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The Concept of Autonomy and Its Role in Kantian Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 February 2012

IAIN BRASSINGTON
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Extract

Among bioethicists, and perhaps ethicists generally, the idea that we are obliged to respect autonomy is something of a shibboleth. Appeals to autonomy are commonly put to work to support legal and moral claims about the importance of consent, but they also feed a wider discourse in which the patient’s desires are granted a very high importance and medical paternalism is regarded as almost self-evidently indefensible.

Type
Special Section: Kant, Habermas, and Bioethics
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 166 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

Notes

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18. Ibid., 4:436.

19. See note 12, Kant 1996, at 6:462.

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