Critique of Personal Autonomy

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-152
Author(s):  
Lucas Swaine
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Immoral Action

This chapter provides a detailed critique of personal autonomy. It distinguishes several hazards affecting agents who are personally autonomous, moving beyond received understandings and critiques. The chapter explains how personal autonomy offers normatively inadequate boundaries with respect to deliberation, volition, capabilities, and the generation of options, respectively. Included in this chapter is discussion of extreme actions, and of evil, to serve to establish the central points of argumentation. The critique presented here is robust even granting that theories of personal autonomy do not countenance immoral action, much less egregious law-breaking or terrible rights violations, on the part of personally autonomous agents.

scholarly journals How Should Liberal Perfectionists Justify the State?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-65
Author(s):  
Chris Mills
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The State

Abstract Liberal institutions should respect citizens as autonomous agents. But what does this mandate require and how should it shape the demands of liberal legitimacy? I trace the contemporary disagreement between liberal perfectionist and anti-perfectionist accounts of legitimacy back to this requirement to respect the autonomy of citizens in order to weigh up how well each approach fulfils this mandate. I argue that further reflection over the nature of respect for the value of personal autonomy gives liberals reason to favour moderate forms of perfectionism and be sceptical of criticisms of perfectionism grounded in concerns over respect.

Instances of the Deconstruction of Free Will and Autonomy in Poe and Lovecraft

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Molnár
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
American Gothic

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the conception of free will and personal autonomy is deconstructed in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. These authors are classics of American Gothic fiction, and Poe exerted a significant influence on Lovecraft. In this paper, I examine the ways the two authors represented their characters as the results of deterministic laws of nature, rather than autonomous agents who possess the ability of free will. First, I am going to analyze Poe’s gothic crime fiction tales, in which the perpetrator-narrators committed their crimes under the effect of “perversity,” and even their confessions after the fact are directed by the same force, which makes these confessions morally meaningless. Then, with respect to Lovecraft’s tales, I point out atavism and the characters’ familial heritage as factors that make free will seem illusory.

Our Bodies, Whose Property?

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Labor Markets ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
Human Organs ◽  
Property Owners ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right

No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, this book challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies and argues against the normalization of markets in bodily services and parts. The book explores the risks associated with metaphors of property and the reasons why the commodification of the body remains problematic. The book asks what is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale? What, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex, reproduction, or human body parts, and the other markets we commonly applaud? The book contends that body markets occupy the outer edges of a continuum that is, in some way, a feature of all labor markets. But it also emphasizes that we all have bodies, and considers the implications of this otherwise banal fact for equality. Bodies remind us of shared vulnerability, alerting us to the common experience of living as embodied beings in the same world. Examining the complex issue of body exceptionalism, the book demonstrates that treating the body as property makes human equality harder to comprehend.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Truth Matters: Cognitive Integrity as an Intervention for Self-Deception

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenia Isabel Gorlin ◽  
Michael W. Otto
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Therapeutic Interventions ◽  
Empirical Validation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adaptive Problem

To live well in the present, we take direction from the past. Yet, individuals may engage in a variety of behaviors that distort their past and current circumstances, reducing the likelihood of adaptive problem solving and decision making. In this article, we attend to self-deception as one such class of behaviors. Drawing upon research showing both the maladaptive consequences and self-perpetuating nature of self-deception, we propose that self-deception is an understudied risk and maintaining factor for psychopathology, and we introduce a “cognitive-integrity”-based approach that may hold promise for increasing the reach and effectiveness of our existing therapeutic interventions. Pending empirical validation of this theoretically-informed approach, we posit that patients may become more informed and autonomous agents in their own therapeutic growth by becoming more honest with themselves.

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