Distributive Autonomy

This chapter first explores the logical imperative that if autonomy is valuable for all, there must be rights for each person to have at least some baseline of autonomy. This baseline imposes duties on each person in society to do her part, including giving up some of her own autonomy to make a minimal amount of autonomy available to all. But once one accepts these duties, one accepts some kind of theory of bounded rather than unfettered individual liberty. The theory of bounded autonomy is more of a justification for the principle of distributive autonomy rather than a principle itself. This chapter articulates a first approximation of the principle of distributive autonomy. This first approximation provides a context for discussing the campaign finance cases in subsequent chapters. To further sketch the initial contours of the principle, the discussion shifts to how key autonomy and liberty theorists have approached this problem.