How do we know that what has happened to us is a microaggression? I claim in this chapter that our understanding about how we perceive microaggression is grounded in the cultivation and critical reflection about experiences of people who occupy marginalized social locations. My aim is to explore the nature of epistemic harms of microaggression in order to highlight how they diminish the microaggressed’s ability to generate and participate in making knowledge claims. I differentiate between the primary (direct) harm of (...) microaggressive acts, and the secondary epistemic harms that occur in the aftermath of the microaggression, particularly when the microaggressed attempts to convey their experience to others. I conclude with an analysis of the two secondary harms in hopes that it helps us explore a possible avenue of resistance to the epistemic harms of microaggression. (shrink)

In the debates regarding the ethics of human enhancement, proponents have found it difficult to refute the concern, voiced by certain bioconservatives, that cognitive enhancement violates the autonomy of the enhanced. However, G. Owen Schaefer, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu have attempted not only to avoid autonomy-based bioconservative objections, but to argue that cognition-enhancing biomedical interventions can actually enhance autonomy. In response, this paper has two aims: firstly, to explore the limits of their argument; secondly, and more importantly, to develop (...) a more complete understanding of autonomy and its relation to cognitive enhancement. By drawing a distinction between the capacity for autonomy and the exercise and achievement of autonomy and by exploring the possible effects of cognitive enhancement on both competence and authenticity conditions for autonomy, the paper identifies and explains which dimensions of autonomy can and cannot, in principle, be enhanced via direct cognitive interventions. This allows us to draw conclusions regarding the limits of cognitive enhancement as a means for enhancing autonomy. (shrink)

A microaggression is a small insulting act made disproportionately harmful by its part in an oppressive pattern of similar insults. How should you respond when made the victim of a microaggression? In this paper I survey several morally salient factors, including effects upon victims, perpetrators, and third parties. I argue, contrary to popular views, that ‘growing a thicker skin’ is not good advice nor is expressing reasonable anger always the best way to contribute to confronting oppression. Instead, appropriately responding to (...) microaggression involves difficult application of practical wisdom that does not easily fall under a simple prescription. (shrink)

Research conducted on Brain-Computer Interfaces has grown considerably during the last decades. With the help of BCIs, users can gain a wide range of functions. Our aim in this paper is to analyze the impact of BCIs on autonomy. To this end, we introduce three abilities that most accounts of autonomy take to be essential: the ability to use information and knowledge to produce reasons; the ability to ensure that intended actions are effectively realized ; and the ability to enact (...) intentions within concrete relationships and contexts. We then consider the impact of BCI technology on each of these abilities. Although on first glance, BCIs solely enhance self-determination because they restore or improve abilities, we will show that there are other positive, but also negative impacts on user autonomy, which require further philosophical and ethical discussions. (shrink)

International migration has a female face in the beginning of the twenty-first century; since at least 1990, a total of 49 percent of international migrants have been women (UN 2008).1 Many women relocate in pursuit of goals that they can’t realize in their countries of origin, and many women move on their own to developed countries as caregivers to the very old or the very young, as nurses to attend to the sick in hospitals, and as domestic workers.2 How should (...) we regard their decisions to do so? One way of thinking about such moves is to deplore the fact that women have to move in order to attain certain goals in their lives; it would be more desirable to live in a world that would not make such moves necessary... (shrink)

How much power does emotional dismissal have over the oppressed's ability to trust outlaw emotions, or to stand for such emotions before others? I discuss Sue Campbell's view of the interpretation of emotion in light of the political significance of emotional dismissal, in response, 1 suggest that feminist contentions of interpretation developed within dialogical communities are best suited to providing resources for expressing, interpreting, defining, and reflecting on our emotions.

How much power does emotional dismissal have over the oppressed's ability to trust outlaw emotions, or to stand for such emotions before others? I discuss Sue Campbell's view of the interpretation of emotion in light of the political significance of emotional dismissal, in response, 1 suggest that feminist contentions of interpretation developed within dialogical communities are best suited to providing resources for expressing, interpreting, defining, and reflecting on our emotions.

