Autonomy: The rubber shark of our age?

It’s said that during the filming of the 1975 movie Jaws, the director Stephen Spielberg thought the giant rubber shark from his props department so “unscary” that he decided to shoot the film with the shark supposedly hidden underwater for almost the whole time; suggesting its fearsomeness and size with clever acting and suspenseful music.

Later he credited this with the film’s success; a plastic fake you never quite see is far more frightening than it would be in full view.

“Autonomy” has, it seems, become the giant rubber shark of our age. “Autonomy” means “self-law” – that is, the idea that each person should and has the right to decide what is right for himself (or herself) to do. This idea has attained in the last few years a moral force which seems to carry all before it. If a thing (whether it’s abortion, gay marriage, or most recently assisted suicide) is justified on the basis of autonomy – “my life, my death, my choice” as journalist Esther Rantzen has put it – then the argument is considered settled. And often as Christians we either give up, not knowing how to answer, or else we fall back on “autonomy” arguments ourselves: after all, isn’t “my life, my choice” a great way to justify our Christian faith in a sometimes hostile secular world?

I want to suggest that autonomy is not such a powerful, or frightening, moral argument at all; provided we look at what it actually means. Let’s pull this particular leviathan out of the water on a fishhook, and see what it looks like close up.

Let’s start by asking, is this a moral argument that works for other matters? Does autonomy mean that I can drive at 100mph on the motorway? My life, my car, my choice! But of course it does not; for this puts everyone else on the motorway in danger as well. And there lies the issue. For autonomy assumes that we exist as little, independent units, unaffected by each other, when the reality is that the decisions of each of us affect countless other people profoundly. This is why I cannot invoke autonomy as the reason why I won’t help the family wash up, or tidy my bedroom. To do so reveals autonomy for what it is: the moral argument of the petulant teenager, shouting about her rights while being so myopically immature that she can’t see the sheer selfishness of her actions. And if that’s true of household chores, it is far more true of more serious matters. To take the example of assisted suicide: committing suicide inflicts grief and pain like no other on all who knew you. And legalising suicide opens many of society’s most vulnerable – the sick, the suffering, the depressed and disabled – to the harrowing possibility of coercion to end their own lives, and the appalling probability of a sense of duty to do so.

Actually, autonomy isn’t really a moral argument at all. It states that if I want to do something, that is a sufficient justification for doing it. But moral judgements don’t finish, but start, at this point. We know you want to do this, the question is, is it right to do it? To invoke autonomy – self-law – is to say that there is no moral order to this world, no responsibility to anything higher than myself for how I act.

Which points us to the most important reason for the total bankruptcy of autonomy as a concept. My life is not actually my life at all. Even if my actions did not impact on anyone else (though they always do), I am still answerable to the God who made me and owns me. And so the law by which I must live is not my law, auto-nomy, but God’s law. That is central to what it means to be an image of God; we are made and called to conform to His likeness in all that we do.

So do we need to fear the force of the demands of autonomy? We do not. It is nothing more than the ancient whispering of the serpent, ludicrously calling us to try to seize out of God’s hands the power to define what is good and what is evil. It is, in fact, simply what the Bible calls sin, and it carries with it both sin’s tragedy and its absurdity. It makes no sense, would be utterly impossible to live by, and it destroys those who try. And thanks be to God, it is the very thing from which Jesus came to save us: for He will save His people, as the angel Gabriel might as well have said (Matt.1:21), from their autonomy.