We need to believe we have autonomy – or at least the capacity for autonomy – even if all the evidence points towards our helplessness.
As a thinker who insisted that human beings shape culture that in turn shapes them, however, Geertz would quite likely have been unhappy to see Bellah become so immersed in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and other disciplines that often give short shrift to the human capacity for autonomy.
Similarly, social and historical conditions (such as oppressive gender socialization) may promote or impede the capacity for autonomy (e.g., Meyers 1989).
The versions of the threshold view that see the capacity for autonomy as the relevant threshold can be challenged by approaches that cast the requirements of the capacity for autonomy as being so minimal that any individual capable of generating independent interests in his deteriorated state counts as autonomous.
Ronald Dworkin's influential work defends the capacity for autonomy as the relevant threshold, with autonomy interpreted as "the ability to act out of genuine preference or character or conviction or a sense of self" (Dworkin 1993, 225).
However, this issue is addressed extensively by some views that take sophisticated cognitive capacities, especially the capacity for autonomy, to ground FMS, and also by some views that take rudimentary cognitive capacities, such as sentience, to ground some moral status.
What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love.
Since Kant himself appeared to hold that all human beings had full moral status, this suggests either that he was overly generous in his attribution of the capacity for autonomy or that he grounded moral status differently.
Both Taylor and Parekh have not built their theories upon the assumption that a culture "helps individuals develop their capacity for autonomy, which then transcends it and views it and the wider world untainted by its provenance" (Parekh, 2000b, p.110).
If one insists on the priority of respect for autonomy over beneficence, or if one views the capacity for autonomy as the essential core of a person, the interests of the earlier self will be seen as having authority over the current self because only the earlier self is capable of autonomy.
