•  68
    Autonomy and informed consent: A mistaken association? (review)
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 10 (3): 253-264. 2007.
    For decades, the greater part of efforts to improve regulatory frameworks for research ethics has focused on informed consent procedures; their design, codification and regulation. Why is informed consent thought to be so important? Since the publication of the Belmont Report in 1979, the standard response has been that obtaining informed consent is a way of treating individuals as autonomous agents. Despite its political success, the philosophical validity of this Belmont view cannot be taken f…Read more
  •  53
    The Limits of Neutrality: Toward a Weakly Substantive Account of Autonomy
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 257-286. 2000.
    Leading accounts of personal autonomy arecontent-neutral:they insist that there are noa prioriconstraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of person who acts at the co…Read more
  •  13
    The Limits of Neutrality: Toward a Weakly Substantive Account of Autonomy
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 257-286. 2000.
    Leading accounts of personal autonomy are content-neutral: they insist that there are no a priori constraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of person who acts at th…Read more
  •  9
    Constructing Universities for Democracy
    Studies in Philosophy and Education 42 (2): 181-200. 2023.
    Universities can sharpen their commitment to democracy through institutional change. This might be resisted by a traditional understanding of universities. The question arises whether universities have defining purposes that demarcate possible university policy, strategic planning, and priority setting. These are significant questions because while universities are among our most stable long-term institutions, there is little consensus on what they are, what they are for, and what makes them val…Read more
  • The Nature and Value of Individual Autonomy
    Dissertation, Cornell University. 1996.
    This dissertation provides an account of individual autonomy. It begins by arguing that the dispute, in social and political philosophy, between negative and positive conceptions of liberty, can only be solved based on a theory of autonomy. The bulk of the dissertation then defends the view that individual autonomy consists in the capacity to regulate one's actions by values that are one's own in virtue of having been adopted through a process of critical reflection. ;This sort of view is regard…Read more