 M. Hand

disposition to evaluate one’s desires for oneself. Is this disposition a plausible

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candidate for the status of an educational aim?

I should like to advance two reasons for thinking that it is not. The first is that
desire evaluation does not play a significant part in most of our lives. We do not go
in very much for the business of evaluating desires, and it is far from clear that our
lives would be improved if we did. Only rarely do we feel inclined to endorse or
repudiate our wants and preferences; for the most part we simply accept them for
what they are. Our moral and prudential efforts are ordinarily focused not on trying
to change our desires, but on ensuring that they are properly regulated, that we
submit to their promptings only when it is appropriate to do so. Imprudence and
immorality lie, in the main, not in the indulgence of improper desires, but in the
indulgence of proper desires to excess. It is not my passion for chocolate that is bad,
but my failure to exercise control over the frequency with which I give in to it.
Again, there is nothing wrong with my wanting a successful career, but there is
something awry with allowing my ambition to override all other considerations in
the determination of my conduct. And even in those cases where our desires do
appear to be improper, it is a moot point whether our energies are better spent on
trying to rid ourselves of those desires or simply on learning to refrain from acting
on them. The practice of identifying with and withdrawing from desires, I suggest, is
just not important enough, not sufficiently central to well-lived lives, to merit seri-
ous educational attention.
The second reason for rejecting autonomy in this sense as an educational aim
pertains to the familiar issue of relevant expertise. The disposition to evaluate one’s
desires independently would confer advantage only if it were always or generally the
case that the person best qualified to evaluate a desire is the person whose desire it is.
And, once again, this is not always or generally the case. Whatever the criteria against
which a desire is to be evaluated, there will often be people in a better position than
the subject of the desire to determine whether or not it satisfies those criteria.
To illustrate this point, let us consider some of the ways in which desires can be
deficient, on the basis of which rational persons might wish to withdraw from them.
One familiar deficiency to which desires are subject is that of being unrealistic. An
unrealistic desire is one that it is not within the power of the agent to satisfy. Time
dedicated to the pursuit of a goal one has no hope of achieving is, arguably, time
wasted, so unrealistic desires would appear to be prime candidates for withdrawal.
But it is clear that those who have unrealistic desires are rarely in the best position to
recognise them as such. Consider the amateur pianist of modest talent with an unre-
alistic desire to turn professional. It is precisely because she is not a professional
pianist, and lacks the technical skill and interpretive artistry to become one, that she
is poorly placed to diagnose the deficiency in her desire. She is simply not qualified
to evaluate her ambition against the relevant criteria. She will, if she is wise, seek out
appropriately qualified others and submit herself to their guidance.
Another deficiency to which desires are subject is that of being false. Typically, the
object of a desire is a state of affairs whose realisation is expected to bring some kind
of pleasure or satisfaction. Sometimes this expectation is false. The victim of a violent
 Against autonomy as an educational aim 549

crime wants to exact vengeance on the perpetrator because she believes that it will
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bring her peace of mind; but on taking her revenge she finds herself more tormented
and unhappy than before. Her desire was predicated on a false belief about the rela-
tionship between vengeance and peace of mind. Had she been willing to submit her
desire for evaluation by people with experience of such matters, and to accept their
verdict on it, she might have avoided the course of action that compounded her
suffering.
A third kind of defect from which desires may suffer is that of being pathological or
neurotic. If some of my desires are mere symptoms of a mental illness or nervous
disorder, I might well consider this grounds for repudiating them. But here again it is
obvious that, unless I am fortunate enough to be a trained psychologist, I shall not be
the person best qualified to make such diagnoses.
No doubt there are many other ways in which desires can be deficient: the list I
have identified is not intended to be exhaustive. What these three kinds of deficiency
clearly show is that it is very often reasonable to submit to the direction of others in
evaluating one’s desires. It may be that I am sometimes better qualified than anyone
else to decide whether my desires are unrealistic, false or pathological, but it is
certainly not the case that I am always or generally better qualified. Desire evaluations,
like actions in general, are such that no useful generalisation can be made about
whether they ought to be performed independently or under instruction. The rational
person will judge each case on its own merits, and a disposition to proceed in one way
or the other can only be a hindrance to her. Our final technical sense of autonomy
therefore will not serve as an aim of education.
I noted at the beginning of this paper the Hydra-like character of autonomy in
recent philosophical literature. The arguments I have advanced against erecting
autonomy as an educational aim in either of its ordinary senses or any of a range of
technical senses may not, of course, be effective against the next generation of tech-
nical definitions. We shall have to examine these definitions as they emerge. But it is
worth bearing in mind that, even if there is a quality of character that satisfies our twin
criteria of learnability and desirability and bears some passing resemblance to what is
ordinarily meant by autonomy, the importance of stating the aims of education in
terms that are transparent not only to theorists but to practitioners, policy-makers and
the general public suggests that we would be well-advised to call it by some other
name.

Note
1. For stylistic reasons, in the absence of a gender-non-specific pronoun in English, I have used
the feminine pronoun throughout.

Notes on contributor
Dr Michael Hand is a Lecturer in Education at the Institute of Education, University
of London.
 550 M. Hand

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