Classical liberalism on autonomy and diversity: what it means for individual action and society’s institutions

Abstract This paper advances three suggestions from the ‘classics’. First, freedom as autonomy is distinct from the popular idea that freedom consists of the absence of restraint. This is because autonomous action is different to acting instrumentally on desires or preferences. It is action where the person uses reason to reflect on what ends to pursue and the person thereby becomes more fully the author of their actions. Second, acting autonomously is a coherent understanding of what individual freedom entails in the sense that it yields predictions regarding individual behaviour. In particular, autonomous action is characterised by satisfying the Categorical Imperative and/or by embarking on learning-by-doing to generate knowledge. Kant is the source for the first of these arguments and Mill the second. Third, the exercise of individual freedom will always generate diverse behaviours. As a result, liberals have to be concerned with how the rules of freedom avoid diversity becoming a source of destructive conflict within society. Thus, liberalism has always been as much about how to avoid costly conflict as it has been about how to encode liberty in society’s institutions. The last two arguments point public policy towards the character of the rules that constrain and enable action. It is the procedures or means that matter (and not the ends) and they matter in more complicated ways than the idea of freedom as the absence of restraint might suggest.