“Relationality, according to Beate Rössler, can be both “an enabling condition and…an obstacle to autonomy.””
This quote made me think of how certain factors can act as both an influence and a constraint on one’s autonomy. Not everything that affects a decision actually hinders autonomy. This made me think of the problem through the lens of computer sciences and decision trees.
I first though of influence and constraints as the same since they both affect one’s autonomy. In my mind, I had pictured a decision tree in which every decision is a node that flows outwards, and in that regard, would be able to map a person’s every decision that they actually made, every decision they could have made, every decision they could make, and every decision they would have made. Constraints make certain decisions inaccessible, blocking off certain paths, whilst influences keep paths accessible without blocking off a path. Constraints would therefore include things like money, laws, and the laws of physics, these make certain paths impossible regardless of preference. Influence would contain things like family, culture, religion, and one’s own values. These can affect which path a person prefers without necessarily making the other paths inaccessible.
Constraints themselves can be split further into hard and soft. A hard constraint blocks a path outright, regardless of anyone's will — money, laws, physics. A soft constraint leaves the path looking open, walkable in principle, but its openness is only held at the pleasure of another agent, as in Oshana's "contented slave," who might subjectively feel every path open while still being "irrevocably made subject to the whims of a master." Without this split, a tree model would score that case as unconstrained, since nothing is blocking the person's felt preference.
“Internalist accounts tend to treat certain psychological processes of an agent's choice-shaping and choice-making to be the relevant primary indicator of an agent's autonomy.”
Another distinction can be made: whether the factors are internal or external. Internal factors stem from the individual, such as their preferences and their own moral values. External factors can be things like peer pressure, family expectations, or laws. In that sense, a hard line cannot really be drawn between internal and external factors. Instead, they can be thought of as existing on a gradient. An external influence can gradually become internalized by an individual. For example, a person may initially choose a career because of their parents' expectations. Over time, however, they may come to genuinely value that career themselves. What began as an external influence can therefore become an internal preference.
So in summary, “factors” can be graded on two axioms. on one side is the internal, and on the other is the external. On one side is influence, and on the other is constraint.
But full internalization can't be the finish line by itself. Stoljar's contraceptive risk-taking women internalized oppressive norms so thoroughly that no resistance was ever felt, yet she still wants to call the resulting preference non-autonomous — so a preference sliding all the way from external to internal isn't automatically autonomous just for having made that slide.
““raise the question of whether [one] will identify with or reject the reasons”
The passage raises the question of whether simply following our preferences is enough for a decision to be autonomous. My belief is that a more autonomous path sits closer to the side of internal influence and away from constraint. However, this does not mean that the most autonomous decision is necessarily the one with the fewest external influences. Instead what matters is the capacity in which the individual can reflect on said factors and identify with the reasons that affect decision making — not just whether the agent failed to reject a reason, but whether they were ever actually in a position to.