This article seeks to explore and analyze the relationship between autonomy and trust, and to show how these findings could be relevant to medical ethics. First, I will argue that the way in which so-called “relational autonomy theories” tie the notions of autonomy and trust together is not entirely satisfying Then, I will introduce the so-called Encapsulated Interest Account as developed by Russell Hardin. This will bring out the importance of the reasons for trust. What good reasons do we have (...) for trusting someone? I will criticize Hardin’s business model as insufficiently robust, especially in the context of health care, and then turn to another source of trust, namely, love. It may seem that trust-through-love is much better suited for the vulnerability that is often involved in health care, but I will also show that it has its own deficiencies. Good health care should therefore pay attention to both models of trust, and I will offer some tentative remarks on how to do this. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I respond to the feminist critique of traditional theories of autonomy, which revolves around the charge that such theories are too individualistic. Feminists argue against the liberal atomism that they see at the center of traditional autonomy theories. Their resulting theory of relational autonomy is meant to remedy that traditional theories of autonomy posit an individualistic conception of both the self and autonomy. Instead, feminists have argued for a theory of autonomy that takes account of the ways (...) in which persons are irreducibly social, and the ways in which autonomy itself is only possible within certain types of social relationships. I separate the feminist charges against liberalism from the feminist charges against traditional autonomy, since it is at least prima facie possible to consider personal autonomy separately from political autonomy. I thus isolate the feminist critique of liberal atomism from the feminist critique of individualistic autonomy. The first chapter examines the feminist critique of liberalism to determine why it is that the charge of liberal atomism continues to stick, even though it has been clearly established by both feminist and mainstream liberals that liberalism is not guilty of such a charge. While I do not provide a full defense of liberalism, I do argue that such a defense is possible, and possible in a way that upholds feminist goals. Having separated the critiques of liberalism from the critiques of traditional autonomy, the rest of the dissertation focuses exclusively on the autonomy debate. I present an argument against the most robustly relational feminist accounts of autonomy those which accept a relational account of both the self and autonomy. I argue that, although such theories are explicitly designed to vindicate the normative commitments of feminism, their implications yield unwelcome results from this very same feminist perspective. I then present my own procedural account of autonomy. Because it is not constitutively social, it is unlikely to be characterized as a relational account at all. I argue, however, that it is this very feature which allows my account to vindicate the feminist normative commitments espoused by constitutively relational accounts. (shrink)

The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other," sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent — in short, the mere body. (...) In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the self that has gained ascendancy in U.S. popular culture and in Western philosophy is derived from the experience of the predominantly white and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts, literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has taken three main tacks: (1) critique of established views of the self, (2) reclamation of women's selfhood, and (3) reconceptualization of the self to incorporate women's experience. This entry will survey feminist perspectives on the self from all three of these angles. (shrink)

This paper addresses two related topics: 1. The disanalogies between elective cosmetic practices and sex reassignment surgery. Why does it seem necessary for me – an aging professional woman – to ignore the blandishments of hairdressers wielding dyes and dermatologists wielding acids and scalpels? Why does it not seem equally necessary for a transgendered person to repudiate sex reassignment procedures? 2. The role of the body in identity and agency. How do phenomenological insights regarding the constitution of selfhood in relation (...) to the interplay between the body image and corporeal know-how contribute to an account of the agency of transgendered individuals? Studying several paintings by contemporary feminist artist Jenny Saville has advanced my thinking on these topics. Saville’s imagery is an invaluable aid to reflection on these issues because she uses her painterly technique, which critics often dub “virtuoso,” to represent lived human bodies. In her work, viewers encounter representations of subjectivized, agentic corporeity, as distinct from inert, objectified flesh. Moreover, her sympathetic engagement with nonconformist, devalued bodies helps to reconfigure the standard gestalts of the human body that viewers typically carry with them and thus to convert fear and/or disgust into appreciation and understanding. In this paper, I consider three of Saville’s paintings. Plan, Saville’s self-portrait as a nude female whose body has been prepped for liposuction, conveys the pathos of this procedure. Matrix is a nude portrait of self-described “gender variant visual artist” Del LaGrace Volcano. In the words of one critic Saville’s depiction of Volcano’s nude intersexed body “restores beauty to the primitive [female] genital organ.” Passage, another nude portrait of an intersexed individual, is an image of vibrant sexuality despite the presumptively jarring juxtaposition of breasts and a penis. I argue that conceiving the agentic subject as a rational deliberative capability that uses a conjoined body as the instrument of its will makes it impossible to theorize the agency of transgendered people. In contrast, when agentic subjects are understood as embodied subjects and embodiment is understood as a dimension of practical intelligence, the agency of transgendered individuals is intelligible. (shrink)

