ABSTRACT
We regularly lack many of the capacities constitutive of being fully autonomous. We may nevertheless exercise high levels of autonomous agency by skillfully engaging supportive dimensions of our contexts. Reliance on such ‘scaffolding’ is often assumed to indicate a deficiency in an individual’s autonomy. Challenging this assumption is central to defenders of a ‘scaffolded’ approach to autonomy. This chapter provides an outline of such an approach, beginning with a characterization of autonomy as attributed to varying degrees on the basis of four clusters of autonomy-capacities: deliberative, volitional, hermeutic, and critical. I then develop an account of how genuine autonomy could be understood as scaffolded, drawing on three related approaches: the social model of disability, feminist theories of relational autonomy, and philosophy of mind that emphasizes the embodied, extended, embedded, and enacted (‘4E’) character of cognition. I then illustrate how these approaches can be seen as reconfiguring (as scaffolded) each of the four clusters of autonomy-capacities. I conclude by first reviewing some of the implications of this approach for the attribution of autonomy, related claims of social justice, and obligations to promote the development and maintenance of these supportive structures and then returning to the objection that a reliance on scaffolding necessarily renders one less autonomous.
