The Philosophical Review, Vol. 112, No. 4 (October 2003)
483
Selflessness and Responsibility for Self:
Is Deference Compatible with Autonomy?
Andrea C. Westlund
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming.
She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed
herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg, if there
was a draught, she sat in itin short, she was so constituted
that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred
to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others.
Virginia Woolf (1979, 59)
So runs Virginia Woolfs description of the idealized Victorian woman,
or, as Woolf calls her, the Angel in the House. As an independent
woman who spoke and wrote her mind, Woolf frequently found herself
doing battle with this partially internalized norm of self-abnegating
deference. The inner struggle she describes in Professions for
Women is intriguing precisely because it isnt easily captured in our
most familiar moral vocabularies. Though Woolf positions herself as a
rebel against a socially sanctioned role, her troubles arent just those of
a counter-cultural crusader who must steel herself against the pull of
tradition. And though she describes the rejected role in part in terms
of the extensive self-sacrifice it demands, she doesnt seem to be exer-
cised by a simple tension between altruism and egoism, or between
generosity and self-interest. What haunted her was not just the pros-
pect of being excessively concerned for others interests, but the more
sinister-sounding prospect of surrendering her own mind and wishes
and making herself a vessel for the minds and wishes of others. Becom-
ing a person who would defer systematically to those around her, mak-
ing her will dependent on theirs for its content, seemed, to Woolf, to
entail a kind of death of the self.
My aim in this paper is to explore the extent to which characters like
Woolfs Angel ought to be understood as suffering a pathology of
agency. To have lost oneself, to have no mind of ones ownthese cer-
tainly sound like unhealthy conditions of the will. Yet one might won-
der how literally we can take such turns of phrase. The Angel, as Woolf
imagines her, prefers to subordinate her will to the wills of others. And
if this is what she prefers, then surely (one might think) there is some
sense in which she has and is motivated by a desire of her own. But in
what sense is this so? Ought we, in light of such preferences, to consider ANDREA C. WESTLUND
484
her agency unimpaired? Are such a persons choices and acts properly
attributed to her as her own choosing or doing? Can we rightly say, of
the Angel, that it is she who governs what she does?
These questions make Woolfs worry about the Angels selflessness
more precise by focusing it on the question of her autonomy. Recent
discussions of human agency have brought out just how subtle such
questions can be. When we ask whether someone acted autonomously,
we are not always just wondering whether we can rule out some slate of
other candidatesother agents, for example, who bump into or push
her, or manipulate or coerce heras being behind what she appar-
ently does. We sometimes seem to be asking whether the acts or
choices in question are such as to be coherently expressive of, attribut-
able to, or authorized by the agent, as a distinct or determinate self, at
all.
1
Harry Frankfurt has done an enormous amount to develop this
second sort of question, and his now familiar hierarchical approach
to answering it has inspired much recent work on autonomy. Frank-
furts model gives pride of place to the concept of identification:
whether a desire on which someone acts is attributable to the person
herself depends on whether she identifies with it, which depends in
turn on whether she wholeheartedly endorses it as determining her
will. This approach, which will be filled out in more detail below, has
considerable intuitive appealso much so that it has, I think, become
tempting to think of identification with the motives on which one acts
as a sufficient condition for autonomy. I focus on the case of self-abne-
gating deference precisely because I think it should shake our confi-
dence in this idea. Woolfs Angel may wholeheartedly endorse her
deference, but whats so striking about her is the way in which her
endorsement can serve to reinforce, rather than to alleviate, the
impression that autonomy is lacking. Such flawlessly deferential con-
duct, far from looking like a paradigm case of self-expression in action,
seems to bespeak the absence of any distinct self that might be
expressed.
