Autonomy

= =    Autonomy is the right to self-government and is a concept found in moral, political and bioethical philosophy.  In both moral and political philosophies, autonomy is used as the basis for determining moral responsibility for one's own actions. In the philosophy of bioethics, autonomy is the discourse of health officials in allowing patients to exercise governance concerning their medical care and treatment.
 * [[image:http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:SQ8rcw8wNlhaFM:http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/immanuel-kant.jpg width="161" height="211" align="left"]]Autonomy**  refers to the capacity of a rational individual to make an educated, un-coerced decision. The notion finds its original constructs within the Greek term //auto-nomos // — //auto //  meaning "self," and //nomos //  meaning "laws" . An autonomous person is, fundamentally, one who is able to act according to his or her own direction. This proficiency is the prerequisite for rational human action, according to   the theory’s founder  Immanuel Kant, a key figure in philosophical history, and in particular, deontological ethics.



Philosophical Foundations and Morally Ethical Autonomy
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">Metaphysical and <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">epistemological  <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> philosophies, (the processes of thinking about how we know things, and what it means to exist), include the consideration of what it means to be an individual. Where does the individual stop and the external world begin? What is the nature of self? Much research has been undertaken in response to these questions, from ancient philosophers to contemporary public relations practitioners, and several explanations that have been considered include the nature of individual freedom to govern one's own actions within the laws of the land, the customs of a society, and the informal power structure of an organization. <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> Autonomy in ethics <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">refers to a person's capacity for self-determination in the context of moral choices and makes decisions based on a course of action out of respect for moral <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; text-decoration: none;"> duty <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">. That is, an autonomous person makes moral decisions solely for the sake of doing "good", independently of other incentives. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">Kant argues that “we can be certain of the principles that arise from the combination of the forms of our sensibility and understanding, as products of our own intellectual autonomy.” <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">His fundamental rule of ethics, the @categorical imperative <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">, suggests that people may simply ask whether a motive behind a given action treats people with dignity as individuals, and whether the motive is able to be universally applied to all people, at all times, in similar situations. If the answer is yes to both, generally, the action is considered to be moral. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> Kant applied this concept in his definition of personhood and suggested that such compliance with moral law creates the essence of human <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">  <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; text-decoration: none;"> dignity <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> For example, if one is forced to steal or set a fire at gunpoint, the ethical nature of the act would be considered quite differently than theft or arson of one's own volition. Autonomous decisions are also those based on reason alone, and not "biased by self-interest, profit, greed, arrogance, or like reasons that would promote personal advantage." <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;"> This philosophical background is an important reflection on the question of autonomy in public relations.

Autonomy in Public Relations
//<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Autonomy is important to the public relations practitioner or issues manager for the reason that it allows the decision maker to use rationality as a guide to the right decision, rather than making a decision tainted by prudential norms. Prudential norms are self-interested concerns that promote one's personal advantage or the advantage of the organization or client. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;"> // <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;">Academic scholars and corporate leaders have long questioned the appropriate extent to which autonomy is demonstrated within organizations. The ability to provide unbiased counsel is particularly important at senior levels of public relations, and danger lies in decisions based upon greed or personal gain. <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">At the strategic level, the PR practitioner has the freedom to be autonomous, and can be guided by such ethical guidelines as the categorical imperative. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">On a tactical level, however, organizational autonomy tends to decrease, as ethical guidelines and questions become increasingly unclear and more difficult to apply <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">For example, while a senior manager may have the autonomy to wrestle with questions of corporate positions on important issues, the tactician writing a press release about the ensuing position may not have this luxury. <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;"> Autonomy in public relations is also found within crisis communications. The ways in which an organization responds to a crisis are increasingly seen as reflective of organizational strategic management and decision-making autonomy. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">Several studies have advocated that autonomous strategic thinking on the part of the public relations professional is a critical function, as it has, in particular, been documented to aid in early detection of threats. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">

Political Autonomy
Political Autonomy is the self-governance of an individual person, group or institution. The term is also used for other self-governing units, such as a parish, a corporation, or a religious sect. Political autonomy is frequently based on cultural and ethnic differences. A test of autonomy is the recognition that the group may make the rules governing its internal affairs, and within empires has frequently been a prelude to independence. <span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">In past decades, large movements of autonomism have emerged in the form of social democracy,anarchism, and the anarcho-capitalist movement.

