The Free, Unencumbered, Self-Creating, Autonomous Self

I am a self-made man or woman.  I am an autonomous and free individual.  I am my own person. I am whatever I choose to be. 

This would be defining yourself as a “self-creating, autonomous self”—what political philosopher Michael Sandel calls the “unencumbered self.”  According to this conception of the individual, persons are not obligated to fulfill ends or purposes they have not chosen—ends given by nature or God, or by their identities as members of “families, peoples, cultures, or traditions.”  An “encumbered identity,” entailed by membership in such groups is assumed to be antagonistic to the conception of the person as “free and independent, unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself….”

But how plausible is this self-conception?  As Prof. Sandel argues, “Despite its powerful appeal, the image of the unencumbered self…cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize.”  These include obligations of solidarity with the poor and disadvantaged, religious duties such as the obligation to treat the dead with respect, and other moral ties such as those to family and/or extended family which may lay claim on us prior to our choosing them.  “Such obligations are difficult to account for if we understand ourselves as free and independent selves, unbound by moral ties we have not chosen.  Unless we think of ourselves as encumbered selves, already claimed by certain projects and commitments, we cannot make sense of these indispensable aspects of our moral and political experience.” 

            So too, this notion of the unencumbered self requires only that we respect people’s equal “rights,” not that we advance their good.  “Whether we must concern ourselves with the good of other people depends on whether, and with whom, and on what terms, we have agreed to do so.” Without some way of understanding ourselves and others as mutually indebted and morally engaged to begin with, there is no way to answer Ralph Waldo Emerson’s challenge to the man who solicited his contribution to the poor—“Are they my poor?”  The only possible response one unencumbered self can give to another is:  “They are if you choose to make them so.”  To this, an obvious rejoinder would be:  “Why would I choose that?”