Autonomy and automobility.

• Author: Lomasky, Loren E.
• Position: Positive side of automobile use

Years before the automobile evolved into a transportation necessity, before multilaned asphalt replaced meandering muddy ruts, intrepidly pioneering motorists took to the roads for pleasure. Today tens of millions drive for pleasure, but increasingly it is a guilty pleasure. From a multitude of quarters, motorists are indicted for the harms they leave in their wake. Drivers generate suburban sprawl, exacerbate the trade deficit while imperiling national security, foul lungs and warm the atmosphere with their noxious emissions, give up the ghosts of their vehicles to unsightly graveyards of rubber and steel, leave human roadkill behind them, trap each other in ever vaster mazes of gridlock and, adding insult to injury, commandeer a comfy subsidy from the general public. Only the presence of unconverted cigarette smokers deprives them of the title Public Nuisance Number One.(1)

Barring a radical reengineering of America, we will not soon toss away our car keys. As the primary vehicles for commuting, hauling freight, and general touring, cars (and trucks) are here to stay. But as the automobile enters its second century of transporting Americans from here to there, it is increasingly dubbed a public malefactor, and momentum grows for curbing its depredations. Construction of significant additions to the interstate highway system has ground to a halt. Designated lanes on urban roads are declared off-limits to solo motorists. Federal Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency CAFE) standards require automakers to eschew selling vehicles as capacious as motorists may wish to buy and instead to alter their mix of products to emphasize lighter, less gasoline-hungry cars. Taxes on fuel have been increased only modestly, but if critics of the hegemony of the automobile have their way, America will emulate Europe, pushing the tax up by a dollar or more per gallon. Funds thereby generated will not be designated for motorist services -- such earmarking is precisely what has exacerbated the current plague of overautomobilization -- but will instead be directed toward more mass transit, pollution relief, and research on alternate modes of transportation.(2) Some argue that employer-provided parking should be taxed as income to the employee or disallowed as a business expense to the provider. Others advocate following Amsterdam's lead, barring nearly all automobiles from entry into the center city. Moral suasion supplements policy proposals. In the name of social responsibility, individuals are urged to carpool or avail themselves of public transportation, scrap their older, fuel-intensive vehicles, and eschew unnecessary automobile trips.

Why this assault on the automobile? I have no wish to deny that it occurs at least in part because some of the critics' charges are true. Automobile carnage is indeed dreadful. The number of people killed each year on our roadways far exceeds the total who succumb to AIDS. Automobiles do pollute, all to some extent, some much worse than others. The cost of petroleum imports into this country exceeds the amount of the entire national trade deficit. And anyone who has ever been trapped in rush-hour gridlock, fuming inside at the delay while being engulfed by the fumes outside spewing from ten thousand tailpipes, knows that the simple job of getting from here to there in one's automobile can be the most stressful part of the day. Cars are not always "user-friendly."

But all these criticisms seem insufficient for explaining the intensity of opposition directed toward the automobile. Any large-scale enterprise entails costs, and so a critique that merely reminds us of the nature and extent of these costs is only half useful. Also required, of course, is a statement of the benefits derived from the enterprise, and a plausible accounting of whether the benefits exceed the costs. Identifying and measuring the costs and benefits of automobile usage pose very difficult methodological problems that I shall not consider here. I do note that the overwhelming popularity of the automobile is itself prima facie evidence that from the perspective of ordinary American motorists, the benefits of operating a motor vehicle exceed the concomitant costs. Just as theorists speak of people "voting with their feet," we can count those who vote-with their tires. And this vote is overwhelmingly proautomobile.

Critics may contend, though, that the election has been rigged. They can maintain that the absence of public transportation and compact neighborhoods in which commerce, industry, and housing are integrated forces us so often into our cars. People might like to be able to purchase a loaf of bread without buckling their seat belts, but in many parts of the country they cannot. And even if each of us values the options and mobility that automobile transport affords, we might devalue yet more the stress, delay, and pollution imposed on us by others. Private use of automobiles so understood would approximate game theory's Prisoner's Dilemma, an interaction in which each player acts in his own rational self-interest but all parties are worse off than they would have been had someone impelled them to choose otherwise. And the critic contends that some such requirement, in the form of regulation or increased taxes or outright prohibitions, is needed to escape the tyranny of the automobile (see Hensher 1993, and Freund and Martin 1993).

