•  255
    Personal Autonomy and the Paradox of Feminine Socialization
    Journal of Philosophy 84 (11): 619-628. 1987.
  •  13
    Kindred Matters: Rethinking the Philosophy of the Family
    with Margaret Coady, Kenneth Kipnis, and Cornelius F. Murphy
    Philosophical Quarterly 45 (180): 405. 1995.
  •  14
    No safe passage: ‘the mapping journey project’
    Journal of Global Ethics 12 (3): 252-259. 2016.
    This essay examines ‘The Mapping Journey Project’, an installation artwork by Bouchra Khalili. It consists of eight large video screens and headsets. In each video, a migrant draws a map of her/his journey to and in Europe and narrates her/his route. In collaboration with Khalili, I argue, these storyteller/draftspersons create a dissident cartography that superimposes their lived geography on the background of legal geography. Thus, ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ is a work of art that is also a …Read more
  •  79
    Part IV. Section 1. The Personal and the Political Value of Autonomy: Disparities in autonomy competency number among the many ways in which women and men in western societies are unequal. Meyers holds that although personal autonomy is not the sole or paramount value, medial autonomy is not only a personal good, but is also a political good.
  •  64
    Inalienable Rights: A Defense
    Philosophical Review 96 (2): 304-306. 1987.
  •  51
    Part II. Section 5. Interests, Self-Interest and Autonomy: Two questions drive this chapter: 1) What kinds of things can be objects of autonomous choices? and 2) How are these related to an individual's authentic self? If self-interest is construed as securing a set of basic goods for oneself, personal autonomy and self-interest can collide. Still, Meyers holds that autonomy based on exercising autonomy competency is compatible with the dominance principle, which counsels opting for a course of …Read more
  •  368
    : J. David Velleman develops a canny, albeit mentalistic, theory of selfhood that furnishes some insights feminist philosophers should heed but that does not adequately heed some of the insights feminist philosophers have developed about the embodiment and relationality of the self. In my view, reflexivity cannot do the whole job of accounting for selfhood, for it rests on an unduly sharp distinction between reflexive loci of understanding and value, on the one hand, and embodiment and relationa…Read more
  •  70
    Authenticity for Real People
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9 195-202. 2000.
    In this paper I shall offer an account of the authentic self that is compatible with human intrapsychic, interpersonal, and social experience. I begin by examiningHarry Frankfurt’s influential treatment of authenticity as a form of personal integration, and argue that his conception of the integrated self is too restrictive. I then offer an alternative processual account that views integration as the intelligibility of the self that emerges when a person exercises autonomy skills.
  •  8
    The Family Romance: A Fin-de-siecle Tragedy
    In Hilde Lindemann (ed.), Feminism and Families, Routledge. 1997.
  •  62
    Part III. Section 3. Autonomy and Feminine Socialization: Having agreed with Beauvoir that narcissism and altruism contribute to women's lack of autonomy, Meyers examines Beauvoir's account of autonomy in light of her own conception of autonomy competency and argues that Beauvoir's conception of autonomy is too stringent. Autonomy competency, in contrast, allows for degrees of autonomy and variations in degree as viewed over a life-time, as well as for a distinction between programmatic and epis…Read more
  •  40
    Rights-based rights
    Law and Philosophy 3 (3). 1984.
    Ronald Dworkin maintains that particular rights, like the right to free speech and the right to own personal property, can be derived from a foundational right, the right to equal concern and respect. This paper questions the tenability of this program for rights-based rights. A right is an individuated moral or political guarantee which confers a specified benefit on each right-holder and which resists conduct that would derogate it. For there to be rights-based rights, both the foundational ri…Read more
  •  49
    This paper considers two accounts of the self that have gained prominence in contemporary feminist psychoanalytic theory and draws out the implications of these views with respect to the problem of moral reflection. I argue that our account of moral reflection will be impoverished unless it mobilizes the capacity to empathize with others and the rhetoric of figurative language. To make my case for this claim, I argue that John Rawls's account of reflective equilibrium suffers from his exclusive …Read more
  •  107
    Part IV. Section 2. Self-Respect and Autonomy: Meyers's discussion of self-respect takes into account work by Stephen Darwall, Thomas Hill, Jr., and Stephen Massey and proposes a unified triadic account that undermines the distinction between self-respect and self-esteem. After distinguishing compromised respect from unqualified respect, she shows why self-respect is both required for and a product of exercising autonomy competency.
  •  9
    Human rights in pre-affluent societies
    Philosophical Quarterly 31 (123): 139-144. 1981.
  •  1
  •  122
    Women and Moral Theory (edited book)
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1987.
    To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
  •  1239
    Corporeal selfhood, self-interpretation, and narrative selfhood
    Philosophical Explorations 17 (2): 141-153. 2014.
    Ever since Freud pioneered the “talking cure,” psychologists of various stripes have explored how autobiographical narrative bears on self-understanding and psychic wellbeing. Recently, there has been a wave of philosophical speculation as to whether autobiographical narrative plays an essential or important role in the constitution of agentic selves. However, embodiment has received little attention from philosophers who defend some version of the narrative self. Catriona Mackenzie is an imp…Read more
  •  100
    Part I. The book begins with literary, cinematic, and historical scenarios that exemplify personal autonomy. Meyers uses these vignettes to distinguish personal autonomy from other, variously related types of autonomy and to show that other kinds of autonomy cannot adequately address the concern people have with their own personal decisions. Noting how profoundly social experience impinges on self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction, Meyers characterizes autonomous individuals as pers…Read more
  •  26
    The Rationale for Inalienable Rights in Moral Systems
    Social Theory and Practice 7 (2): 127-143. 1981.
  • The justice position and the care perspective
    In Eva Feder Kittay & Diana T. Meyers (eds.), Women and Moral Theory, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 4--10. 1987.
  •  9
    No Title available: Reviews
    Economics and Philosophy 3 (2): 351-361. 1987.
  •  738
    Recovering the Human in Human Rights
    Law, Culture, and Humanities 1-30. 2014.
    It is often said that human rights are the rights that people possess simply in virtue of being human – that is, in virtue of their intrinsic, dignity-defining common humanity. Yet, on closer inspection the human rights landscape doesn’t look so even. Once we bring perpetrators of human rights abuse and their victims into the picture, attributions of humanity to persons become unstable. In this essay, I trace the ways in which rights discourse ascribes variable humanity to certain categories of …Read more
  •  836
    Jenny Saville Remakes the Female Nude – Feminist Reflections on the State of the Art
    In Peg Brand (ed.), Beauty Unlimited, Indiana University Press. pp. 137-162. 2012.
    Jenny Saville is a leading contemporary painter of female nudes. This paper explores her work in light of theories of gender and embodied agency. Recent work on the phenomenology of embodiment draws a distinction between the body image and the body schema. The body image is your representation of your own body, including your visual image of it and your emotional attitudes towards it. The body schema is comprised of your proprioceptive knowledge, your corporeally encoded memories, and your c…Read more