Ideals Of Autonomy Research Articles

Failure and moral distinction in a Ukrainian marketplace of ideas

AbstractThis essay examines the generative effects of claiming moral failure within a Ukrainian liberal movement for media reform in post‐Maidan, pre‐invasion Ukraine. The reformers wished to reorganize news reporting around the ideals of autonomy, balanced objectivity, impartiality, and corrigibility, which they believed underpinned Western media. They decried most Ukrainian media as failing such standards, highlighting the individual moral failure of journalists bankrolled by oligarchs in return for favourable media representation. In turn, those from whom the reformers tried to distinguish themselves morally mocked them as ‘grant‐eaters’ for their dependence on Western democracy promotion grants. This tussle pitted material success against yearnings for moral and professional probity. Developing Selka's idea of moral distinction, I argue that while the reformers’ pursuit of virtuous difference was sincere, their structural vulnerability vis‐à‐vis the mainstream media also made morality more salient as the basis for agonistic differentiation.

Vulnerability and Social Justice

This Article briefly considers the origins of the term social justice and its evolution beside our understandings of human rights and liberalism, which are two other significant justice categories. After this reflection on the contemporary meaning of social justice, I suggest that vulnerability theory, which seeks to replace the rational man of liberal legal thought with the vulnerable subject, should be used to define the contours of the term. Recognition of fundamental, universal, and perpetual human vulnerability reveals the fallacies inherent in the ideals of autonomy, independence, and individual responsibility that have supplanted an appreciation of the social. I suggest that we need to develop a robust language of state or collective responsibility, one that recognizes that social justice is realized through the legal creation and maintenance of just social institutions and relationships.

Training Dogs to Feel Good: Embodying Well-being in Multispecies Relations.

Social science concepts of well-being are largely premised on notions of a common humanity with shared physical needs and broadly legible experiences of the world. While medical anthropologists have interrogated ideas of universal bodily subjectivities, articulations of well-being across species boundaries remain underexplored. This article offers a conceptualization of well-being that attends to species difference. Drawing on ethnographic research with an animal rescue organization, I argue that in the context of partially connected bodily experiences, rescue workers navigate distinctions between dogs' internal feelings and external actions, and they train their bodies alongside dogs' bodies to cultivate canine well-being. A multispecies perspective complicates ideals of autonomy and self-actualization long associated with well-being and opens up avenues for considering well-being as an intercorporeal relationship conditioned in unequal bodies and embodied interactions.

“Hopefully I Won’t Be Misunderstood.” Disability Rhetoric in Jürg Acklin’s Vertrauen ist gut

This essay brings together the fields of German literature, disability studies, and rhetoric in an analysis of the rhetorical strategies and representational implications of disability in Jürg Acklin’s 2009 novel Vertrauen ist gut. Resting on the theory of complex embodiment, the analysis considers the rhetoric of anmut as a literary strategy that invites readers to share imperfect, yet profound, embodied rhetorical connections with the protagonist without rendering invisible the differences that shape embodied experience. Although the characters in Vertrauen ist gut are fictional, this novel provides important insights regarding experiences of precarious embodiment and affirms the value of interdependence while challenging ideals of autonomy and independence. Furthermore, the novel’s narrative within a narrative—and the consequences of the narrator’s interpretation of their significance—challenges readers to use caution when interpreting literary narratives, as their relationship to personal narratives may not always be straightforward.

Counting Wordsworth by the Bay: The Distance of Josephine Miles

ABSTRACT This essay situates the pioneering quantitative methodology of the poet-critic Josephine Miles in the early new-critical period, when the reading practices associated with modern literary studies were taking hold of the incipient discipline—often at the expense of romantic poetry. Skeptical of ideals of autonomy and unity, Miles’s descriptive historicism veers between “close criticism” and what we now call distant reading. Her early work on nineteenth-century poetry as well as her archived word-counting notes challenge the New Critics’ obsession with the shape and wholeness of the poem, adding nuance to our sense of the evolving academic hegemony of formalism in the 1940s while also suggesting new ways of understanding the recent digital turn.

Prioritising patient care: The different views of clinicians and managers.

