Passage 1: Relationality, according to
Beate Rössler, can be both “an enabling condition and...an obstacle to autonomy.” (Rössler, 2002, p. 148) By conceiving of the individual agent as necessarily enmeshed in social relations, then, we can explore ways that social ties can be
a positive or negative resource for the agent in all their endeavours – that is, how social factors contribute to an individual's autonomy.
As suggested in this passage, relational autonomy can function as both an obstacle and an enabling force, and my experience as a first-generation, low-income student illustrates this duality. As a first-generation student in college and in America, I am autonomous by necessity, meaning that my parents are unfamiliar with the institution of higher education, so I must be autonomous and "take the call" alone on decisions that they cannot help me navigate, which constitutes the obstacle side of the equation. Yet this same relational structure is also the source of my autonomy. My capacity to make these choices at all exists only because my parents made the prior decision to let me pursue an education despite our financial conditions, and my motivation to work hard in itself comes from a place of giving back to them. Even though they couldn't help me make decisions about my higher education, career, etc., they gave me the ability to make judgments by always reaffirming their trust in my decisions. Lastly, this passage resonated with me on a personal level because institutional obstacles in relational autonomy also became my enabling conditions to exercise my autonomy in relation to others around me.
Passage 2: Natalie Stoljar, for instance, has said that purely procedural approaches cannot account for why oppressive
norms of femininity are inimical (Stoljar, 2000, p. 95) to personal autonomy. This is because proceduralism in principle permits even those agents who have internalized oppressive norms to count as fully autonomous. After all, the content of what agents internalize is not relevant to the proceduralist, so long as the agent satisfies certain formal standards thought to make one ‘authentic’.
This passage resonates with me because of the practice of dowry in India, where the bride's family is expected to give money or goods to the groom's family at marriage. Dowry is illegal under Indian law, yet it persists widely, and its persistence illustrates exactly the gap Stoljar identifies between procedural and substantive autonomy. According to a purely procedural account of autonomy, this case would be autonomous because many families who continue giving dowry are aware that it is illegal and are capable of reflection. However, families continue giving Dowry because of their internalized norm that a daughter is a financial burden to be offset. These practices also hinder the girl child's ability to think for herself and make autonomous decisions because these relational concepts of autonomy within her family become an obstacle to her in practicing her own autonomy. Therefore, it also undermines the "physiological freedom that would be necessary for autonomy," as Stoljar criticizes.
Passage 3: She claimed in one of her earlier accounts of autonomy that agents must thus exercise normative competence – a skill which enables one
to identify and exclude oppressive norms from one's decision-making process – to count as autonomous.
I often struggle with identifying the place from which my decisions stem. Whether they are truly mine or the result of the things that I have experienced. This passage does suggest one solution to this problem. However, this also perplexes me more because in implementing normative competence, I will be living up to Stoljar's definition of autonomy and abiding by her way of exercising my autonomy. This dilemma encourages me to think more about my own definition of autonomy and my ways of practicing it, whilst still considering that my idea of autonomy is relational to scholars like Stoljar.