If a woman lives in a Taliban-like state and has grown up believing, for example, that it is right and correct that women should be covered up and should be deferential to men, is that an autonomous belief? Many feminists would say, no, it is socially constructed by the power imbalances in a patriarchal culture that seeks to keep women subservient.
However, say this woman has read Mary Wollstonecraft and Judith Butler and Martha Nussbaum and Janet Radcliffe Richards and Kate Manne and so on and so forth as well as the Quran and other Islamic texts and still believes that her views about women stand up to scrutiny. She can argue her case. Then, is she autonomous?
Consider again a paedophile who believes that his desire to have sex with, say 13 year olds is perfectly reasonable. He appreciates that rape is wrong and also that young girls might not be emotionally mature, but he only chooses girls who seem mature and capable and who consent. He could be, after all, in his twenties, charming and intelligent. He can cite many cases of young girls being married off at such early ages through the course of history and really cannot understand why his desire should be considered morally wrong. Is he acting autonomously?
Another paedophile, exactly the same sort of guy and choice of partners, but he hasn't read any history or psychology. He chooses mature-seeming girls because to him they are the most attractive - he can talk to them, for example, about something other than Candy Crush or whatever. He has been told by all those around him that his desires are evil and unnatural and depraved and comes to believe that he is a 'bad' person. They haven't explained their reasons, there has been no dialogue: he simply accepts the label and feels guilt. Is he autonomous?
There is an argument that chemical castration can increase autonomy because paedophiles, say, will no longer have desires they don't want to have and that only the second order desire (wanting not to want to sleep with young girls) is the 'autonomous' desire. But it might not be their autonomous desire - it might be socially constructed by the power imbalances of a society that condemns sex with 13 year olds.
Now, I happen to believe it is wrong for adults to have sex with 13 year olds - but I suppose that's because I think that 13 year olds might lack the capacity to consent... but perhaps that's not fair on 13 year olds.
Anyway, I in no way seek to say paedophilia is OK - just that the desire may well be entirely autonomous. This is relevant to me because it is relevant to all considerations of autonomy in cases of mental illnesses. Is a depressive autonomously desiring to kill herself - or is the desire 'caused' by the depression? Maybe the desire not to want to kill herself is only socially constructed, however.
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