In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the United States Supreme Court considered whether religious corporations could refuse to abide by the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The Hobby Lobby and Conestoga corporations believed that certain forms of birth control effectively acted as abortifacients. Given that their religious beliefs prohibited abortion, the corporations requested to be exempt from a policy that would, from their perspective, require them to subsidize abortion for their employees. In a 5-4 ruling, the Court decided that corporations could in fact refuse to cover contraception—despite the fact that many people use contraception for purposes other than birth control, and despite the fact that Hobby Lobby and Conestoga’s claims about abortifacients are disputed.
It is evident that this ruling diminishes the freedom of employees who seek access to contraceptives, but does it also undermine their autonomy? Freedom, or negative liberty, describes an absence of constraints on our actions, and autonomy describes a person’s ability to self-govern according to values they endorse. These are closely related concepts, and both are of special concern to feminists, since both can be negatively impacted by oppression. One clear component of oppression, a structural phenomenon that harms individuals as members of social groups, is that it perpetuates an unjust lack of freedom, such as restrictions on one’s access to birth control. But it may also endanger personal autonomy if it threatens our ability to direct our lives as we see fit. In this post, however, I argue that autonomy can survive oppression, even in cases where our freedom is diminished.
One way to emphasize the relationship between freedom and autonomy is to posit that oppression-such as the effects of the Hobby Lobby ruling-tends to diminish both. This is one of the key insights of feminist relational autonomy. According to relational autonomy theorists, a feminist conception of autonomy should recognize not only that we are all social creatures embedded in relationships, but that our preferences, desires, and choices all arise within a certain social context. If this context is marred by conditions of oppression, our ability to choose may be negatively impacted.
For example, some feminists have argued that oppression can cause deformed desires, which are desires twisted by oppression to no longer represent what a person would choose under conditions of freedom. Thomas Hill’s Deferential Wife is often cited as an example of deformed desires or adaptive preferences, since the wife subsumes her will to the will of her husband and chooses to do whatever he desires. Because these desires do not reflect what she would choose in more ideal circumstances, they do not represent her real desires at all. Instead, they represent her oppression and inequality—and this is what renders the desires non-autonomous. According to this sort of relational autonomy theory, a lack of freedom can negatively influence an agent’s autonomy.
More recently, some relational autonomy theorists have stressed the relationship between freedom and autonomy by making the stronger claim that freedom is part of autonomy. In other words, freedom conditions are required for personal autonomy. On this view, features of our social environment, including others’ recognition of our agency, help make up what it means for us to be autonomous; in conditions of oppression, unfreedom is a feature of our social environment that has the power to undermine agency. For example, social reformers who resist oppression have diminished autonomy since their freedom is restricted by the oppressive social circumstances they resist. To have full autonomy, we need a less constrained choice set¾but this is precisely what oppression denies us by limiting our freedom to choose.
To say that freedom conditions are required for autonomy means that oppression limits autonomy just because it limits freedom. Accordingly, people who lack significant freedoms on account of their oppression thereby have diminished autonomy. Oppression and autonomy become incompatible; not only does one suffer a loss of liberty, but also the loss of an ability to direct one’s life according to deeply held values. But I think we have reason to question this conclusion since it mandates that oppressed agents have diminished autonomy. This is certainly not always the case.
This leads me to endorse a different view: the view that oppression involves a loss of freedom, but this loss need not undermine autonomy understood as self-government. While diminished freedom can sometimes endanger autonomy, this is because freedom (like negative liberty) supports autonomy, not because it is required for autonomous action. This is an important distinction because it allows for the possibility that a person’s autonomy can survive even under conditions of oppression. Recognizing that autonomy can persevere is important for feminist theorizing because currently, in political theory, autonomy serves as a barrier against paternalistic intervention, protection from which is freedom-preserving. Protecting vulnerable agents from unwarranted paternalism is part of what motivates my argument that oppression need not undermine autonomy.
To see this, let’s return to the Hobby Lobby case. Justice Ginsburg’s dissent argued that people have autonomy to make decisions about their own reproductive care. At the same time, she held that the central harm of the ruling is that it wrongly limits reproductive freedom, since many people who seek contraceptives under their employer’s insurance plan cannot afford these medications if they are not covered; this is especially true for birth control with a higher upfront cost, like intrauterine devices (IUDs). Ginsburg notes that nearly one third of people would change their method of birth control if cost were not a factor, and only one fourth of those seeking IUDs get them after learning the price. This suggests that people would make different decisions if they had more freedom to choose their method of contraception. The Hobby Lobby decision therefore limits their freedom because they are effectively blocked from accessing the medical care they need. But is their autonomy also diminished?
