AUTONOMY, Akhil Abraham

Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political, and bioethical Philosophy. Within these contexts, it refers to the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision. In moral and political Philosophy, autonomy is often used as the basis for determining moral responsibility for one's actions. One of the best known philosophical theories of autonomy was developed by Kant. In medicine, respect for the autonomy of patients is an important goals deontology, though it can conflict with a competing ethical principle, namely beneficence. Autonomy is also used to refer to the self-government of the people. Autonomy An ethical principle which, when applied to managed care, states that managed care organizations and their providers have a duty to respect the right of their members to make their own decisions about the course of their own live.   Human resource management: A degree or level of freedom and discretion allowed to an employee over his or her job. As a general rule, jobs with high degree of autonomy engender a sense of responsibility and greater job satisfaction in the employee. Not every employee, however, prefers a job with high degree of responsibility.  The word autonomy has several meanings in a philosophical context. In ethics, autonomy refers to a person's capacity for self-determination in the context of moral choices. Kant argued that autonomy is demonstrated by a person who decides on a course of action out of respect for moral duty. That is, an autonomous person acts morally solely for the sake of doing "good", independently of other incentives. In his Ground works of the Metaphysics of morals, Kant applied this concept to create a definition of personhood. He suggested that such compliance with moral law creates the essence of human dignity. In metaphysical philosophy, the concept of autonomy is referenced in discussions about free will, fatalism, determinism, and agency. Autonomy is central in certain moral frameworks, both as a model of the moral person the feature of the person by virtue of which she is morally obligated  and as the aspect of persons which ground others' obligations to them. For Kant, the self-imposition of universal moral law is the ground of both moral obligation generally and the respect others owe to us. In short, practical reason  our ability to use reasons to choose our own actions  presupposes that we understand ourselves as free. Freedom means lacking barriers to our action that are in any way external to our will, though it also requires that we utilize a law to guide our decisions, a law that can come to us only by an act of our own will. This self-imposition of the moral law is autonomy. And since this law must have no content provided by sense or desire, or any other contingent aspect of our situation, it must be universal. Hence we have the Categorical Imperative, that by virtue of our being autonomous we must act only on those maxims that we can consistently will as a universal law.