Autonomy

Jurgen Habermas has argued that carrying out pre-natal germline enhancements would be inimical to the future child's autonomy. In this article, I suggest that many of the objections that have been made against Habermas' arguments by liberals in the enhancement debate misconstrue his claims. To explain why, I begin by explaining how Habermas' view of personal autonomy confers particular importance to the agent's embodiment and social environment. In view of this, I explain that it is possible to draw two arguments against germline enhancements from Habermas' thought. I call these arguments ‘the argument from negative freedom’ and ‘the argument from natality’. Although I argue that many of the common liberal objections to Habermas are not applicable when his arguments are properly understood, I go on to suggest ways in which supporters of enhancement might appropriately respond to Habermas' arguments.

Debate about physician-assisted suicide has typically focused on the values of autonomy and patient well-being. Margaret Battin, Rosamond Rhodes and Anita Silvers note that both those in favour of legalizing physician-assisted suicide and those who want this activity to be legally prohibited claim these values in support of their case. This is understandable, even reasonable, given the importance of these values in bioethics. However, these are not the only moral values there are. The purpose of this paper is to examine physician-assisted suicide on the basis of the values of equality and justice. In particular, I evaluate two arguments that invoke equality, one in favour of physician-assisted suicide, one against it, and I argue that a convincing equality-based argument in support of physician-assisted suicide is available. I conclude by showing how an equality-based perspective transforms some secondary features of debate about this issue.

In order to find a convincing position in the ‘free will’ debate, two sorts of determinism are distinguished. The merits of encompassing determinism, which is determinism as it is usually understood, and individual determinism, which focuses on the agent, are brought to the fore. The existence of encompassing determinism cannot conclusively be proven, but it may be demonstrated, on the basis of individual determinism, that actions come about in a determined way, leaving no room for ‘free will’. In order to facilitate the discussion, recent scientific developments in such diverse fields as, e.g., quantum mechanics and neuropsychology are incorporated. Balancing the arguments, I aspire to a consistent and nuanced viewpoint, not eschewing divergent conclusions.

There are some signs that a resurgence of interest in modeling constitutive autonomy is underway. This paper contributes to this recent development by exploring the possibility of using evolutionary robotics, traditionally only used as a generative mechanism for the study of embodied-embedded cognitive systems, to generate simulation models of constitutively autonomous systems. Such systems, which are autonomous in the sense that they self-constitute an identity under precarious conditions, have so far been elusive. The challenges and opportunities involved in such an endeavor are explicated in terms of a concrete model. While we conclude that this model fails to fully satisfy all the organizational criteria that are required for constitutive autonomy, it nevertheless serves to illustrate that evolutionary robotics at least has the potential to become a valuable tool for generating such models.

Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency.

This article critically engages with Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy. It does so by taking into account the implications of Castoriadis’s enduring interest in the ecological devastation of the natural world, on the one hand, and the changing configuration of his philosophical anthropology, on the other—especially in regard to his reconsideration of the creativity of nature in the 1980s and the reconfiguration of the nomos and physis problematic. It contextualizes these movements in his thought within a broader hermeneutic of modernity that, following Johann Arnason, emphasizes the cultural currents of both Romanticism and the Enlightenment as constitutive of modernity as a field of tensions. In an extension of Arnason’s elaboration, however, the present article argues that a latent opening towards an ecological worldhood is implicit to Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity that, conversely, also finds Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy.

This paper offers a reflexive ethnography of a set of queer autonomous spaces created in London over the last five years. It traces the political genealogies of a recent strand of radical queer activism that is broadly aligned with the anarchist and anticapitalist wings of the global justice movement. In line with the usage of the term ‘queer’ by these activists themselves, to refer to a variety of states of being that challenge both homonormativity and heteronormativity, this paper utilises a definition of ‘queer’ that moves beyond the ways in which it has been mobilised by many sexual geographers. The ethnography poses questions about the ‘queer’ in ‘queer geography’ and what it means to be an ‘activist’. This work considers the importance (as well as the limits) of these autonomous queer spaces. It suggests that the process of collective experimentation to build autonomous queer spaces is ultimately more transformative and empowering than the resulting structures.

Based on interviews and social movement primary sources, this article critically analyzes the contributions of that current of Italian feminism which, while maintaining its distance, has both influenced and been influenced by the evolution from the neo-Marxist workerist movements of the 1960s to today’s global autonomist movements. Through the writings of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and other academics, and the activism of New Left-related feminists movements such as Lotta Feminista, one of the first transnational feminist movements, Wages for Housework, began to network in North America and Western Europe from the mid 1970s. In their campaign against sexual violence within the working class family as a disciplinary measure used by men to force unwaged housework from women, and their demands for waged housework, sex work and other forms of unwaged reproductive labour as part of an overall demand for a guaranteed social salary, these theoretician-activists have made links with grassroots, autonomous movements among mainly non-unionised women workers. They have critiqued the limits of both the liberal-feminist discourse on participation in the labour market as the prerequisite for equal opportunities, and the dependence of much socialist-feminist discourse on the centrality of the welfare state for female emancipation.