Now, such intuitions about Woolfs Angel may not be universally
shared. But it is quite natural (and, I think, reasonable) to feel some
ambivalence about the status of her agency, and it would be satisfying
if we could develop a conception of autonomy that shed greater light
on this ambivalence without doing violence to other core intuitions. Ill
argue that we can. I propose that what unsettles us, in certain especially
deep cases of deference, is the profound difficulty we encounter in
attempting to engage the agent in justificatory dialogue.
2
Deeply def- SELFLESSNESS AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR SELF
485
erential characters lack a disposition to hold themselves answerable to
external, critical perspectives such as our own. The disposition to
answer for oneself, or to be self-representing in justificatory dialogue,
constitutes a self-orientation to which I refer alternatively as responsi-
bility for self or as self-responsibility. I hope to make convincing the
idea that this self-orientation is required for genuine self-government
of choice and action. In short, Ill argue that self-abnegating deference
compromises autonomy by rendering the agent insusceptible to a spe-
cial sort of dialogical reflectiveness about her action-guiding commit-
ments. In adopting this conception of autonomy we step outside of the
identificationist framework and gain new tools for understanding the
moral psychology of deference and related attitudes. At the end of the
paper I venture to suggest that we also gain a rather different picture of
what it is to have or to be a distinct and determinate self, at least so far
as the capacity for self-governance is concerned.
I begin, in section 1, by clarifying the form of deference I have in
mind. In section 2 I discuss two prominent accounts of identification
(Frankfurts own and a variation developed by Michael Bratman), and
I argue that these approaches do not give us the resources we need to
diagnose any pathology of agency in self-abnegating deference. In sec-
tion 3 I turn to the somewhat different account of autonomy advanced
by Gerald Dworkin, which, in stressing the capacity for specifically crit-
ical reflection, anticipates certain aspects of the view Ill defend. I
advance my own diagnosis of self-abnegating deference in section 4,
tracing out a connection between autonomy and responsibility for self.
I add further detail to the key notion of self-responsibility in section 5,
where I address several objections that might be raised.
1. Self-Abnegating Deference
Because the term deference is ambiguous between a number of
loosely related but distinct attitudes, my first task will be to narrow our
focus to the specific kind of deference in which Im interestedwhat
Ill call self-abnegating deference. In short, self-abnegating deference is
the systematic subordination of oneself to another whose interests,
needs, and preferences are treated as pre-emptively decisive in ones
own practical reasoning. In his paper Servility and Self-Respect, Tho-
mas Hill Jr. introduces us to a character who approximates the sort of
person I have in mind. The Deferential Wife, as he calls her, is a recog-
nizable contemporary counterpart to the Victorian Angel in the ANDREA C. WESTLUND
486
House. She subordinates herself to her husband as follows:
She buys the clothes he prefers, invites the guests he wants to entertain,
and makes love whenever he is in the mood. She willingly moves to a new
city in order for him to have a more attractive job, counting her own
friendships and geographical preferences insignificant by comparison.
She loves her husband, but her conduct is not simply an expression of
love. She is happy, but she does not subordinate herself as a means to hap-
piness. She does not simply defer to her husband in certain spheres as a
trade-off for his deference in other spheres. On the contrary, she tends
not to form her own interests, values, and ideals, and when she does, she
counts them as less important than her husbands. (Hill 1991, 5)
Like Woolfs Angel, this Deferential Wife (DW, for short) seems to
sympathise with the minds and wishes of others (Woolf 1979,
59)or, in this case, with the mind and wishes of one particular
otherin a peculiarly all-encompassing way. Instead of developing and
pursuing independent interests that might compete with her hus-
bands, DW treats her husbands interests as paramount and organizes
her will around them.
Some forms of deference involve nothing like this sort of self-subor-
dination, and these can be set aside at the outset. Consider, for exam-
ple, the sort of deferential act that is motivated by prudence. An
extreme example of this kind of case is intentional acquiescence in the
face of coercion: doing what ones coercer demands in order to avoid
a still worse fate seems, on its face, to be a self-preserving rather than a
self-ab