Autonomy and Commitment: compatible ideals

Fears of alienation and anomie in liberal societies have driven many writers to emphasize care and commitment as essential ingredients of human well‐being and as educational aims. Conceiving autonomy to be incompatible with these values, they have concluded that autonomy should be replaced with alternative conceptions of human well‐being and of education that emphasize care and commitment. The claim I will try to defend in this paper is that, in contrast to these views, there is no contradiction between autonomy on the one hand and care and commitment on the other; hence acknowledgment of the importance of the latter pair of values need not lead to the rejection of the ideal of autonomy.