Principled Autonomy (O'Neill)

Autonomy, in the Kantian tradition that Onora O'Neill has defended and refined across her career, is not the freedom to act without constraint. It is the capacity for self-governance—governance of the self by the self, where the governing self is the reflective agent who evaluates her own desires, tests them against principles she can articulate and defend, and acts on the basis of reasons rather than impulses she has not examined. This demanding conception is what O'Neill means by principled autonomy, and it stands in sharp contrast to what she calls negative autonomy: the mere removal of obstacles to action. Large language models that speak natural language unambiguously expand negative autonomy—they remove the translation barrier between intention and execution, enabling the developer in Lagos or the artist whose vision exceeded her technical skill to act on intentions that were previously blocked. But the same removal that expands negative autonomy threatens principled autonomy by collapsing