There is little research comparing clinicians' and managers' views on priority settings in the healthcare services. During research on two different qualitative research projects on healthcare prioritisations, we found a striking difference on how hospital executive managers and clinical healthcare professionals talked about and understood prioritisations. The purpose of this study is to explore how healthcare professionals in mental healthcare and somatic medicine prioritise their care, to compare different ways of setting priorities among managers and clinicians and to explore how moral dilemmas are balanced and reconciled. Research design and participants: We conducted qualitative observations, interviews and focus groups with medical doctors, nurses and other clinical members of the interdisciplinary team in both somatic medical and mental health wards in hospitals in Norway. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Ethical considerations: Basic ethical principles for research ethics were followed. The respondents signed an informed consent for participation. They were assured anonymity and confidentiality. The studies were approved by relevant ethics committees in line with the Helsinki Convention. Our findings showed a widening gap between the views of clinicians on one hand and managers on the other. Clinicians experienced a threat to their autonomy, to their professional ideals and to their desire to perform their job in a professional way. Prioritisations were a cause of constant concern and problematic decisions. Even though several managers understood and empathised with the clinicians, the ideals of patient flow and keeping budgets balanced were perceived as more important. We discuss our findings in light of the moral challenges of patient-centred individual healthcare versus demands of distributive justice from healthcare management. The clinicians' ideals of autonomy and good medical and nursing care for the individual patients were perceived as endangered.

Consumer Transformation: Cosmetic Surgery as the Expression of Consumer Freedom or as a Marketing Imperative?

McCracken’s analysis of identity construction in contemporary culture sees the drive to transform oneself as the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom. Transformation is accessible through cosmetic surgery, enabling consumers with funds to purchase a ‘whole new me’. This consumer is an active participant in the transformation process, not content with observing beauty but actively engaged in the creative construction of new improved selves. In doing so, they have “mastered the codes of cultural production” making themselves “co-creators in the culture they consume” (McCracken xvi). An alternative and far less positive narrative of consumer transformation focuses on the pervasive influence of promotion on individual identity. Marketing and promotion constructs a deficiency in the lives of consumers which, marketers imply, can be remedied by the purchase of cosmetic surgery. Rather than being powerful co-creators of their own fluid identity, consumers are constructed as victims of a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ and preys on consumer vulnerabilities (Fatah 1). In this paper I draw on consumer blogs, industry webpages and regulatory and professional publications to explore the tensions between these competing narratives of bodily transformation. In doing so, I argue that there is an inherent paradox in the discourse of consumer transformation which advocates consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to certain forms of ideal beauty which can be marketed by the promotional industries.

Performing Sovereignty, Sounding Autonomy: Political Representation in the Operas of Maria Antonia of Saxony

This article assesses representations of sovereignty in the court operas of Maria Antonia of Saxony, Il trionfo della fedelta (1754) and Talestri, regina delle amazzoni (1762). I argue that, while clothed in the garb of representational court culture, the princess’s operas are substantially inflected with (then new) ideals of autonomy. The decisive philosophical ideal that individuals are equally capable of moral decision-making eventually enabling self-government is inscribed most frequently in extended displays of interiority, of which opera seria had an established tradition. Situated in the religious milieu of the Dresden court, Maria Antonia’s operas transform Augustinian Christian morality into a framework in which compassion coupled with autonomy becomes a catalyst for societal transformation. As such, her operas curiously interrogate the very power relationships between ruler and subject that opera seria is designed to fortify. Ultimately, these operas display a fascinating and unusual instance of ruler-driven transformation of sovereignty in opera seria during the Enlightenment.

The Return of the Family? Welfare State Retrenchment and Client Autonomy in Long-Term Care

AbstractEuropean welfare states are cutting back their responsibilities for long-term care, emphasising ‘self-reliance’ and replacing care as an entitlement of citizenship with targeted services. But we do not know how former long-term care recipients cope with retrenchment and if they are able to negotiate support from their family and friends. Through an analysis of 500 telephone interviews and thirty face-to-face interviews with long-term care recipients facing reduced care rights in the Netherlands, we found that disabled and elderly persons resist increased dependence on their personal networks. Most clients who face reduced access to public long-term care do not seek alternative help despite their perceived need for it, and feel trapped between the policy definition of self-reliance and their own ideals of autonomy.

Reading the closet through connectivity

This article takes up a deceptively familiar observation – the emergence of ‘gey’ as a category of identification by men who practice same-sex sex – in order to consider how this borrowed ‘global’ category is given substance and localized in Turkey. The author places this explication in the broader context and content of the identity formation of upwardly mobile, educationally advantaged young men in İstanbul who embody the contradictions and quandaries that Eve Sedgwick theorizes as the simultaneous existence of two irreconcilable accounts of homosexuality: the minority and the universal. By foregrounding the more opaque (and deeply internalized) instances of cultural particularity in Turkey via Joseph's concept of connectivity this article demonstrates that this conundrum assumes a special potency in Turkey where notions of self inscribed by connectivity (as opposed to ideals of autonomy or independence) work against both ‘minority’ accounts of homosexuality and living as openly gay. The author focuses on two vital aspects of gey identification: desire management and love, and social class to show how these domains give substance to a gey subjectivity that is at once fashioned on ideals of globalism and inflected by cultural particularities. This article concludes that connectivity, closely articulated with class reproduction, informs, fashions, and regulates selves in ways that might not sit well with the global demands of an open gay identity.

