ABSTRACT
Babbitt appreciates certain virtues of the liberal account of autonomous choice. Its definition of autonomous choice as choice with full information, good reasoning skills, and vivid awareness of the likely consequences respects the individual without entailing that whatever an individual chooses is good. However, Babbitt doubts that the liberal view is adequate to address the problem of ideological oppression or false consciousness. Ideological oppression forms one’s preferences in ways that deny or diminish the interest in one’s own human flourishing. According to Babbitt, the idealized cognitive conditions that liberals rely on will not counteract such distortions if they stem from an individual’s “not possessing a sense of self that would support a full sense of flourishing.”
