ABSTRACT
In a minimal sense, to be autonomous is to have projects that are one’s own, that define one’s identity. In so far as John Stuart Mill can be said to defend autonomy as an ideal, it is this component of the ideal that is central. While Mill never employs the term ‘autonomy’ itself, his description of what it is to have a character provides a classic version of what it is to be an autonomous person in this sense:
A person whose desires and impulses are his own-are the expressions of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture-is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character.1