In this paper I propose and develop a social account of global autonomy. On this view, a person is autonomous simply to the extent to which it is difficult for others to subject her to their wills. I argue that many properties commonly thought necessary for autonomy are in fact properties that tend to increase an agent’s immunity to such interpersonal subjection, and that the proposed account is therefore capable of providing theoretical unity to many of the otherwise heterogeneous requirements (...) of autonomy familiar from recent discussions. Specifically, I discuss three such requirements: (i) possession of legally protected status, (ii) a sense of one’s own self-worth, and (iii) a capacity for critical reflection. I argue that the proposed account is not only theoretically satisfying but also yields a rich and attractive conception of autonomy. (shrink)

Feminist strong substantive autonomy (FSSA), as presented by Natalie Stoljar and Anita Superson, pronounces judgment on the autonomy status of certain women living under oppression. These women act on deformed desires, Superson explains, and as deformed desires cannot be the agent's own, the women are heteronomous. Stoljar argues that some women's choices violate the Feminist Intuition; by acting on false and oppressive values, these women render themselves heteronomous. I argue against Stoljar and Superson on epistemological grounds. I present six different (...) ways in which agents' choices can be related to deformed desires, with varying results for their autonomy statuses. I show that Stoljar and Superson are not able to distinguish properly among the differing autonomy statuses in these six cases, because doing so requires attention to agents' inner processes of decision-making, as those processes are enacted in the agents' social and temporal contexts. Stoljar and Superson judge others' autonomy statuses based on abstract generalizations rather than via empirical attention to agents' actual decision-making processes. Consequently, their judgments are not adequate to the lived self-direction of real persons. Assessing others' autonomy status requires consideration of agents' inner choice-making in sociotemporal context, which favors a procedural or weak substantive account of autonomy. (shrink)

This paper presents a relational account of autonomy showing that a technological imperative impedes autonomy through undermining women’s capacity to resist use of technology in the context of labor and birth. A technological imperative encourages dependence on technology for reassurance whenever possible through creating a (i) separation of maternal and fetal interests; and (ii) perceived need to use technology whenever possible. In response I offer an account of how women might promote autonomy through cultivating self-trust and self-confidence. Autonomy is not (...) simply a matter of choosing freely and acting on our choices, it is also a matter of possessing the ability to resist social contexts undermining choice and action. An important implication of this view is that respecting autonomy requires more than simply respecting persons’ ability to make and act on choices. Respecting patient autonomy requires a recognition of patients’ need to resist factors impeding autonomy and support for that resistance. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to analyze the relational theory of personal autonomy proposed by Catriona Mackenzie. First, the theoretical context of the theory is shown, including key features and examples of relational theories of personal autonomy. Then Mackenzie's theory is presented, according to which seven conditions of autonomy should be distinguished. The conditions are grouped into three separate axes: self-determination, self-governance, and self-authorization. According to the theory, none of the conditions is necessary, and the assessment of the level (...) of an individual's autonomy is to be contextual. Finally, an attempt is made to assess the value of the conception proposed by the Australian scholar. It is argued that the condition of authenticity of practical identity should be replaced with the condition of coherence of practical identity. It is also suggested that for the theory to be useful in assessing the autonomy of decisions it should be supplemented with two further conditions: the coherence of a decision made by a person with her practical identity, and the absence of controlling influence such as coercion, persuasion, and manipulation. (shrink)

A summary of the philosophical literature on trust.

