The phrase "autonomous preferences" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts discussing individual choices or decisions that are made independently, without external influence.
Example: "In a market driven by autonomous preferences, consumers make choices based solely on their personal values and needs."
Alternatives: "independent choices" or "self-directed preferences".
Preferences for relationships of care and dependency such as those within marriage or other family structures can be just as autonomous as preferences for self-reliance or relative social isolation; preferences for cultural and religious norms into which agents are born can be just as autonomous as preferences to repudiate these norms, and so on.
The trend is growing this year, with the prolongation of the ATP (Autonomous Trade Preferences) regime to Moldova until 2015, when we hope it will be replaced by a full Free Trade Comprehensive Agreement with the European Union.
If non-human animals lack aesthetic agency that is, the capacity to exhibit autonomous behavioral preferences based on cognitive evaluation of sensory information then they must lack something other than the requisite sensory complexity.
Recently, many successful machine learning applications have been developed, ranging from data-mining programs that learn to detect fraudulent credit card transactions, to information-filtering systems that learn users' reading preferences, to autonomous vehicles that learn to drive.
The problem asks to select k out of m available items, so as to maximize the social welfare for autonomous agents with combinatorial preferences (valuation functions) over subsets of items.
Strong substantive accounts are constitutively relational because preferences are autonomous if and only if they correspond to moral or otherwise objectively correct features of the world.
However, although these agents are locally autonomous relative to these preferences, they are less autonomous than agents who altogether repudiate what Friedman calls "autonomy-devaluing norms" (Friedman 2003, 24).
Procedural conceptions characterize autonomous agents—agents whose preferences and desires are genuinely their own as those who critically reflect in the appropriate way to evaluate their preferences, motives, and desires.
Benson is careful to point out that a requirement of normative competence should not be conflated with a strong substantive conception of autonomy in which the theory places direct normative constraints on the contents of the preferences of autonomous agents.
