•  304
    Personal Autonomy and Society
    Journal of Social Philosophy 29 (1): 81-102. 1998.
  •  282
    Moral Accountability
    Philosophical Topics 32 (1-2): 255-274. 2004.
    The principal aim of this essay is to explore aspects of the phenomenon of moral conversation at work in ascriptions of responsibility. A corollary aim will be to understand the variety of freedom we regard as foundational to ascriptions of responsibility. To ascribe responsibility to a person is to judge that the person is accountable for her behavior. Accountability demands that a person be a moral interlocutor; being a moral interlocutor requires that a person is alert to moral reasons in f…Read more
  •  271
    How much should we value autonomy?
    Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2): 99-126. 2003.
    Autonomy generally is a valued condition for persons in liberal cultures such as the United States. We uphold autonomous agents as the exemplar of persons who, by their judgment and action, authenticate the social and political principles and policies that advance their interests. But questions about the value of autonomy are often problematic. They are problematic because they concern the kind of value autonomy has and not just how much value autonomy has when weighed against competing goods…Read more
  •  212
  •  117
    The misguided marriage of responsibility and autonomy
    The Journal of Ethics 6 (3): 261-280. 2002.
    Much of the literature devoted to the topics of agent autonomy and agent responsibility suggests strong conceptual overlaps between the two, although few explore these overlaps explicitly. Beliefs of this sort are commonplace, but they mistakenly conflate the global state of being autonomous with the local condition of acting autonomously or exhibiting autonomy in respect to some act or decision. Because the latter, local phenomenon of autonomy seems closely tied to the condition of being respon…Read more
  •  101
  •  96
    Moral taint
    Metaphilosophy 37 (3-4). 2006.
    Moral taint occurs when one’s personality has been compromised by the introduction of something that produces disfigurement of the moral psyche. While taint may be traced to vicarious liability for our voluntary associations, the thought that we might be responsible for taint and that taint is something we must confront and make amends for becomes problematic when taint is acquired by circumstantial luck. I argue that the idea of circumstantial taint—for example, the idea that people can be mo…Read more
  •  89
    Autonomy and liberalism * by Ben Colburn
    Analysis 71 (2): 399-402. 2011.
    Colburn’s ambition in this book is to defend a ‘political morality of autonomy-minded liberalism’. Colburn defines autonomy as the ability to live in accordance with what one has deemed valuable, and to bear responsibility for this decision. There is a traditional debate that forces liberalism either to identify itself as anti-perfectionist and thus as neutral on the question of autonomy’s value , or as pro-autonomy and perfectionist. Colburn alleges that this debate is premised on a logical err…Read more
  •  71
    Wanton responsibility
    The Journal of Ethics 2 (3): 261-276. 1998.
    Mainstream accounts of responsible agency either overlook or discount wanton agents as plausible candidates for responsible agency. This is largely due to the compatibilist project of such accounts, and to their deemphasis of historical and modal considerations. I argue that wantons – those who are indifferent to the desires that move them to act – can and ought to be counted as responsible agents. Indeed, they deserve special blame for the acts of wrong doing that issue from their wanton behavi…Read more
  •  66
    The reasons of love
    Journal of Value Inquiry 39 (3-4): 499-505. 2005.
  •  56
    Autonomy and the Partial-Birth Abortion Act
    Journal of Social Philosophy 42 (1): 46-60. 2011.
  •  55
    Trust and Autonomous Agency
    Res Philosophica 91 (3): 431-447. 2014.
    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 betwee…Read more
  •  46
    The essays in this volume open up reflection on the implications of social inequality for theorizing about moral responsibility. Collectively, they focus attention on the relevance of the social context, and of structural and epistemic injustice, stereotyping and implicit bias, for critically analyzing our moral responsibility practices.
  •  45
    The autonomy bogeyman
    Journal of Value Inquiry 35 (2): 209-226. 2001.
  •  36
    _Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression_ addresses the impact of social conditions, especially subordinating conditions, on personal autonomy. The essays in this volume are concerned with the philosophical concept of autonomy or self-governance and with the impact on relational autonomy of the oppressive circumstances persons must navigate. They address on the one hand questions of the theoretical structure of personal autonomy given various kinds of social oppression, and on the other, how con…Read more
  •  35
    Autonomy Naturalized
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1): 76-94. 1994.
  •  34
    Autonomy and the Question of Authenticity
    Social Theory and Practice 33 (3): 411-429. 2007.
  •  19
    Personal Autonomy in Society
    Routledge. 2006.
    Challenging many of the currently accepted conceptions of autonomy and of how it is valued, Oshana develops a social-relational account of autonomy that is constituted by a person's relations with others and by the absence of certain social relations. She denies that command over one's motives and the freedom to realize one's will are sufficient to secure the kind of command over one's life that autonomy requires, and argues against psychological, procedural, and content neutral accounts of auto…Read more
  •  15
    The Importance of How We See Ourselves: Self-Identity and Responsible Agency analyzes the nature of the self and the phenomena of self-awareness and self-identity in an attempt to offer insight into the practical role self-conceptions play in moral development and responsible agency
  •  11
    4. Memory, Self- Understanding, and Agency
    In Christopher Cowley (ed.), The Philosophy of Autobiography, University of Chicago Press. pp. 96-121. 2015.
  • Ascriptions of responsibility given commonplace relations of power
    In Marina Oshana, Katrina Hutchison & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility, Oup Usa. 2018.
  • Self-identity and moral agency
    In Michael Kühler & Nadja Jelinek (eds.), Autonomy and the Self, Springer. 2012.