Individual autonomy is the idea, as Clark Neily describes it, that “no one may interfere with your freedom, whether it’s a private individual or a government official, without some extremely strong justification for doing so.” Neily places it at the top of the libertarian hierarchy of values Judicial Round-Up with Clark Neily (2022). Across the episodes of The Bob Zadek Show in which it appears, autonomy functions both as a stated first principle and as a site of disagreement — about what threatens it, and about what it requires.
Autonomy and private coercion
Matt Zwolinski, discussing bleeding-heart libertarianism, identifies the concern that drives libertarians as a desire to see people freed from being bossed around by others. He cites the dislike of big government and of the feudalist system on the ground that people were not in control of their own lives, with somebody else holding despotic power to tell you what to do and where to go and when to do it. Libertarians, he says, like a world in which individuals are free to control their own destiny, and he argues that a system of free markets, private property rights and freedom of contract generally lends itself to that kind of individual autonomy Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014).
Zwolinski adds that most of the gains in individual autonomy over the past 100 years have been due to those very institutions, but that sometimes people fall through the cracks. His example is a worker in a non-competitive market — a down economy, a small town, few employers — who must work for some employer or be unable to feed his family. Such an employer, he says, can tell the worker exactly what to do, how many bathroom breaks they can take an hour, who they can vote for in some cases, or else they’re fired. Zwolinski argues this should concern libertarians, and that they should feel some pull to provide a support mechanism so that individuals do not find themselves in that kind of vulnerable position, under the despotic power of any other individual or group of individuals like a corporation.
Bob Zadek frames the same episode’s starting point as a distinction between poverty and inequality: poverty as an objective level of existence involving certain minimum needs that must be met, and inequality as a subject bound up with envy, jealousy and class warfare. Zwolinski agrees that one person having a bigger house or a faster car gives no one a moral claim to take their stuff by force, or to have some other entity like the government take it for them, but treats poverty as somewhat more serious as a philosophical matter.
Autonomy and the administrative state
A separate line of argument treats bureaucracy rather than private power as autonomy’s principal rival. John Marini describes a shift in which rational authority is substituted for social authority, so that the family itself comes to be judged on the basis of scientific authority — the authority of the social scientist and the psychologist replacing even parental authority. He identifies the family as the most basic of the institutions that arise organically in civil society, and says that once the prior kind of authority is displaced it becomes very hard to maintain those social institutions that depended on it The “Doctor for Liberty” on Opioid Abuse, Harm Reduction, and ObamaCare (2019).
Marini characterizes this not as a mere transformation of government into the establisher of conditions of human freedom — allowing a great deal of autonomy in civil society — but as something that goes to the heart of transforming and controlling civil society, a process he says occupied much of the 20th century. In his account the authority of these structures comes to permeate the whole of society and establishes the primary authority in expertise itself, regardless of what the citizens’ views are, with the conditions established for the protection of rights, property and freedom disappearing as secondary, if considered at all.
Bob Zadek restates the point as a devolution of decision-making power from civic institutions — the family, the church, voluntary associations — to government. In his framing, to the extent that governmental and bureaucratic power grows, individual power and individual autonomy must recede; the two cannot coexist, and what is underway is a crash of two power structures rather than their coexistence. He asks the audience whether they want the power to make their own decisions or are willing to let government quietly assume that power, describing the process as ratcheting, never going back, and happening in tiny increments.
Autonomy and lifestyle choice
Nick Gillespie, in an episode on the Capitol riot, points to vastly multiplied choices in media and in how people live their lifestyles, and says that many of the great gatekeeper institutions — churches, government, and others — can no longer tell us how to live the way they could 50 or 100 years ago The Capitol Riot in Context (2021). He argues that libertarians should offer a principled alternative: a better way to live in which people come together for the few things absolutely necessary to have a society where people can participate and actualize themselves, keeping a minimal amount of order and then allowing people to flourish and follow their bliss. Zadek closes the hour by expressing the hope that libertarianism will fill the void imposed by what he calls the vacuous nature of the two political parties.
Autonomy and abortion
The clearest disagreement over autonomy’s application concerns abortion. Neily, asked to reconstruct the arguments of a pro-choice and an anti-abortion libertarian, says the pro-choice libertarian would begin from the claim that libertarians place individual autonomy at the top of their hierarchy of values, and that the presumption is therefore that you get to do what you want with your body — including taking whatever kind of medicine and ingesting whatever kind of intoxicants. On that view, government interference with something having to do with your body requires a very strong justification, and the case for interfering at the moment of conception, when there is just a fertilized egg, is not strong enough, though it may mature into a sufficient justification at some point during the pregnancy. Neily notes that virtually all libertarians agree there are unenumerated rights the Constitution protects, and that the right to bodily autonomy and self-defense would be two of them arguably relevant here Judicial Round-Up with Clark Neily (2022).
The anti-abortion libertarian, in Neily’s reconstruction, would answer that the right to travel, the right to raise your own children and even the right of access to contraception are different from abortion because none of them results in the termination of a human life or a potential human life. When it comes to abortion, the government has an obligation to arguably two different morally relevant beings, and if you believe that from the moment of conception we are dealing with at least a human life and perhaps also a person, then the government has a very strong reason to protect that human life, including prohibiting the woman inside whom that human life exists from doing anything to end it. Neily calls this a moral or metaphysical question rather than a legal one.
In a later episode, Neily raises the Fourteenth Amendment, which he says obligates all states to guarantee equal protection of the laws to all persons, and notes that some people argue that at some point during a pregnancy the fetus has become a person; if that is true, he says, every state would have a legal obligation to guarantee equal protection of the laws to that entity, which would include not allowing it to be gratuitously terminated Dobbs, the Democratization of Rights, and the Disaster of Qualified Immunity (2022). Zadek responds that a state does not have to authorize an abortion, only to not criminalize it, and that a state electing to have no law on abortion is like having no law on taking aspirin. Neily’s piece on the subject, written with Jay, is described by Zadek as addressing how a libertarian approaches abortion; Neily directs listeners to find it on the Cato website under the title “The Hard Problem of Abortion Rights.”
Across episodes: what changed
The topic recurs across the Zwolinski, Marini, Gillespie and Neily episodes, but the excerpts show no development in the concept itself. Zwolinski and Marini locate the threat to autonomy in different quarters — private coercion in uncompetitive markets on one hand, the displacement of social authority by expertise on the other — while Gillespie treats multiplied lifestyle and media choices as an expansion of autonomy and Neily treats autonomy as the shared premise from which libertarians divide over abortion. The two Neily episodes, from July 2022, present the same pro-choice and anti-abortion arguments in nearly identical terms, with the later episode adding the Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection point.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define autonomy’s boundaries, nor state what counts as the “extremely strong justification” that would permit interference. They do not resolve whether private coercion or state bureaucracy is the graver threat, and they do not say how the libertarian disagreement over abortion should be settled. The Marini material appears in an episode whose listed topic is opioid abuse, harm reduction and ObamaCare, and the excerpts do not explain that juxtaposition.