Other, and the self, discussed in the works of Emmanuel Lévinas, because they are outside the scope of this study.

3. In addition to the debate on the degree of competency and autonomy, other questions involve the inbornness or “acquisivity” of autonomy (see Meyers, Self, Society, and Personal Choice). Ancient Greek culture explored various aspects of autonomy. Plato implicitly recognizes the freedom of the rational guide of the soul, and Aristotle the voluntary choice. Aristotle considered both freedom from compulsion and ignorance; his account of responsibility, freedom, and the awareness of circumstances focused on human control over one’s actions and the moment of choice—a sort of interior debate of assembly—in which one decides one’s goals and the most efficient means of achieving them. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, 1–3, Book V, 10. See also Hardie, “Aristotle and the Freewill Problem,” 274–278; Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame; Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness; and Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility). Sophocles, in contrast, focused on external constraints (by the gods or Fate) on human freedom, and Euripides doubted man’s free will and responsibility on the grounds that man is blinded by passions. Concerning the great question of free will, considered the precondition of responsibility, in Western tradition, three main positions can be roughly distinguished: the supporters of the power of self-determination, the determinists who deny it, and the compatibilists. Compatibilism believes that the previous currents are mutually compatible as freedom can be present or absent not on the basis of a metaphysical principle: an agent may be free to act according to their motivation, but the nature of that motive is determined. According to the Stoics, although human choice and behavior are causally determined, choices are freely taken by humans. This freedom is emphasized by the Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias.

4. For instance, Daniel Wegner (The Illusion of Conscious Will) and Benjamin Libet (Mind Time) argue that conscious intentions and the motivations we attribute to our decisions are illusory a posteriori reconstructions for self-valorization, and thus actions are caused by prior neural activity.

5. Freedom and choice in Confucianism are discussed in Chenyang Lee, “The Confucian Conception of Freedon,” 907–912. On the category of “moral realism” and its applicability to Confucianism, see Liu Jeeloo, “Confucian Moral Realism,” 167–184.