“I Kill White Mens … Cause I Can”: The Rewriting of Liberation and Mastery in <em>Dessa Rose</em>

Introduction: Freedom and MasteryIn their quest for autonomy and freedom, Black1 writers in nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had to struggle with agonistic inception of Black identity in America. To be Black in America did not, of course, simply mean that one had African ancestors. To be interpellated as Black American additionally meant that one played pivotal role in symbolic production of white American identity. Toni Morrison explains that we cannot understand genesis of American identity without recognition thatnothing highlighted freedom - if did not create it - like slavery. Black slavery enriched country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of and enslavement could be found not only but also, with dramatic polarity created by skin color, projection of not-me. The result was playground for imagination.2Morrison identifies not only that American society was built upon slave labor, but that central principles of American identity, including ideal of freedom, took shape around symbolic economy in which blackness played foundational role of the not-me.3 To be Black was by definition to be excluded from principle of personal and collective principle that took shape in relation to its ideological counterpart, slavery.* The quintessential (white) American identity was made possible by, shaped by, activated by complex awareness and employment of constituted Africanism that was strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego reinforcing, and pervasive.5 Blackness generally, and enslaved Black bodies in particular, became location in American imaginary where anxieties, fears, and inconsistencies of symbolic (white) self could be projected or displaced in order to constitute self-consistent vision of autonomous American individual. To be American was to be to extent that ideals of autonomy, authority, and ultimately absolute power6 could be enacted upon slaves, not-free, ideological antithesis of free white citizen.7In effort to define and claim principle of freedom as their own within this historical context, many Black male writers have struggled with and, to varying degrees, adopted this symbolic economy in their own conceptualizations of freedom, and power, transferring role of not-me, dialectical counterpart of autonomous individual, from Blacks generally to Black women. Speaking of maleauthored slave narratives, Angela Davis explains that lurking within definition of black freedom as reclamation of black manhood is obligatory suppression of black womanhood.8 bell hooks traces this tradition of imagining Black male freedom into recent scholarship on slavery, where she notes predominance of belief that the subjugation of black women was essential to black male's development. According to this myth, Black men could not become proper patriarchs, and thereby develop a positive self-concept, without rite of passage of controlling Black women.9Yet, this very reality - that suppression of Black female agency has so often served as condition of freedom for Black male writers - has led many Black feminist writers and critics to suggest that unique possibilities for rethinking notion of freedom might emerge from Black female subject position. Hortense Spillers argues that because Black women's bodies have been site at which freedom as mastery has been ritualistically enacted, these bodies have served as degree of social for freedom and power, state of social being to which she refers as flesh.10 As ground zero for creation of autonomous individual, flesh offers a praxis and theory for new kind of writing and new conceptualization of freedom. In this essay, I examine how Sherley Anne Williams revisits and rewrites tradition of imagining Black (male) freedom through control of Black women in her neo-slave novel, Dessa Rose (1987). …

Why theology needs disability

This article explores the emerging field of theology and disability studies, beginning with an introduction to disability studies before moving on to consider what significance a disability perspective may have for theology. The author argues that in the same way disability studies critiques cultural ideals of autonomy and self-sufficiency it can likewise critique theology’s participation in these cultural ideals. Using the theological term “image of Christ” and a case study of the L’Arche communities, the author shows in particular how relationality, and not autonomy, more rightly defines what it means to be human.

The Liberating Power of Commercial Marketing

The aim of this article is to explore the impact of commercial marketing on personal autonomy. Several philosophers argue that marketing conflicts with ideals of autonomy or, at best, is neutral to these ideals. After qualifying our concept of marketing and introducing the distinctions between (i) divergent and convergent marketing and (ii) being autonomous and acting autonomously, we demonstrate the heretofore unnoticed positive impact of marketing on autonomy. Specifically, we argue that (i) convergent marketing has a significant potential to reinforce autonomous action and (ii) divergent marketing has a significant potential to reinforce the state of being autonomous.

The Crisis of Musical Aesthetics in the 21st Century

This essay is an attempt to understand the reasons for the current crisis of musical aesthetics. It examines the function of this discipline as the mediator between philosophy and musicology, it inquires into its connections with the ideals of autonomy, beauty and free subjectivity. During the 20th Century, major changes in society and their communication forms happened; anthropology and semiotics began to compete with aesthetics in explaining musical facts. The last paragraphs test the chances of resistance of musical aesthetics; musical meaning appears to be the only question which endured in spite of the considerable fragmentation and loss of profile of musical experience.

