The Virtues of Vulnerability
Title | The Virtues of Vulnerability PDF eBook |
Author | Sara Rushing |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 227 |
Release | 2020-12-04 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0197516645 |
"There are many locations, relationships and experiences through which we learn what it means to be a citizen. Contemporary healthcare - or "the clinic" - is one of those sites. Being drawn into the complex "medical-legal-policy-insurance nexus" as a patient entails all sorts of learning, including, it is argued here, political learning. When we are subjected as a patient, frequently through a discourse of "choice and control," or "patient autonomy," what do we learn? What happens when the promise of a certain kind of autonomy is accompanied by demands for a certain kind of humility? What do we learn about agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge, dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute vulnerability? This book explores these questions on a journey through medicalized encounters with giving birth, navigating death and dying, and seeking treatment for life-altering mental illness (here PTSD among veterans). While the body has always posed a problem for Western thought, and been treated as an obstacle to freedom and independence and something our rational capacity must master and control, this book aims to counter that intellectual-historical and political tendency by asking how might we reimagine the political potential of embodiment, or make space for considering "the virtues of vulnerability." In particular, the book offers a novel conception of democratic citizen-subjectivity, grounded in an ethical disposition of humility-informed-relational-autonomy"--
The Virtues of Vulnerability
Title | The Virtues of Vulnerability PDF eBook |
Author | Sara Rushing |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 240 |
Release | 2020-11-20 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0197516653 |
Within the liberal tradition, the physical body has been treated as a focus of rights discussion and a source of economic and democratic value; it needs protection but it is also one's dominion, tool, and property, and thus something over which we should be able to exercise free will. However, the day-to-day reality of how we live in our bodies and how we make choices about them is not something over which we can exercise full control. In this way, embodiment mirrors life in a pluralist body politic: we are interdependent and vulnerable, exposed with and to others while desiring agency. As disability, feminist, and critical race scholars have all suggested, barriers to bodily control are often a problem of public and political will and social and economic structures that render relationality and caring responsibilities private, invisible, and low value. These scholarly traditions firmly maintain the importance of bodily integrity and self-determination, but make clear that autonomy is not a matter of mere non-interference but rather requires extensive material and social support. Autonomy is thus totally intertwined with, not opposed to, vulnerability. Put another way, the pursuit of autonomy requires practices of humility. Given this, what do we learn about agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge, dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute vulnerability? The Virtues of Vulnerability looks at the question of how we navigate "choice" and control over our bodies when it comes to conditions like birth, illness, and death, particularly as they are experienced within mainstream medical institutions operating under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. There is often a deep disconnect between what people say they want in navigating birth, illness, and death, and what they actually experience through all of these life events. Practices such as informed consent, the birth plan, advanced directives, and the patient satisfaction survey typically offer a thin and unreliable version of self-determination. In reality, "choice" in these instances is encumbered and often determined by our vulnerability at the most critical moments. This book looks at the ways in which we navigate birth, illness, and death in order to think about how vulnerability and humility can inform political will. Overall, the book asks under what conditions vulnerability and interdependence enhance or diminish our sense of ourselves as agents. In exploring this question it aims to produce a new vocabulary for democratic politics, highlighting traits that have profound political implications in terms of how citizens aspire, struggle, relate to, and persevere with each other.
Wounded Heroes
Title | Wounded Heroes PDF eBook |
Author | Marina McCoy |
Publisher | |
Pages | 247 |
Release | 2013-09-26 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199672784 |
McCoy examines how Greek epic, tragedy, and philosophy offer important insights into the nature of human vulnerability, especially how Greek thought extols the recognition and proper acceptance of vulnerability. Beginning with the literary works of Homer and Sophocles, she also expands her analysis to the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle.
Dignity and Vulnerability
Title | Dignity and Vulnerability PDF eBook |
Author | George W. Harris |
Publisher | University of California Press |
Pages | 160 |
Release | 2021-01-08 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0520356365 |
In this significant addition to moral theory, George W. Harris challenges a view of the dignity and worth of persons that goes back through Kant and Christianity to the Stoics. He argues that we do not, in fact, believe this view, which traces any breakdowns of character to failures of strength. When it comes to what we actually value in ourselves and others, he says, we are far more Greek than Christian. At the most profound level, we value ourselves as natural organisms, as animals, rather than as godlike beings who transcend nature. The Kantian-Christian-Stoic tradition holds that if we were fully able to realize our dignity as Kantians, Christians, or Stoics, we would be better, stronger people, and therefore less vulnerable to character breakdown. Dignity and Vulnerability offers an opposing view, that sometimes character breaks down not because of some shortcoming in it but because of what is good about it, because of the very virtues and features of character that give us our dignity. If dignity can make us fragile and vulnerable to breakdown, then breakdown can be benign as well as harmful, and thus the conceptions of human dignity embedded in the tradition leading up to Kant are deeply mistaken. Harris proposes a foundation for our belief in human dignity in what we can actually know about ourselves, rather than in metaphysical or theological fantasy. Having gained this knowledge, we can understand the source of real strength. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
Dependent Rational Animals
Title | Dependent Rational Animals PDF eBook |
Author | Alasdair MacIntyre |
Publisher | Open Court |
Pages | 163 |
Release | 1999-08-10 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0812697057 |
"MacIntyre--one of the foremost ethicists of the past half-century--makes a sustained argument for the cetnrality, in well-lived human lives, of both virtue and local communities of giving and receiving. He criticizes the mainstream of Western ethics, including his own previous position, for not taking seriously the dependent and animal sides of human nature, thereby overemphasizing the powers of reason and the pursuit of reason and the pursuit of autonomy. . . . This important work in ethics is essential for the professional philosopher and is highly readable for students at all levels and for thoughtful citizens." --Choice
Open Subjects
Title | Open Subjects PDF eBook |
Author | James Kuzner |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Pages | 232 |
Release | 2011-06-28 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0748647104 |
Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.
Dignity and Vulnerability
Title | Dignity and Vulnerability PDF eBook |
Author | George W. Harris |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 160 |
Release | 2023-04-28 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0520309723 |
In this significant addition to moral theory, George W. Harris challenges a view of the dignity and worth of persons that goes back through Kant and Christianity to the Stoics. He argues that we do not, in fact, believe this view, which traces any breakdowns of character to failures of strength. When it comes to what we actually value in ourselves and others, he says, we are far more Greek than Christian. At the most profound level, we value ourselves as natural organisms, as animals, rather than as godlike beings who transcend nature. The Kantian-Christian-Stoic tradition holds that if we were fully able to realize our dignity as Kantians, Christians, or Stoics, we would be better, stronger people, and therefore less vulnerable to character breakdown. Dignity and Vulnerability offers an opposing view, that sometimes character breaks down not because of some shortcoming in it but because of what is good about it, because of the very virtues and features of character that give us our dignity. If dignity can make us fragile and vulnerable to breakdown, then breakdown can be benign as well as harmful, and thus the conceptions of human dignity embedded in the tradition leading up to Kant are deeply mistaken. Harris proposes a foundation for our belief in human dignity in what we can actually know about ourselves, rather than in metaphysical or theological fantasy. Having gained this knowledge, we can understand the source of real strength. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.