Moral Autonomy and the Theory of Criticism. It
is this emphasis on the theory of criticism in morality,
most clearly presented in the pragmatist formulation,
but implicit in most twentieth-century ethics, that
emerges as the distinctive mark of moral autonomy.
Its basis in the history of ideas was the unsettling of
all fixities in the development of evolutionary concep-
tions. Its sociological base in the twentieth century is
the complexity, rapidity of change, and conflicts, aris-
ing in all institutions and segments of human life; the
collective effect is an increase in the need for decision,
and the importance of comprehensive standards as
contrasted with the rules of specific fields. Even in the
ethical formulations that set up a separate domain of
value and took autonomy to lie in independence from
existence, this independence when it functions becomes
in effect the right of moral criticism of anything and
everything. Thus moral autonomy becomes less the
traditional emphasis on Kantian formulation of laws,
or the emphasis on the isolation of ethics from the
sciences and human knowledge generally; rather it
maintains the integrity of moral decision as a critical
process. Ethical theory becomes thus the theory of the
way in which human knowledge can be used by men
who become conscious of their human aims—both
perennial and historically local—to criticize the direc-
tion of their striving and to reorient it on the basis
of the evidence. In such a conception, both the right
and the good become retranslated into phases of the
critical process.