This paper examines developing trust in two related senses: (1) rationally overcoming distrust, and (2) developing a mature capacity for trusting/distrusting. In focussing exclusively on the first problem, traditional philosophical discussions fail to address how an evidence- based paradigm of rationality is easily co-opted by (immature) agents in support of irrational distrust (or trust) - a manifestation of the second problem. Well-regulated trust requires developing a capacity to tolerate the uncertainties that chracterise relationships among fully autonomous self-directed agents. Early relationships (...) lack this uncertainty since care-givers take primary responsibility for determining a child's interests, reducing the scope (if not the intensity) of potential conflict between self and other. Once agents recognize that adulthood demands foregoing the security embedded in such relationships of dependency, they are free to embrace a more appropriate paradigm of rationality for guiding their thought and action in interactions with others. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article explores the idea that there is a spectrum of individuals who feel compelled to dwell in the past, either due to psychological or social conditions. I analyze both conditions respectively by critically examining two cases: post-traumatic stress disorder and racialized oppression. I propose that individuals with PTSD can feel psychologically compelled to dwell in the past in a dually negative sense: the individual lives in the past but also broods on it, causing them to feel “stuck” in the (...) past. This kind of “dwelling” can cause individuals to suffer disruptions to their sense of self and intersubjectivity. After exploring the psychological case of dwelling in the past, I explore the social sense in which individuals can dwell in the past due to oppressive social structures by examining the case of racialized oppression. The case of racialization is philosophically stimulating because of its intersubjective dimensions—it subverts the idea that dwelling in the past is simply a psychological phenomenon by capturing that others can help or hinder us with maintaining a sense of self and future-directed intentionality. By putting the phenomenological work of Al-Saji into conversation with recent phenomenological research on incarceration, I propose that racialization can be similarly disruptive to one’s sense of self and intersubjectivity. The proposed account is suggestive that traumatic and oppressive experiences may amplify and compound each other in ways not yet well elucidated in the literature. If this account is taken to be persuasive, it is indicative that both psychological and social conditions mediate one’s temporality and well-being. (shrink)

In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a (...) flurry of books making “self-help” arguments about how we could live happier, more fulfilling lives if we were less addicted to our phones. But none of these authors see this issue as one involving a moral duty to protect our autonomy. (shrink)

Self‐trust is essential to the well‐being of people with chronic illnesses and those who care for them. In this exploratory essay, we draw on a trove of health narratives to catalyze examination of this important but often overlooked topic. We explore how self‐trust is impeded at both personal and structural levels, how it can best be nourished, and how it is related to self‐advocacy. Because people's ability to trust themselves is intrinsically linked to the trust others have in them, we (...) pay particular attention to the role that allies such as clinical professionals play in the development of self‐trust, highlighting the importance of eliciting patient narratives, of curious listening, and of compassionately raising questions. We also contrast the self‐trust paradigm with that of self‐management, which tends to replace the former's attention to patients’ experiences, abilities, qualities, or judgments with a professionally dominated discourse dedicated to addressing illness through behavior changes prescribed by clinicians. We close with a call to action, exhorting readers to focus on supporting self‐trust in health care settings and on creative research in this critical yet heretofore underrepresented domain. (shrink)

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been incapable of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon agential demotion. (shrink)

There is a strong presumption that mental disorder injures a person's autonomy, understood as a set of capacities and as an ideal condition of agency which is worth striving for. However, recent multidimensional approaches to autonomy have revealed a greater diversity in ways of being autonomous than has previously been appreciated. This presumption, then, risks wrongly dismissing variant, neuro-atypical sorts of autonomy as non-autonomy. This is both an epistemic error, which impairs our understanding of autonomy as a phenomenon, and a (...) moral error, which withholds recognition and respect that autonomous agents are due. I argue that careful attention to the different 'shapes' of agent's autonomy reveals that there are indeed distinctive kinds of neuro-atypical autonomy that are widely mistaken for non-autonomy. This project argues for two propositions. First, that there is a kind of autonomy, with a distinctive shape and texture, available to bipolar agents. This is a variant sort of autonomy, but not a defective or deficient sort. It is the ideal of autonomy that it is worth bipolar agents striving for, given the range and intensity of experiences that they will have to confront. Whilst bipolar autonomy will look unlike more neurotypical kinds of autonomy, it continues to be owed recognition. The second proposition is that we should understand the ideal of autonomy to be both pluralist and highly context sensitive. Given the range of starting points from which agents will strive to an ideal of autonomy, there will be some variation in the ideals worth striving for. The variation in ideals will reflect the existential realities they are local to. Theory of autonomy must be adapted to recognise bipolar, and other neuro-atypical, kinds of autonomy, and to reflect this wider pluralism. These propositions will be argued for with careful attention to the experiences and agency of people living with bipolar, or related, disorders. Understanding the ways that manic or depressive episodes, and the shifts between them, alter and apply pressure to our agency will inform an account of the distinctively bipolar autonomy that can be built on top of it. (shrink)