Biomedical Autonomy
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">Respect for a patient’s autonomy is considered to be a fundamental biomedical ethical principle. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;">Autonomy is one of what is known as the “four principles” of bioethics – autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence and justice. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%; font-weight: normal;">In this context, autonomy entails that health care <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-weight: normal;"> <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;">professionals respect decisions made by competent adults concerning their personal health-care. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;">This principle is derived from an ancient foundation for interpersonal relationships <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;"> - a respect for persons as individuals. It exists as a counterweight to the medical profession’s long-practiced paternalism (or parentalism), wherein the practitioner acted on what he or she thought was "good" for the patient, whether or not the patient agreed. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;">Respect for the autonomy of patients is an important goal, though at times, it may conflict with the competing ethical principle, beneficence. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">This belief is the central premise of the concept of informed consent. Exploitative medical ‘experiments’ prompted calls for safeguards in medical research in the 1940s, yet “informed consent” hadn’t been widely used until the 1970s. Initially, discussions of informed consent focused almost exclusively on research subjects, yet have eventually been applied to the conventional physician-patient relationship. The seven elements of informed consent include threshold elements of competence and voluntariness, information elements of disclosure and recommendation and understanding, and consent elements of decision and authorization. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;"> Physicians have only grudgingly begun to accept patient autonomy in recent years. Autonomy in medical practice has changed the role of the physician to be a partner in their patients’ care rather than the arbiters of the timing, intensity, and types of treatment. Additionally, physicians have become educators, teaching their patients of their ailments and treatments so they are able to make educated and rational decisions. Finally, and most distressing and disheartening to health care professionals, is the need to accept that some patients will make uneducated and inappropriate decisions concerning their healthcare, often refusing treatment or opting for ineffective regimens. <span style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; border-collapse: collapse;">

Autonomy in the Professional Capacity
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">Autonomy and the Professional Capacity is seen as a person encompassing qualities and transferable skills necessary for further study, employment, community involvement and other activities requiring:
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">The exercise of initiative, personal responsibility and accountability in both personal and group contexts;
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 27px;">**<span style="color: black; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman'; line-height: 27px;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">Working effectively with others; and **
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> Decision-making in complex contexts

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;">Autonomy in this capacity includes having the ability to manage one’s own learning in changing circumstances, both within and outside the discipline to select an appropriate program of further study, and to exercise consistent behavior with academic integrity and social responsibility

Criticisms of Autonomy
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">An issue exists as to whether autonomy can exist harmoniously with control in a management setting. Many theorists have arrived at the conclusion that some degree of participation must be established in order to move forward to the management of business ethics.

Formal corporate statements of ethical principles, responsibilities or codes may serve to guide individual and collective judgment on ethical matters.

There is a call for ‘community’ in organizations and discussions of how, perhaps with help from enlightened management, ‘control’ might lead to autonomy in such cultures. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">

Conclusion
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">A certain amount of autonomy to one's own devices is inherent in any profession—the ability to act individually in a certain way with a certain kind of outcome is in fact what makes its members professionals.

Considered through the lens of ethics in public relations, autonomy may raise more questions than answers. It is certainly to be desired, especially at senior levels of public relations counsel such as issues management. <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">

<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">Full autonomy on the part of more tactical (and often junior) practitioners raises many other questions. Is there not merit in having a tactician want to make the decision that is best for the organization? This would contravene Kant's categorical imperative <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;">, yet would seem to be basic organizational practice. From an academic perspective, more research may be required in applying Kant's rules of autonomy at the tactical level of public relations. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> It is perhaps only responsible to consider the motivations behind a given course of action from a moral perspective, and Kant's categorical imperative provides guidance at these highest levels. When afforded autonomous reflection on issues, senior practitioners would be well-served to consider how their action might be willed for everyone in a similar situation, and the extent to which it uses people as a means to an end. <span style="color: #7030a0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">**See Also** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal;">1. Individualism 2. Autonomous <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%; font-weight: normal;">3. Ethical Principles 4. Personal Integrity 5. Independence 6. Sovereignty

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Further Reading ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Agich, G. (1994). Key concepts: Autonomy. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 1 // <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">(4), pp. 267-269.

Breaugh, J. A. (1999). Further investigation of the work autonomy scales: Two studies. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"> Journal of Business & Psychology, 13 //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">(3), 357-373.

Kerstein, S. J. (2008). Autonomy and practical law. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Philosophical Books, 49 //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">(2), 107-113.

Nelson, M. T. (2007). More Bad News for the Logical Autonomy of Ethics. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Canadian //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"> //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"> Journal of Philosophy, 37 //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">(2), 203-216.

Prior, A.N. (1976). The autonomy of ethics. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">Australian Journal of Philosophy, 38 //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">(2), 90- 3.

Quinn, A. (2008). Autonomy and responsibility in the practice of journalism. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 22 //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">(1), 117-132.

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