Accurate Self-Assessment, Autonomous Ignorance, and the Appreciation of Disability

Abstract

In their thoughts commentaries on our essay, “Knowing your own strength: Accurate self-assessment as a requirement for personal autonomy,” George Agich, Ruth Chadwick, and Dominic Murphy (2004) provide both criticisms and insights that give us a context in which to clarify further our claim that one’s autonomy is impaired when one is unable to appreciate whether one has the capacities required for tasks one is undertaking. We focus on two issues: the extent to which our account of autonomy suggests a problematically “externalist” or “objective” approach and the issue of whether our talk of accurate self-assessment entails an overdemanding requirement that one know numerous facts about oneself to count as autonomous.