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

moral autonomy is associated with moral responsibility, which is often discussed in relation to the debate on free will and determinism, which will be examined in the second part of this book. Personal autonomy is the capacity to decide for oneself and pursue a course of action in one’s life, often regardless of any particular moral content, and independently of external forces. Autonomy does not need to be justified by universal principles but is based on the free decision-making process of the agent. Political individualism is the freedom of participating in the civil and political life of the community without discrimination and interference: practically, it consists of the restriction of the powers of the government regarding actions affecting the individual and their autonomy (civil rights), and the opportunity to contribute to the determination of laws and participate in government (political rights). These various autonomies can be combined into a multidimensional account in a mature liberal society⁴ but each of them can develop differently because they pertain to different sides and functions of human life. Thus, we can see that in the last decades, personal and private autonomy has been liberalized in China, while other rights remain strictly frozen.

Among the various components of the Western notion of individual autonomy, we may consider the following interconnected concepts: individualism and authentic self, human dignity, human rights, and moral responsibility. Other collateral notions concern tolerance/mutual respect, individual’s negotiation for autonomy, the defence of one’s private space, freedom of expressing ideas that do not conform with orthodoxy, self-assertiveness, priority of subjects over doctrines and values, and criticism against conventions and conformism. The examination is, however, complicated by the fact that most of these notions have evolved at various times. For instance, human dignity is a concept elaborated in modern European history, but we may explore the hypothesis of a universal idea of “dignity” and various definitions of it in Chinese culture. Moreover, to define the motives and essential/primary/universal desires behind autonomy, it would be necessary to identify a true self—in fact, a constructed concept too—but we are faced with varied images of the