If we adopt the view that freedom is required for self-government, we must conclude that people who are denied birth control are thereby denied both freedom and autonomy. This conclusion is based on an insight of relational autonomy¾that autonomy is constituted socially, and that part of what it means to be autonomous is to exist in a social world that respects one’s agency. The denial of reproductive freedom and the widespread acceptance of the appropriateness of such denial are both driven by a failure to regard women as agents. If the social recognition of one’s autonomy, signaled by granting full reproductive liberty, is part of what it means to be autonomous, then people who are denied contraception do indeed fail to achieve full agency. This conclusion highlights the harms of oppression manifested by the refusal to subsidize preventative medical care for women, while readily supporting preventative care for men.
On the view I endorse, women can maintain their autonomy even as they are denied reproductive liberty, because they can, at least sometimes, act autonomously under these non-ideal conditions. For example, a woman could willingly accept a method of birth control that she can access, though she would ideally choose a different method under different circumstances. On this understanding, she makes a “bargain with patriarchy,” as Uma Narayan argues. Though women are denied freedom, they maintain autonomy.
I endorse this view for two reasons. First, there is something puzzling about the first conclusion. Remember that on the first view, a loss of reproductive liberty involves a loss of personal autonomy. So if autonomy requires freedom, then refusing birth control renders those who are denied this form of medical care non-autonomous. But in our current social and political reality, paternalistic laws like Hobby Lobby are justified on the basis that people are non-autonomous. In fact, in political theory, one of the key functions of autonomy is to protect agents from paternalism—interference with peoples’ choices “for their own good.” Autonomy is widely acknowledged to serve this purpose because attributing autonomy to an agent expresses that their choices deserve respect, and one way to respect choices is to refrain from interfering with them. Determining that someone is not fully autonomous communicates to others, including legislators, that their choices are not really their own, and may therefore be justifiably overridden.
Attributing non-autonomy to oppressed people signals something negative, namely, that they are not capable of self-government and that therefore they are justifiably susceptible to interference from those who “know better” and can govern for them. This contributes to a broader social attitude that women don’t deserve to control their own bodies. But this should not represent our thinking about those who are denied contraception by legislation that seeks to wrest from them control of their own bodies. Otherwise, we justify paternalistic policies like Hobby Lobby that seek to undermine this control in the first place. And the denial of people’s autonomy under oppression risks paternalism. This is a result feminists should want to resist, since paternalistic laws render women unable to choose for themselves.
Second, we need to recognize that autonomy can survive oppression in order to understand a large part of what is wrong with cases like Hobby Lobby (or the 2017 Executive Order, “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” that expands the reach of Hobby Lobby; or the resulting policies issued by Health and Human Services that implement this expansion; or Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania (2020) which upholds the expansion, etc.). If, following my interpretation, people impacted by these policies retain their autonomy despite non-ideal circumstances, then it turns out that state interventions such as this do not eliminate their agency, but rather fail to respect it. The problem with the Hobby Lobby case is that the state fails to acknowledge women’s autonomy; it does not take it away. Oppression is of course harmful, but the oppressed remain autonomous since they can still act according to values they endorse, despite the ruling. Although they might choose to govern differently under more ideal conditions, they are still fully capable of self-government.
This interpretation better preserves our intuition that Hobby Lobby and similar cases send the message that women aren’t capable of making their own choices. If, on the other hand, we adopt the first interpretation and believe that unfreedom means non-autonomy, then women who are less free (like women impacted by Hobby Lobby) have less agency. But then consistently denying women’s healthcare does not fail to respect their autonomy–it takes their autonomy away. Women become non-agents, whose desire for medical care imposes no requirement that it be supplied. But the lesson we glean from Hobby Lobby should not be that women are non-agents. Rather, what Ginsburg’s dissent teaches us is the exact opposite: that even in non-ideal circumstances, women are autonomous and therefore capable of making their own choices about medical care.
In circumstances of oppression, a variety of social forces (including court rulings) serve to send a message that women are not fully autonomous. These forces operate on the battleground of women’s bodies. But these messages are wrong, and we must not endorse them: women can retain their autonomy in circumstances of oppression. If we require freedom for autonomy, we too easily surrender autonomy for those who are oppressed. Saying instead that freedom can support autonomy is not just a matter of semantics, but rather preserves the one thing we need to resist our own oppression–our agency.
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Emily McGill
Emily McGill is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Coastal Carolina University. She earned her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and her M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include ethics, social/political philosophy, and feminist philosophy, with a particular focus on feminist liberalism and relational autonomy.
Really interesting — and sensible — post. Thank you.