3 - Measuring Autonomy Freedom

Summary

A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE

The previous chapter suggested that attributing procedural value to choice heals the cardinality ranking's maladies. Though this would be a perfectly acceptable motivation for embracing the procedural perspective, we shall illustrate in this chapter that, in fact, there are other, more pregnant, reasons that invite us to opt out of the intrinsic and the instrumental values of choice for the procedural. They have to do with the interpretation of freedom involved by the procedural view of the value of choice and with the readiness with which the ranking we construct under this perspective on the value of choice lends itself to empirically meaningful applications. While the applications are the subject matter of the next chapter, the interpretation of freedom called in by a procedural view of the value of choice and the possibility to overcome the difficulties experienced by the cardinality rule are the concern of the pages that follow.

To adopt the procedural value of choice entails a substantial shift in perspective that requires some preparatory work. This is because the aim of the measurement exercise is to gauge the decision maker's autonomy freedom. None of the rankings introduced so far make any attempt at assessing the extent of autonomous behavior (or autonomy freedom), so the analytical framework where our argument has to be deployed must be different in the sense that it must assess the richness of the decision maker's deliberative process.