Individual Autonomy: A Western Parochial Value?

This paper engages with Confucian communitarian arguments that liberal democracy and human rights, when grounded in individual autonomy, conflict with the collective self-determination of East Asian societies (Bell 1993, 2006; Chan 2014; Kim 2016). On this view, autonomy—including its Kantian variant—is cast as a parochial Western value with merely instrumental significance in East Asian democracies. I argue, however, that this literature conflates autonomy with individual sovereignty, exaggerating unencumbered agency as its central element. This overlooks feminist accounts of relational autonomy, which emphasize the social embeddedness, situatedness, and intersubjectivity of agency (Meyers 1989, 2000; Christman 2009; Nedelsky 2011). More specifically, while I acknowledge that strong substantive conceptions of relational autonomy (Oshana 2006, 2014, 2015) can revert to old-style individualism and remain vulnerable to Confucian critiques, I contend that dialogical conceptions, which define autonomy as a capacity to speak for oneself in response to potential criticisms within interpersonal relationships (Westlund 2003, 2009; Benson 2005a, 2005b), address most Confucian communitarian concerns. On this basis, I argue that an autonomy-based liberalism need not be incompatible with East Asian collective self-determination, so long as it is grounded in citizens’ relational autonomy. I illustrate this claim with examples from recent South Korean feminist movements.