Personal Identity, Individual Autonomy and Group Rights

It is a commonplace in liberal circles that individual persons have a right to individual autonomy or self-determination. Each mentally competent adult has a right to be at liberty to live and shape their own life in accordance with their own view about what makes for a good life, free from undue coercion or interference by others, so long as they do not harm others. In the words of John Stuart Mill, mentally-competent persons should have the liberty of “framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they may think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong”. The commitment to individual autonomy is widely thought to entail, first, that paternalism is unjustified. It is illegitimate for others to interfere with a person’s liberty of action—with their pursuit of their own life plan—on the grounds that their conduct seems to others, in Mill’s words, “foolish, perverse or wrong”. Mentally competent adults should not be prevented from acting in ways that they perceive to be in their own best interests, so long as they do not harm other individuals—even if those decisions and actions seem to others to be profoundly mistaken or ones that the agent himor herself is likely later to regret. Second, the commitment to individual autonomy is widely thought to entail that group rights—or, more precisely, what I will call strong group rights—are liberally indefensible. By a “strong group right” I mean the right of a group (or group leaders) to restrict the freedom of its own individual members in the name of the good of the group, without the consent of the individual members, and where the individuals have no right of exit from the group. These sorts of group rights are unjustified, liberals think, precisely because they license paternalistic interference with individual autonomy: they invest groups with the moral and legal authority to bind their individual members to certain ways of life in the perceived best interests of the group, whether that way of life is of the individual’s own choosing or not. So liberals who are entirely comfortable attributing the right to autonomy to individual persons are deeply opposed to attributing such a right to groups or collections of individual persons. Attributing strong rights to groups—rights to determine how their own individual members shall live—is thought to be deeply problematic in a way in which attributing rights to individuals to determine how they should live their own lives