From Termination to the Evolution of a Relationship: A New Understanding

Much of the psychoanalytic literature on termination is steeped in ideals of autonomy, independence, and permanent cessation of contact. Although more recently some modified perspectives on termination have been offered, literature from various fields including contemporary psychoanalytic models, infancy research, and neuroscience supports a more extensive reconceptualization. After reviewing the literature, this article proposes replacing the concept of termination with the more flexible idea of multiple possible evolutions of the analytic relationship depending on the particular pair and their context. A clinical illustration is offered to support this perspective.

Family as failure? The role of informal help-givers to disabled people in Sweden

Based on a survey mapping all unpaid help and care work in the county of Stockholm, this article focuses on the informal help and care carried out for long-term ill and/or disabled people aged 64 or younger. The findings indicate that these forms of support are common and that the informal help-givers work many hours every month. Yet the impact of this work is quite invisible in texts on disability policy and there is a void of research addressing this issue. This article argues that, in spite of welfare state arrangements and reforms, families play a crucial role in providing resources, notably help and care for disabled family members. Their invisibility is interpreted as an expression of the fact that the care concept has become politically incorrect. In the light of modern disability policies, with its ideals of autonomy and empowerment, help and care provided by families to adults aged 64 or younger stand out as a dilemma and a contradiction. Making help and care provided by families invisible can be interpreted as one way of solving this contradiction.

The Impact of Individualized Evidence-Based Decision Support on Aneurysm Patients' Decision Making, Ideals of Autonomy, and Quality of Life

Patients with an asymptomatic abdominal aneurysm and their surgeon were randomized to receive a general brochure (GB) or an IB presenting survival information and a ranking of the treatment strategies. Before and after receiving the brochure, patients filled out questionnaires on their behavior during the consultation, ideals of patient autonomy, and quality of life. Surgeons answered a short checklist evaluating the consultation. One hundred patients participated, 49 in the intervention, 51 in the control group. The IB group had a better understanding of important issues in the treatment decision, had prepared more questions, and was less satisfied with the duration of the consultation. Their impression that the surgeon perceived them more as a medical problem than a patient with a problem increased. They agreed less with the surgeon's advice and lost some of their belief in "the doctor knows best.'' Beforehand, the IB group had a stronger preference for patient-based decisions, but afterward they displayed more surgeon-based decisions. No effects were seen on patients' quality of life. Individualized evidence-based information stimulated patients' active involvement but in the context of our study led to less patient-based decisions. Patient-made decisions and patient autonomy should, however, not be equated.

Psychotherapy and Moral Inquiry

Psychotherapy is necessarily an investigation into questions concerning individual intentions, purposes and the pursuit of the good life. Therapeutic inquiries centre on the motives-implicit and explicit-that underpin clients' actions. The motives examined may be formulated by the therapist in terms of theoretical or everyday vocabularies of motive. Investigations of such motives for their moral and practical adequacy will constitute an apprenticeship in therapy for the client, leading to the pursuit of those virtues proposed by the therapeutic approach in question. In order to foster the therapeutic ideals of autonomy and personal decision, some hermeneutic reflection on the status of motive interpretations in therapy is desired. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics offer a means of reflecting on therapeutic method, making the moral thrust of psychotherapy more explicit, and avoiding premature constructions of the subject.

Ageing and Isolation: Is the Issue Social Isolation or Is It Lack of Meaning in Lige?

SUMMARY Social and spiritual isolation are growing issues for an ageing society that promotes the ideals of autonomy and high levels of individuation amongst its citizens. This chapter explores the issues of social and spiritual isolation for older adults and ways of addressing these issues both now and in the future. The need for intimacy with God and with others is illustrated using material from in-depth interviews with older adults who live independently and others who are residents of aged care facilities.

Nursing the future: a re‐examination of the professionalization thesis in the light of some recent developments

It is now 6 years since Salvage's (1988) analysis of the position of nursing within the professionalization process; this was written in the light of the aspirations of Project 2000. Recently there have been several significant policy statements from the United Kingdom Central Council which appear to be pursuing professional status despite Salvage's contention that nursing's leaders know 'that full professional status for nursing cannot be achieved'. Elements of these statements are discussed in relation to the professionalization thesis. Using the examples of nurse prescribing and managerialism, it is argued that the deprofessionalization thesis is more appropriate to nursing since the ideals of autonomy, authority and status are being eroded in the new managerialist post-Griffiths National Health Service culture. A positive deprofessionalization notion is put forward which highlights and re-emphasizes the caring role through the new occupational strategy of Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning (APEL).