Agency (philosophy)

About: Agency (philosophy) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10461 publications have been published within this topic receiving 350831 citations. The topic is also known as: Thought & Human agency.

The Illusion of Moral Superiority.

Abstract: Most people strongly believe they are just, virtuous, and moral; yet regard the average person as distinctly less so. This invites accusations of irrationality in moral judgment and perception-but direct evidence of irrationality is absent. Here, we quantify this irrationality and compare it against the irrationality in other domains of positive self-evaluation. Participants (N = 270) judged themselves and the average person on traits reflecting the core dimensions of social perception: morality, agency, and sociability. Adapting new methods, we reveal that virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities, and the absolute and relative magnitude of this irrationality was greater than that in the other domains of positive self-evaluation. Inconsistent with prevailing theories of overly positive self-belief, irrational moral superiority was not associated with self-esteem. Taken together, these findings suggest that moral superiority is a uniquely strong and prevalent form of "positive illusion," but the underlying function remains unknown.

The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

Abstract: THE QUESTION OF WOMEN IN CHINESE FEMINISM, BY TANI E. BARlOW, DUKHAM, NC: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004 Questions concerning the subject of women in Chinese feminism are conceptually as well as linguistically complex; historically constituted; nationalized and internationalized; and, in the present as in the past, under formation. Such arenas of complex meaning, and the similarly complex historical and geographical processes that have given rise to them, mean that ideas and understandings concerning feminism in China have been multiple and contested-even as they have been distinguished by points of consolidation-over the course of their trajectories. We are tempted to say that it is no wonder that the Chinese state and its institutions, as well as Chinese society at large, have had an uneven relationship with feminist perspectives and goals. But at the same time it is because of this complexity that questions concerning women and Chinese feminism are particularly compelling, especially in the context of contemporary processes of globalization, which have arguably reconsolida ted patriarchal positions of power, perennially acute in their effects, if not now more so. In The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, Tani Barlow seeks to accomplish several goals. She introduces the project as one that is centrally concerned with "the catachresis of women in modern Chinese intellectual history" (15). Barlow, however, is not content with literary interventions, and she adapts the notion of catachresis from Spivak in order to analyze the discourses and ideologies of Chinese feminism while also materially grounding them in the lives, times, and writings of the important feminist thinkers who have produced them and worked within them. The result is a dialectical history of the different concepts of Chinese feminism; a partial interpretation of the social, political, and economic realities in which they formed; and an analysis of the experiences of authorial agency in the context and within the limits of the always urgent and shifting political economy of twentieth-century China. Barlow also orients the project around the idea of colonial modernity, developed in her earlier writings, which anchors the multiple lines of inquiry in the book and bridges historical episodes that are otherwise often bracketed in Chinese historiography. It is unlikely that anyone but Barlow could so thoroughly set forth such an agenda. The complexity of ideas surrounding feminism in China substantially reflects the different linguistic categories concerning women and their subjects. In other words-literally-more than one Chinese word denotes women; this justifies Barlow's analytical approach. The two keywords centrally at stake, funu and nuxing (in addition to nuren and nuzf), are bound up in important social histories. Funu (women) is a collective noun, and its evolution cannot be understood apart from the family unit and the dynastic era; it historically connotes marriage, kinship, and even expectations concerning the appropriate behavior of a woman in relation to her husband's family. Loaded with meaning, as well as being intensely debated during the twentieth century, it implicates a full range of issues in patriarchal society. Nuxing (female sex) was a neologism of the 1920s and thus a term of modernity. Barlow identifies its associations, including international ideas concerning eugenics and self-selection of sexual partners. But even as it suggested new freedoms, it was not a term women evolved to describe themselves. These and other complex conditions suggest how the subject of women in China is a domestic arena of meaning formation that is closely connected to wider social issues, engaged with social theory broadly speaking, and informed by international debates. Barlow's analysis reminds us that feminist projects are not to be necessarily understood as contained within national or hemispheric (viz. Western) boundaries and that their formations are embedded simultaneously in national politics, class formations, historical political geographies, and transnational intellectual developments. …

Personal Autonomy: Feminist Intuitions and the Normative Substance of Autonomy

Abstract: The concept of personal autonomy has become a matter of considerable contention among feminists. For quite some time, many feminists disowned the concept for purposes of ethical and social theory, arguing that the notion of personal autonomy harbors dangerous masculinist implications. However, over the past decade it has become clear that autonomy is too useful for both critical and constructive purposes for feminists to abandon the concept altogether. If autonomous agency is intuitively a matter of claiming ownership of what one does and one's reasons for doing it, then some conception of autonomy, suitably “refigured,” would seem to be indispensable for feminist projects of personal, institutional, and social critique and transformation. Among feminists seeking to reconceive autonomous agency, there has arisen considerable contention about how normatively robust a conception of autonomy must be to underwrite feminist projects of ethical and social criticism and reconstruction. This has come at a time when the issue of autonomy's normative content has also been the subject of much debate among a wider circle of theorists. To put the matter (too) simply, some feminists argue that only a conception of autonomy that incorporates substantive normative commitments can adequately explain how oppressive modes of gender socialization can impair women's and men's autonomy. Other feminists argue that such substantive accounts of autonomy are intolerably restrictive because they clash with the fundamental conviction that autonomous agents must be self-directing or self-ruling in a manner that leaves them free to adopt or act upon normative commitments other than those that substantive theories prescribe.

Post-Communist Modernization, Transition Studies, and Diversity in Europe

Abstract: The majority of studies of post-communism – habitually grouped under the heading of 'transitology' – understand the transition ultimately as a political and cultural convergence of the ex-communist societies with Western Europe. Even those critical approaches that regard the post-communist transition as a relatively unique phenomenon (as in the approaches of path dependency and neo-classical sociology) tend to conflate normative prescriptions with empirical descriptions and to move within an overall framework of what Michael Kennedy has aptly called 'transition culture'. This article argues instead that the transition's nature can only be fully grasped if a case-specific and historical-contextual approach is taken. In theoretical terms, a three-step movement to grasp diversity in Central and Eastern Europe is proposed: (1) the acknowledgement of the plurality of modernizing agency and its creativity; (2) the acknowledgement of multi-interpretability and difference as primary elements of modernity; and (3)...