Bratman, Autonomy, and Self-Governance

Bratman's self-governance model of autonomy is part of a tradition of hierarchical accounts, according to which autonomy is a matter of the agent's psychology having a certain functioning and hierarchical structure that is constitutive of her practical standpoint. Bratman develops a sophisticated version of that account by drawing on a temporally extended sense of agency, which is realized and sustained by the role higher-order (self-governing) policies play—by being subject to rational demands of consistency, coherence and stability—in coordinating one's life over time. We shall argue that: (i) there may be autonomous agency without self-governing policies; (ii) there is a tension between understanding autonomy as involving temporally extended agency and as realized essentially by those rational demands.