Commentary on Andrea Westlund’s ‘Rethinking Relational Autonomy’ and Catriona Mackenzie and Jacqui Poltera’s ‘Narrative Integration, Fragmented Selves and Autonomy.’

Andrea Westlund’s ‘Rethinking Relational Autonomy’ and Catriona Mackenzie and Jacqui Poltera’s ‘Narrative Integration, Fragmented Selves and Autonomy’ have many overlapping themes. In what follows, I draw out one of the overlapping themes: both articles distinguish between the necessary conditions for ‘identity’ or cross-temporal agency and the necessary conditions for autonomy. I suggest that the distinction between identity and autonomy potentially challenges one of the orthodoxies in the autonomy literature, namely, that an autonomous agent is in effect an agent who exhibits authenticity.1 Neither article endorses a distinction between authenticity and autonomy. On the contrary, both assume that the orthodoxy is correct and hence that autonomy requires authenticity. I am suggesting that the distinction between autonomy and identity implicitly puts pressure on the orthodoxy even if it is not intended to do so.