ABSTRACT
Many feminists and care ethicists have sought to understand autonomy in non-traditional terms, stressing the relational character of individual human autonomy in a way that standard liberals or Kantians have never done. (Contemporary liberals may not want to deny that autonomy is causally relational, that an ability to think and decide for oneself at least partly depends on how we have interacted with others and the world in general. But liberalism and Kantianism have certainly tended to ignore or downplay this fact.) However, those who have proposed an alternative, relational view of autonomy haven’t attempted to integrate such a view completely into the ethics of caring. To be sure, the ethics of care stresses connection and relationship, and this sits well with the idea that autonomy should be conceived in relational terms. But liberals think our autonomy should be respected, and a care ethics that takes autonomy seriously needs to say something substantive about respect, and about respect for autonomy in particular. This has not, to the best of my knowledge, been done previously, but in the previous chapter I attempted to show how the notion of empathy helps us to integrate both autonomy and respect for autonomy into a comprehensive ethics of care.
