Teaching Autonomy: The Obligations of Liberal Education in Plural Societies

Existing conceptions of autonomy tend to fall to one of two criticisms: they either fail to capture our intuitive understanding that autonomy implies an ability to act congruently with the demands of justice and equality, or they are unclear as to whether particular actions must be good by some standard to be considered autonomous. In this article I propose a conception of autonomy that is clear on both these fronts, and I show how this description is useful for both clarifying what educators must do to teach for autonomy, and for resolving currently problematic issues in the literature on autonomy.