Overture ・ Being ・ Order ・ Choice ・ Relation ・ Field Guide
Autonomic dignity grants the right to choose—but dignity fulfilled is the freedom to choose in relation.
I. Definition — Dignity as Self-Determination
If substantive dignity says the state defines what dignified life looks like, autonomic dignity says: no, you decide.
This is dignity as liberation. It proclaims that your worth isn’t about following moral rules someone else wrote—it’s about being free to write your own. The meaning of your life, the choices about your body, your conscience, your identity—these belong to you, not to any government or tradition or authority claiming to protect you.
Autonomic dignity is the child of liberty movements: women’s rights, civil rights, LGBTQ+ liberation. It sees you as sovereign over yourself. Respect for your dignity means respecting your will—your right to love whom you choose, to speak your truth, to dissent from what you’re told to believe, to decide how you want to live and even when you want to die.
This is dignity as agency: the idea that if someone else controls your choices, they don’t really honor your worth. Freedom isn’t something that violates dignity—it’s what dignity requires.
II. In Law and Politics — Freedom as the Measure of Respect
This understanding of dignity took hold after World War II, especially in the United States, where courts started linking dignity to privacy and personal liberty. The Supreme Court put it directly in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”1
That’s powerful language. It means no one else—not the government, not the majority, not tradition—gets to tell you what your life should mean. This reasoning underlies marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges), the right to refuse medical treatment (Cruzan), control over your own body, and protection for how you identify and express yourself.2
Internationally, Canada’s Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights have used dignity-as-autonomy to protect people’s rights to define their own identity, follow their conscience, and live according to their own understanding of who they are.3 The law’s job shifts: instead of enforcing shared morality, it ensures everyone can author their own life.
Politically, this is the language of liberation movements: civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, bodily autonomy. It’s freedom over conformity, self-determination over paternalism.
III. Shortcomings — The Solitude of Sovereignty
But here’s where autonomy gets complicated: freedom without connection can become loneliness. Liberation without solidarity can become abandonment.
When everyone is sovereign over themselves, when every choice is purely individual, the bonds of mutual care start to fray. And the marketplace has learned to exploit this—selling you identity as product, packaging self-determination as consumer choice, turning liberation into isolation you pay for.
Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen similarly argues that freedom without capability is emptiness — “choice without real options is the parody of liberty.”4 Law becomes neutral to whether your choices are good for you or being exploited—as long as you technically consented. Your body becomes a contract you can negotiate away. You become a site of transactions, not a person in relationship.
This version of autonomy can justify abandonment. Systems withdraw all support and call it respecting your freedom: You’re free to be homeless. You’re free to work for wages that don’t cover survival. You’re free to suffer. The independence that was supposed to liberate you ends up isolating you from the very relationships and support that make freedom meaningful.
Without connection to others, autonomy becomes: you’re on your own. And that’s not dignity, it’s exile dressed up as liberty.
IV. Reflection — The Covenant’s Relational Freedom
The Covenant doesn’t reject autonomy—it completes it by putting it in relationship.
The Covenant protects your right to privacy, to follow your conscience, to refuse what violates your sense of self (Part 1, Article 2, Sections 5–6). Your choices about your body, your beliefs, your life path—these remain yours. But the Covenant recognizes something crucial: freedom works better when it exists alongside care, not against it.
This is what the Covenant calls relational sovereignty: you’re free to choose, and your freedom is strengthened—not weakened—by your connection to others who are also free. Your right to dissent coexists with everyone’s duty to uphold dignity. Your right to withdraw coexists with everyone’s duty to remember and repair harm.
The difference is this: autonomy alone says “you’re free to choose whatever you want, and you’re on your own with the consequences.” Relational sovereignty says “you’re free to choose, and we’re committed to maintaining conditions where your freedom remains real—not just theoretical.”
True liberty isn’t separation from the world. It’s the freedom to become yourself while remaining connected to the web of relationships and responsibilities that make living possible.
That’s why the Covenant carries autonomy forward—not as isolation, but as kinship. To understand how freedom matures into reciprocity, we turn to dignity’s fourth form—the dignity of relation.
The Covenant turns the idea of dignity into living law—a constitution for all people, grounded in worth, care, and freedom.
Read it for yourself and see what lawful power can be when it serves life.
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015); Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (1990).
Law v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration), [1999] 1 S.C.R. 497; European Court of Human Rights, Christine Goodwin v. United Kingdom, No. 28957/95 (2002).
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Knopf 1999).