Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

As pointed out in the second part on the theme of moral responsibility (a way to maintain personal autonomy), the main difficulty faced when one studies the individual construct is the use of categories and notions that do not correspond directly to those used in different cultures. There is a lexicographic question which involves a lack of correspondence of categories, which, moreover, are interacting with other related concepts or sub-concepts that have their own specific and autonomous histories and developments. As no equivalents exist, “components” or similar elements, as well as the Chinese terms with contiguous meanings, have to be singled out and examined.²

Autonomy is the quality of the self-governing agent, which is supposed to have some capacity for self-determination, self-sufficiency, and self-rule. It includes the concrete power to manage one’s affairs, make and express one’s judgments, and provide for oneself. This ability is different for each individual, varying according to one’s wealth, health, and other such factors; and it is associated with freedom, free will, free choice, free action, and with the hypothetical concept of “authentic” self. It refers to self-rule, either as a human capacity or as an ideal to be attained. In other words, it means the actual or ideal ability to lead a life according to one’s own principles or desires. This implies that it is possible to make life choices apart from social relations or establish one’s place in a community. Self-directing freedom is manifested in moral independence, personal autonomy, and political autonomy.³ Moral autonomy, usually traced back to Immanuel Kant’s definition, is the capacity to deliberate and to give oneself the moral law, without direction from others (heteronomy): the agent is not obedient to an externally imposed precept, but one is supposed to follow one’s self-imposed law and has the right to any action that is not in conflict with the freedom of the other members of the society. While Kant excludes emotions, habits and other non-intellectual factors from autonomous decision-making—because the “phenomenal self” depends on the deterministic laws of natural causality—David Hume, Stuart Mill, and later the Romantics appreciate desires and impulses, considering them an expression of human nature. In Western philosophy,