A crucial issue in discussions of the nature of individual autonomy concerns whether a person can be properly called autonomous if her value commitments contain (or fail to contain) certain substantive ideals, that is, whether “autonomy” can be conceptualized without reference to such ideals. If not, the question is whether such a “content-neutral” or “procedural” conception of autonomy – one which is defined without including substantive values to which the autonomous person must be committed – will suffice in the theoretical and practical settings in which we want the concept to operate. At the same time, debates over the acceptability and foundations of liberalism have included protracted discussions about whether and how state neutrality can be maintained in the principles and mod e of justification of liberal institutions. Debates about public reason, for example, have pitted perfectionists against proceduralists in asking whether it is plausible to expect participants to bracket reference to substantive, comprehensive values in affirming the basic framework of justice, as political liberalism demands.1 That is, can the processes of public reason that provide the grounds of legitimacy for liberal justice be fashioned in ways that do not rely upon particular substantive values in their architecture.

These debates are clearly isomorphic in an interesting way and speak to questions of the nature of commitment, obligation, and independence. In this chapter, I want to consider certain aspects of these debates and to explore this parallelism. In both cases, I think, the question revolves around how autonomy is meant to function in our moral and political vocabulary.