Many popular artificial intelligence (AI) ethics frameworks center the principle of autonomy as necessary in order to mitigate the harms that might result from the use of AI within society. These harms often disproportionately affect the most marginalized within society. In this paper, we argue that the principle of autonomy, as currently formalized in AI ethics, is itself flawed, as it expresses only a mainstream mainly liberal notion of autonomy as rational self-determination, derived from Western traditional philosophy. In particular, we (...) claim that the adherence to such principle, as currently formalized, does not only fail to address many ways in which people’s autonomy can be violated, but also to grasp a broader range of AI-empowered harms profoundly tied to the legacy of colonization, and which particularly affect the already marginalized and most vulnerable on a global scale. To counter such a phenomenon, we advocate for the need of a relational turn in AI ethics, starting from a relational rethinking of the AI ethics principle of autonomy that we propose by drawing on theories on relational autonomy developed both in moral philosophy and Ubuntu ethics. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to move toward a relational moral theory of harm through examination of a common yet underexplored form of child maltreatment: childhood psychological abuse. I draw on relational theory to consider agential, intrapersonal, and interpersonal ways in which relational harms develop and evolve both in intimate relationships and in conditions of oppression. I set forth three distinctive yet interconnected forms of relational harm that childhood psychological abuse causes: harm to the relational agency of individuals, harm (...) to the relationships individuals hold with themselves, especially with regard to how they respect, know, and trust themselves, and harm to interpersonal relationships of both a direct and indirect nature in present and future timeframes. I close by noting that while relationships can be the site of human brutality that destroys the relational self, paradoxically and promisingly, they also can be a primary means of the relational reconstitution of the self. Ultimately, relational analyses of the harms of childhood psychological abuse reveal several key elements of a relational theory of harm and demonstrate the significance of relational harms for moral philosophy. (shrink)

In the debates regarding the ethics of human organoid biobanking, the locus of donor autonomy has been identified in processes of consent. The problem is that, by focusing on consent, biobanking processes preclude adequate engagement with donor autonomy because they are unable to adequately recognise or respond to factors that determine authentic choice. This is particularly problematic in biobanking contexts associated with organoid research or the clinical application of organoids because, given the probability of unforeseen and varying purposes for which (...) a donor’s organoids could be employed and given the different ways in which a donor can relate to her biospecimens, a donor can value her organoids differently in different contexts and her reasons for autonomously permitting use of her cells and tissues in one case may not support an autonomous decision in another. In response, this paper has three aims: firstly, to make the case for why organoid biobanks ought to respect donor autonomy conceived as authentic choice; secondly, to explore the autonomy-respecting limits of established and widely prevalent models of biobank consent; and thirdly, to propose certain conditions that organoid biobanks ought to support or facilitate in order to respect donor autonomy. (shrink)

Respect for patient autonomy is a central principle of medical ethics. However, there are important unresolved questions about the characteristics of an autonomous decision, and whether some autonomous preferences should be subject to more scrutiny than others. In this paper, we consider whether _inappropriately adaptive preferences_—preferences that are based on and that may perpetuate social injustice—should be categorised as autonomous in a way that gives them normative authority. Some philosophers have argued that inappropriately adaptive preferences do not have normative authority, (...) because they are only a reflection of a person’s social context and not of their true self. Under this view, medical professionals who refuse to carry out actions which are based on inappropriately adaptive preferences are not in fact violating their patient’s autonomy. However, we argue that it is very difficult to articulate a systematic and principled distinction between normal autonomous preferences and inappropriately adaptive preferences, especially if this distinction needs to be useful for clinicians in real-life situations. This makes it difficult to argue that inappropriately adaptive preferences are straightforwardly non-autonomous. Given this problem, we argue that there are significant theoretical issues with contemporary understandings of autonomy in bioethics. We discuss what this might mean for the practice of medicine and for medical ethics education. (shrink)

Nietzsche talks about trust [vertraue*] and mistrust [misstrau*] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to trust in 90 passages and mistrust in 101 – approximately ten times as often as he refers to resentment/ressentiment. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and trust includes just a handful of publications. Worse still, I have been unable to find a single publication devoted to Nietzsche and mistrust. This chapter aims to fill (...) the gap in the secondary literature by using digital humanities methods to systematically investigate the functions of trust and mistrust in Nietzsche’s writings. I argue that Nietzsche offers three main insights into trust and an additional two into mistrust. When it comes to trust, in his free spirit works, he reflects on the development of interpersonal trust, with an eye to situations in which trust is or is not reciprocated. He also criticizes some of the heuristics people use to identify trustworthy partners, especially the notion that all and only people with stable character are trustworthy. And perhaps Nietzsche’s most interesting thoughts about trust relate to self-trust, which he thinks is often unjustifiably undermined. When it comes to mistrust, although he regards generalized mistrust as a sign of bad character, he also thinks that harnessing mistrust can be valuable in at least two domains. One is morality, where we are disposed to accept traditional pieties and would benefit from turning a suspicious eye towards these pieties. The other is science, which systematizes both trust and mistrust in pursuit of the truth. (shrink)

Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that digitally fuses the parts of different (...) women to create pliable characters incapable of giving consent to their depiction. Next, we develop the idea of ‘illocutionary wronging’, in which an individual is forced to engage in speech acts they would prefer to avoid in order to deny or correct the misleading evidence of a publicized deepfake. Finally, we consider the risk that deepfakes may facilitate campaigns of ‘panoptic gaslighting’, where many systematically altered recordings of a single person's life undermine their memory, eroding their sense of self and ability to engage with others. Taken together, these harms illustrate the roles that social epistemology and technological vulnerabilities play in human ethical life. (shrink)

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical (...) thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble. This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms. (shrink)

People with gut issues are often constrained in the foods they are able to eat. The choices they are able to make about food, however, are shaped not merely by specific medical and dietary needs but also by social, relational, and environmental factors such as the presence of trusted and supportive others who take their needs seriously. Drawing on work in disability theory and relational autonomy, as well as interviews undertaken in summer 2019, the paper explores the ways that choices (...) are enabled or undermined, and argues that these should be taken into account in work on the ethics and politics of food. (shrink)

The High Court continues to exercise its inherent jurisdiction to make declarations about interventions into the lives of situationally vulnerable adults with mental capacity. In light of protective responses of health care providers and the courts to decision-making situations involving capacitous vulnerable adults, this paper has two aims. The first is diagnostic. The second is normative. The first aim is to identify the harms to a capacitous vulnerable adult’s autonomy that arise on the basis of the characterisation of situational vulnerability (...) and autonomy as fundamentally opposed concepts or the failure to adequately acknowledge the conceptual relationship between them at common law. The second part of this aim is to draw upon developments in analytic feminist philosophy to illustrate how standard approaches to autonomy are ill-equipped to capture the autonomy issues of capacitous vulnerable adults when their decisions regarding care and treatment are at stake. The second (normative) aim is to develop an account of self-authorised, intersubjective autonomy on the basis of analytic feminist insights into the relational practices of recognition. This account not only attempts to capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults and account for the necessary harms to their autonomy that arise from standard common law responses to their situational vulnerability, it is also predicated on the distinctions between mental capacity, the satisfaction of conditions for informed consent and the exercise of autonomy, meaning that it is better placed to fulfil the primary aim of the inherent jurisdiction – to facilitate the autonomy of vulnerable adults with capacity. (shrink)

En los sectores políticos democráticos liberales, el principio del respeto a la autonomía es ampliamente aceptado —en teoría, si no siempre en la práctica— como un valor moral cardinal que debería guiar tanto la deliberación política, la política pública y las prácticas, como nuestras actitudes respecto a nuestros conciudadanos. En términos simples, respetar la autonomía es respetar los intereses de cada persona de vivir su vida según su propia concepción del bien. En la base del requisito normativo de respetar la (...) autonomía de otro está la presunción de que la autonomía confiere autoridad normativa sobre la propia vida; la autoridad para tomar decisiones de importancia práctica para la propia vida, por razones propias, cualesquiera que sean. Se asume que las personas autónomas tienen la capacidad, el derecho y la responsabilidad de ejercer esta autoridad, incluso si no siempre lo hacen sabiamente. (shrink)

