ABSTRACT

Throughout this book, I have sidestepped the topic of moral responsibility. This may strike the reader as an oversight. The classic and contemporary literature devoted to the topics of agent autonomy and agent responsibility suggest that there are conceptual connections between the two, although these connections are rarely explored in detail.1 In the past twenty years alone there has been an abundance of scholarship on the topic of responsibility and, more generally, moral agency, with much of this discussion resting on some theory of autonomous agency.2 But I have chosen to avoid the topic of responsible agency for the simple reason that this is a book on autonomy. To treat autonomy and responsibility as two sides of a coin is a mistake, despite the fact that this has often been done. The bulk of this final chapter will be devoted to explaining, very briefly, the differences between autonomy and responsibility as I see them.