The critic's case has at least this much merit: a purely behavioristic appraisal of automobile usage is insufficient for evaluating its normative status. We need also to think more intently about how to classify and understand as a distinctive human practice the action of driving a car. Opponents of the automobile argue that the most telling way to understand this is by equating the act with creating a public bad. I shall dispute that appraisal. My focus will not be on the many and varied instrumental uses to which the automobile is put (driving to work, carpooling the kids, buying groceries), though in no way do I mean to disparage these. Rather, I shall concentrate on automobility's intrinsic capacity to move a person from place to place. As such, automobility complements autonomy: the distinctively human capacity to be self-directing. An autonomous being is not simply a locus at which forces collide and which then is moved by them. Rather, to be autonomous is, minimally, to be a valuer with ends taken to be good as such and to have the capacity to direct oneself to the realization or furtherance of these ends through actions expressly chosen for that purpose. Motorists fit this description. Therefore, insofar as we have reason to regard self-directedness as a valuable human trait, we have reason to think well of driving automobiles.

I am not maintaining, of course, that all and only motorists are autonomous, that someone persuaded by the slogan -Take the bus and leave the driving to us' thereby displays some human deficiency. A liberal society is one in which people pursue a vast diversity of goods in myriad ways, and this variety accounts for a considerable share of that society's attractiveness. So even if driving a car is an intrinsically worthwhile action, it does, not follow that declining to drive is suspect.

But neither am I claiming that automobiles are simply one among thousands of other products that individuals might, and do, happen to find attractive in a cornucopia of consumer goods. The claim is stronger. Automobility is not just something for which people in their ingenuity or idiosyncrasy might happen to hanker -- as they have for Nehru jackets, disco music, hula hoops, pet rocks, pink flamingo lawn ornaments, Madonna, and "How many ... does it take to change a lightbulb?" jokes. Rather, automobile transport is a good for people in virtue of its intrinsic features. Automobility has value because it extends the scope and magnitude of self-direction.

Moreover, the value of automobility strongly complements other core values of our culture, such as freedom of association, pursuit of knowledge, economic advancement, privacy, and even the expression. of religious commitments and affectional preference. If these contentions have even partial cogency, then opponents of the automobile must take on and surmount a stronger burden of proof than they have heretofore acknowledged. For not only must they show that instrumental costs of marginal automobile usage outweigh the corresponding benefits, but they must also that these costs outweigh the inherent good of the exercise of free mobility.

Wheels of Fortune:

Movement, Choice and Human Potential

Concern about automobiles may be a modern phenomenon, but analysis of the distinctive nature of automobility is not. For Aristotle, being a self-mover was the crucial feature distinguishing animals from plants and, thus, higher forms of life from lower. A more basic distinction separates the organic realm from that which is lifeless. Living things have an internal animating force, psyche.(3) The customary translation is 'soul,' but in the context of Greek biology that is misleading. For us, 'soul' tends to carry a theological and therefore elevated sense, but in classical Greek thought it marks the divide between inert things and those imbued with a vital principle.(4) Psyche appears at three levels. The lowest is vegetative soul. Plants are more than just things insofar as they are not merely acted on but also do something. Specifically, they ingest food, metabolize, and reproduce. At the highest level is the rational soul, the intelligence exhibited among the animals only by humans. Between, and crucial to this discussion, is animal or sensitive soul. Level-2 psyche has the capacities of level-1 psyche (and level-3 psyche those of level-2) plus two further features. Unlike plants, animals perceive and they move themselves.

Perception and movement are enumerated as two qualities but, as set out in Dc Anima, they are to be understood...