Muchos autores que se han ocupado de la autonomía personal parecen identificar la capacidad de autonomía esencialmente con la capacidad de todo agente racional para identificar preferencias y tomar decisiones conforme a las mismas. Estos autores -entre los que podríamos ubicar a C. Nino- prescinden a menudo de ulteriores elementos o condiciones para su ejercicio. Sin embargo, resulta fundamental ahondar en esos aspectos a veces pasados por alto; ahondar principalmente en las opciones y el proceso de formación de preferencias de (...) los agentes, para delinear mejor los aspectos normativos de la autonomía. En este trabajo propongo recuperar un elemento central del concepto que ha sido extensamente desarrollado en la literatura feminista, me refiero al contexto de relaciones que ha dado lugar a la llamada "autonomía relacional". Propongo incorporar esta noción al núcleo conceptual de la autonomía sin renunciar, sin embargo, a otros elementos del concepto entre los que destacaré las "opciones relevantes", es decir, la presencia de cursos de acción, de oportunidades, que la persona es capaz de reconocer como propuestas no solo viables sino legítimas para sí. Para desarrollar esta idea comenzaré por definir la autonomía a través de los que considero los elementos o condiciones centrales del concepto, deteniéndome especialmente en la condición de opciones relevantes. A continuación se abordará la cuestión relativa al modo en que las opciones se perfilan, se construyen y son percibidas por los sujetos. En este punto el estudio se fijará específicamente en el entorno contextual y de relaciones que sirve de trasfondo para la construcción de las opciones, para proponer la noción de opciones relacionales. Many authors have written about autonomy focusing mainly on the capacity of the autonomous agent for identifying preferences and making decisions. These authors -C. Nino among them- do not take into consideration further elements or conditions for being autonomous. However, it is necessary to take other aspects into consideration; mainly it is important to take account of both options and the building of the agent’s preferences. This way, autonomy normative aspects will be better understood. I propose here to analyse the concept of "relational autonomy", which has been largely elaborated within feminist theory. My aim is to incorporate relations and options to the core of the concept of personal autonomy. In this article, I will define personal autonomy first, highlighting the importance of relevant options. Second, I will describe the way options are built and their perception by the agent. Finally, I will focus on the context and relations on the background, and I will propose the notion of relational options. (shrink)

This paper explores the role trust plays in the context of health care partnerships where the preservation of autonomy is desired. The case of IN RE: Maria Isabel Duran is used as a focal point for discussion. I argue that within the context of collective decision making of the sort that occurs in health care relationships, trust is consistent with autonomous agency, provided the trust is relational, a property of a triadic relation between the patient and her partners in health (...) care, and between the patient and herself. Moreover, if it is the autonomy of the patient that drives the nature and the direction of her medical options, we must respect a medical ethic of informed consent and durable powers of attorney and the patient’s right of selfgovernance this ethic serves. At the foundation of trust in others and in oneself is respect. (shrink)

Abstract This paper examines a convergence between Heidegger's reconceptualization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and some recent work in feminist philosophy on relational autonomy. Both view the concept of autonomy to be misguided, given that our capacity to be self-directed is dependent upon our ability to enter into and sustain meaningful relationships. Both attempt to overturn the notion of a subject as an isolated, atomistic individual and to show that selfhood requires, and is based upon, one's relation to and dependence upon (...) others. The paper argues that Heidegger's notion of authentic Mitsein (being-with) rejects traditional notions of autonomy and subjectivity in favor of a relational model of selfhood. Ultimately, it provides a new point of entry into contemporary debates within feminist philosophy on Heidegger's thinking and defends Heidegger from certain feminist critiques. (shrink)

In this article I wish to show how care ethics puts forward a fundamental critique on the ideal of independency in human life without thereby discounting autonomy as a moral value altogether. In care ethics, a relational account of autonomy is developed instead. Because care ethics is sometimes criticized in the literature as hopelessly vague and ambiguous, I shall begin by elaborating on how care ethics and its place in ethical theory can be understood. I shall stipulate a definition of (...) care ethics as a moral perspective or orientation from which ethical theorizing can take place. This will mean that care ethics is more a stance from which we can theorize ethically, than ready-made theory in itself. In conceiving care ethics in this way, it becomes possible to make clear that, for instance, a moral concept of autonomy is not abandoned, but instead is given a particular place and interpretation. In the final part of this article I will show how ‘relational autonomy’ can be applied fruitfully in the practice of psychiatric care. (shrink)

