Relational Autonomy and Liberal Universalism

“Non-western” individuals who endorse liberal values seldom see themselves as a major contributor to those values. Rather, they often think that their people, including themselves, can at best import a sort of finished product that is already fully developed in “the West.” This is because, first, the liberal discourse has been developed by reflecting American and European experiences, and second, the liberal discourse was often imposed on their societies. Consequently, “non-western” individuals are often alienated from liberalism, thinking that liberal values are not their own even when they identify with them. Such alienation is partly due to the way individual autonomy was previously conceptualized. The traditional conception of individual autonomy presumes social influence, by default, inconducive to autonomy. This assumption seems incompatible with many cultural traditions that are still valued, and this is why liberalism has been criticized as imperialistic. But even from the liberal standpoint, an irony arises. If someone is forced into the situation to adopt the value of autonomy, and if such imposition was systemic, there is a reason to doubt that she is enjoying autonomy in the fullest sense. The traditional conception of autonomy cannot escape this irony when it is extended to societies where autonomy was adopted due to the major external influence, the imperialistic imposition of liberalism. Nonetheless, autonomy is still a powerful conceptual tool that can be used to problematize oppressive elements of a given society. In fact, I argue that the irony of liberal universalism is caused by a very specific aspect of autonomy, which can be modified: its reluctant position towards social influence. In this paper, I argue that a more inclusive model of liberalism in the globalized world would be a liberal model based on relational autonomy. The relational model explores how different levels of social relations, from personal relations to broader structural relations, can be crucial factors of autonomy. While most liberal theorists do admit that autonomy cannot be acquired in a vacuum, they still treat social relations as a negligible factor that can be placed in the background rather than the foreground of a conception of autonomy. In contrast, relational theorists propose social relations as an important dimension of theorizing autonomy. I argue that for this reason, the relational model is well equipped to incorporate the historical contexts of one’s cultural and political community into the theory of autonomy. The paper consists of three sections. First, I provide a brief summary of the existing accounts of relational autonomy. Relational autonomy is in dept to feminist theories, which provide a rich account of how social influence can have both positive and negative effects on women’s agency. Second, I attempt to construct a comprehensive, workable definition of relational autonomy which considers not only direct personal relations but also broader structural relations such as the relationships among different social groups and political communities. Lastly, I explain how this new definition of autonomy is useful to handle the irony of liberal universalism compared to the traditional way of understanding autonomy.