The autonomy assumption of assuming others have arrived at their beliefs unaided

The reason why we normally explain beliefs is  by appeal to the reasons the person gives for them is that we normally assume that the person is capable of intelligent reflection and reasoning and has arrived at her belief for the reasons she gives as a result of that reflection (whether or not the belief is ultimately correct). We assume in general that people are capable of significant autonomy in their thinking, in the following sense:

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people have, to greater or lesser degrees, a capacity for reasoning that follows autonomous standards appropriate to the subjects in question, rather than in slavish service to evolutionarily given instincts merely filtered through cultural forms or applied in novel environments. Such reflection, reasoning, judgment and resulting behavior seem to be autonomous in the sense that they involve exercises of thought that are not themselves significantly shaped by specific evolutionarily given tendencies, but instead follow independent norms appropriate to the pursuits in question (Nagel 1979).]]

Russel:  all our value judgments are strictly speaking false (“The Element of Ethics,” Philosophical Essays). Then by 1935 he had dropped also the claim about meaning, holding that value judgments are expressions of desire or wish, and not assertions at all. 


Rawls thought it important that substantive conceptions of the good life were left behind in moving to the Original Position, because he was attempting to provide an account of justice that people with competing visions of the good could agree to in a pluralist society. Like early Habermas he included religions under this prohibition. In Political Liberalism (1993) he conceded that the procedure of the Original Position is itself ideologically constrained, and he moved to the idea of an overlapping consensus:

 Kantians can accept the idea of justice as fairness (which the procedure describes) because it realizes autonomy, 
utilitarians because it promotes overall utility, 
Christians because it is part of divine law, etc.
 But even here Rawls wanted to insist that adherents of the competing visions of the good leave their particular conceptions behind in publicdiscourse and justify the policies they endorse on grounds that are publicly accessible. He described this as the citizen's duty of civility (Political Liberalism, iv).