ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on concerns about the tensions between personal autonomy and cultural traditions, taking as its focus the example of arranged marriage and the debate it has spawned in Britain. My aim is to highlight the difficulties that attend a specifically liberal understanding of the effect of certain traditional cultural practices on women’s lives. I begin by asking whether autonomy is useful as an ideal and regulative norm for determining the validity and permissibility of controversial cultural traditions, and if so, what kind of conception of autonomy is adequate for this task. I then discuss the UK government inquiry into the phenomenon of forced marriages among some British South Asians, paying particular attention to the framing of this issue in terms of autonomy, choice, and consent. The autonomy paradigm, I shall argue, has had the effect of steering public debate and policy about marriage in problematic directions. Fruitful discussion about both the reality of contested social practices – such as arranged marriage – and their purported validity thus necessitates a critical rethinking of personal autonomy and the closely related concepts of choice and consent.
