Autonomy — the capacity to give oneself one’s own law, from the Greek autos (self) and nomos (law). The term arose in the political vocabulary of ancient Greece, where it described the condition of a city governed by its own laws rather than subject to a foreign power. It was Immanuel Kant, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), who carried the notion from the political sphere into the heart of ethics, defining autonomy as the property by which the will is a law to itself. For Kant, to act morally is to act on a principle that reason gives to itself and that can be willed as a universal law — the categorical imperative — independently of inclinations, pleasures, or external commands. Opposed to this mode of determination stands heteronomy: receiving the law from outside, whether from sensible appetites, authority, custom, or the promise of reward. Any morality grounded in such motives is, for Kant, spurious, because it subjects the will to something alien to reason. Autonomy thus presupposes the freedom of the will: only a rational and free being can legislate for itself. This conceptual core has reached far beyond Kantian ethics, becoming decisive in liberal political thought, in bioethics (informed consent), and in education, where the formation of an autonomous subject, able to think and decide for itself, stands as a central ideal.
← Glossary