The term autonomy derives from classical Greek, where it was applied primarily or even exclusively in a political context, to civic communities possessing independent legislative and self-governing authority. Autonomy is a moral framework, both as a model of the moral person and the feature of the person by virtue of which he is morally obligated. For Kant, our ability to use reasons to choose our own actions and presupposes that we understand ourselves as free. Freedom means lacking barriers to our action that are in any way external to our will, though it also requires that we utilize a law to guide our decisions, a law that can come to us only by an act of our own will. This self-imposition of the moral law is autonomy. And since this law must have no content provided by sense or desire, or any other contingent aspect of our situation, it must be universal. Hence we have the Categorical Imperative, that by virtue of our being autonomous we must act only on those maxims that we can consistently will as a universal law.
The capacity to impose upon ourselves the moral law is the ultimate source of all moral value. Some theorists who are not Kantians have made this inference central to their views of autonomy. Paul Benson has argued that being autonomous implies a measure of self-worth in that we must be in a position to trust our decision-making capacities to put ourselves in a position of responsibility. But the Kantian position is that such self-regard is not a contingent psychological fact, but an unavoidable implication of the exercise of practical reason. So we owe to ourselves moral respect in virtue of our autonomy. Hence we are obliged to act out of fundamental respect for other persons in virtue of their autonomy. In this way, autonomy serves as both a model of practical reason in the determination of moral obligation and as the feature of other persons deserving moral respect from us.
So when the optimal decision for me is an impassioned one, I must value by ability to engage in the right passions, not merely in the ability to cold-heartedly reflect and choose. Putting the passions inside the scope of reasoned reflection, rather than outside its scope and merely something to be considered adverbially in choosing an action. Putting passions inside that scope and saying that what it is right to do now is to act with a certain affect. When we generalize from our ability to make the latter sort of decisions, we must value not only the ability to weigh options and universalize them but also the ability to engage the right affect emotion. We need not commit ourselves to valuing only the cognitive capacities of humanity but also its subjective elements. This directly relates to the nature of autonomy, for the question of whether moral obligation rests upon and contains affective elements depends on the conception of autonomy at work and whether affective elements are included in the types of reflective judgments that form its core. Autonomy can play a role in moral theory without that theory being fully Kantian in structure. For example, it is certainly possible to argue that personal autonomy has intrinsic value independent of a fully worked out view of practical reason. Following John Stuart Mill one can claim that autonomy is "one of the elements of well-being" Viewing autonomy as an intrinsic value or as a constitutive element in personal well-being allows one to adopt a generally consequentialist moral framework while paying heed to the importance of self-government to a fulfilling life
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