"THE BRUTAL MASSACRE of 45 indigenous sympathisers, mostly women
and children, of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) in a
refugee camp near Acteal in the south-eastern state of Chiapas,Mexico, last
December 22, at the hands of paramilitary death squads linked to the PRI
government served to remind world opinion that the ‘Rebellion of the Forgotten’
of January 1994 has moved from a low to a high intensity conflict.The success of
the Zapatistas in mobilising Mexican and international ‘civil society’, particularly
through the Internet, in a common struggle against the disastrous human and
environmental consequences of neoliberalism, globalisation and “free trade”and
for increased autonomy for indigenous peoples has forced the PRI regime, under
the instigation of the US government and World Bank, to adopt a more violent and
politically riskier strategy of repression through state terror. This has effectively
ended the phase of negotiations which led to the signing of the San Andrés
Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture in February 1996, which the PRI
(Party of the Institutional Revolution) regime has since refused to implement, so
intensifying the conflict."

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Italian “1977 Movement” in its conflict with the grey, humourless political system was its use of irony to ridicule its opponents. Irony was central to the identity of the movement and its cultural and political break with the institutional old and vanguardist new lefts. Its use, particularly by the “Metropolitan Indians”, the transversalists and other “creatives”, marked a social revolt by mainly marginalized young people, who invented a new political counter-culture based on linguistic experimentation in circumstances far from the optimism of 1968. The paper, based directly on primary sources from the movement and on interviews with former participants, reassesses a movement usually characterized as “violent” by Italianist social history. It concludes that the movement's “ironic praxis” contributed to a fundamental change in Italian society in the late seventies and has influenced the political style of contemporary alter-globalist and anti-capitalist movements.

In this paper, I examine the mobile territorial processes and practices that operate among participants in two global voluntary exchange networks. CouchSurfing (a free hospitality network) and WWOOF (an organic farming network) are part of a broad spectrum of alternative travel practices that rely on global networks of mutual aid between and among hosts and guests. Using ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I explore the everyday, mobile territorial practices and imaginaries of participants in WWOOF and CouchSurfing, relating them to broader political-economic and geopolitical processes of neoliberal globalisation. Mobility and territory have been conventionally positioned as in opposition or tension with one another, but recent work in Anglophone geography has emphasised the contested and uneven co-constitution of movement/borderlessness and fixity/enclosure in a globalised world. The counter-territorial practices of Couchsurfing and WWOOF participants may, therefore, offer us ways of imagining and creating global collectivities and solidarities that counteract prevailing statist-capitalist territorial logics and relations. Deploying a critical framework drawn from the anarchist theoretical tradition, I interrogate the extent to which the ‘infrapolitical’ practices of WWOOF and CouchSurfing participants offer alternative territorial models of relating and living globally.

We take self-governance or autonomy to be a central feature of human agency: we believe that our actions normally occur under our guidance and at our command. A common criticism of the standard theory of action is that it leaves the agent out of his actions and thus mischaracterizes our autonomy. According to proponents of the endorsement model of autonomy, such as Harry Frankfurt and David Velleman, the standard theory simply needs to be supplemented with the agent's actual endorsement of his actions in order to make room for our autonomy. I argue that their proposal fails and that a more substantive enrichment of the standard theory is called for. I sketch an alternative account of autonomy in which our capacity for basic executive control plays a central role.

"I try take some of the idealization out of Harry Frankfurt’s theory of love in his paper, "Autonomy, Necessity, and Love" in which he raises love to the status of being necessary and unconditional. The idealization in his position is not readily apparent, I argue, because he typically draws on more or less standard cases - his favorite paradigm being love of ones children. I argue that it’s important that an account of love cover cases falling outside the norm, otherwise, we may miss the extent to which certain well-scripted feelings and normalizing beliefs in the more standard cases are masking the complexities, instabilities, and darker variations of love.

I do not wish to deny or refute Frankfurt's concept of love, only to resituate his concept in a concrete context that can bring out its complex dynamism. My reconstructive critique is aimed to take some of the abstract purity out of his concept, by stretching its meaning over a wider field, to include nonstandard cases falling outside the norm. This required me to take a somewhat extended detour through some cases of adoption that are of growing interest to anthropologists and philosophers. I wished to frame the empirical details more generally within Frankfurt's larger theoretical framework about freedom and free will as it relates to love. These cases alert us to a special class of destabilizing features of love, most salient in nonstandard families, but equally present in their mainstream counterparts.
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This study has explored the use of portfolios and of awareness-raising of literacy networks in a CLIL lecture preparation class for first-year undergraduates in a Japanese university. It is argued that CLIL-related literature has a paucity of practical studies investigating these two elements essential to autonomy-building, particularly for students who have been previously mostly exposed to teacher-centered modes of instruction. Questionnaires asking students their perceptions of portfolio use and self-study were gathered over three years and were coupled with a one year small-scale data set of student-drawn ‘literacy maps’ exploring who and what materials students had consulted to produce a final lecture-related report. Findings revealed increased awareness of the importance of portfolio and self-study and even their cross-fertilization over to other classes across the language and content curricula; however, some reticence was evident regarding self-scoring in self-study mode, showing that the transition from traditional teacher-centredness at high school had not yet been overcome. Also, of importance was the initially extensive use of self-access center advisors which, when withdrawn, may have negatively impacted students’ literacy networks. Implications to be drawn from this study lie primarily in the expanded use of portfolios and increased awareness-raising of student networks as important means towards the development of autonomous study skills and literacy. Questions do, however, remain as to the extent that this approach actually mirrors English-medium instruction in content classes at the university.