CONCEPT
Principled Autonomy
Onora O’Neill’s Kantian account of genuine self-governance—not the freedom to do as one pleases but the capacity to act on principles one has reflectively endorsed—and the specific way AI’s frictionless fluency threatens it while appearing to enhance it.
There is a difference between the capacity to act and the capacity to act autonomously, and the arrival of
AI that speaks natural language has made the difference consequential in a way it has not been before. Autonomy, in Onora O’Neill’s Kantian account, is not negative freedom—the mere absence of external constraint, the liberty to do as one pleases. It is self-governance in the literal sense: governance of the self by the self, where the governing self is the reflective, rational agent who evaluates her own desires, tests her own assumptions, and acts on the basis of principles she can endorse and defend. The removal of the translation barrier between human intention and machine execution looks, at first inspection, like an expansion of autonomy: more people can do more things more easily, and since autonomy involves the capacity to act on one’s own principles, removing obstacles to action looks like enabling self-governance. O’Neill’s framework exposes the equivocation. The