A debate persists over how to distinguish manic states from non-manic ones (such as depressions). A lacuna exists amongst these efforts, where a specifically agentive account of mania would sit. An agentive account centers the manic person’s view of practical reasons, rationalizing their actions in the same way that sympathetic understandings rationalize the actions of more neurotypical agents. In this paper, I argue that mania restructures our agency by creating a pervasive sense of urgency. This urgency changes the kind of (...) handling that our practical reasons seem to call out for. Whilst this can make us less reliable as agents, I argue that this does not undermine the basic capacities on which personal autonomy is founded. The greater threat to manic agents’ autonomy is nonrecognition of this restructured agency, undermining autonomy in its social dimensions. Without an agentive account, we will fail to recognize distinctly manic agency when we see it, limiting our understanding of autonomy, and withholding recognition, fundamental to autonomy in its social dimensions, from manic agents. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Self‐esteem is traditionally regarded as an important human good. But it has suffered a number of injuries to its good name. Critics allege that endeavours to promote self‐esteem merely foster narcissism or entitlement, and urge that we redirect our efforts elsewhere. I argue that such criticisms are symptomatic of a normative decline in how we think and theorize about self‐esteem rather than a defect in the construct itself. After exposing the shortcomings of alternative proposals, I develop an account of self‐esteem (...) that reflects what its supporters have in mind: a valuable form of self‐appraisal worth fostering in others and ourselves. (shrink)

I begin the chapter with research, reported recently in The Atlantic, on the surprising phenomenon that many successful women, all accomplished and highly competent, exhibit high degrees of self-doubt. Unlike the original research, the chapter aims to bring into view the role self-respect plays in higher education as another crucial explanatory factor. First, I clarify the main concepts that are relevant for getting a clear view of the notion of self-respect: different kinds of self-respect and the connection to the notion (...) of self-esteem are discussed. After this, in section III, I move on to the main theoretical positions that historically have put self-respect in the centre of their theorizing. The story starts with Immanuel Kant, continues with John Rawls, and ends with the influential accounts of Axel Honneth, Avishai Margalit and several feminist thinkers. Having covered the theoretical and conceptual landscape, I finally connect self-respect to higher education both on the systematic as well as on the more applied level of thinking. I then wrap up the chapter by connecting back to The Atlantic story we have started out with as well as make suggestions of further reading for those with deeper interest in the topic. I also provide a a brief list of the main takeaways as well propose some questions for discussion. (shrink)

In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, they must be sifted from the spammers, concern trolls, practical jokers, conspiracy theorists, counterintelligence sock-puppets, and outright liars who also proliferate online. (...) We can approach this problem via the individual or via the network, asking two questions. First, holding the topology of the network constant, which moral and epistemic dispositions are conducive to successful inquiry by nodes at different positions within it? Second, holding the distribution of people’s epistemic dispositions constant, which network topologies are more likely to produce epistemic goods and avoid epistemic ills? To answer these questions, we need to combine virtue-theoretic reflection on individual dispositions with a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of networks. In this paper, I highlight and explore some important properties of such networks and connect those properties with dispositions that make someone an excellent member of an epistemic network. (shrink)

There is a crisis of leadership in sport. Leadership as an athletic excellence is under threat from the deepening influence of coaches on in-game decision- making. To appreciate what is being lost in this shift of responsibility, it is necessary to understand the challenge of athlete leadership. Captaincy is the quintessential on-field leadership role. However, the role of captain, and athlete leadership more widely, remains philosophically untheorized. This paper initiates a discussion of leadership in sport by providing the first normative (...) account of captaincy. Rugby union is used as a case study, as this sport preserves an especially demanding and complex form of captaincy that may provide a rough template for the revival of athlete leadership in other sports. A virtue theoretical analysis of the role is developed based on a functionalist conception of virtue. It is argued that discharging the responsibilities of such captaincy requires two key virtues: ‘sporting judgement’ and ‘responsibility’. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an account of the relationship between self-esteem and moral experience. In particular, drawing on feminist and phenomenological accounts of affectivity and ethics, I argue that self-esteem has a primary role in moral epistemology and moral action. I start by providing a characterization of self-esteem, suggesting in particular that it can be best understood through the phenomenological notion of “existential feeling.” Examining the dynamics characteristic of the so-called “impostor phenomenon” and the experience of women who are (...) involved in abusive relationships, I then claim that self-esteem fundamentally shapes the way in which self and others are conceived, and the ethical demands and obligations to which they are considered to be subjected. More specifically, I argue that low self-esteem—which in the experience of women may be rooted in particular assumptions regarding gender roles and stereotyping—can hinder autonomy, make it difficult to question other people's evaluative perspectives and behaviors, and attribute to others responsibility for their actions. (shrink)