The notion of autonomy commonly employed in medical ethics literature and practices is inadequate on three fronts: it fails to properly identify nonautonomous actions and choices, it gives a false account of which features of actions and choices makes them autonomous or nonautonomous, and it provides no grounds for the moral requirement to respect autonomy. In this paper I offer a more adequate...

The principle of autonomy underpins legal regulation of advance directives that refuse life-sustaining medical treatment. The primacy of autonomy in this domain is recognised expressly in the case law, through judicial pronouncement, and implicitly in most Australian jurisdictions, through enactment into statute of the right to make an advance directive. This article seeks to justify autonomy a...

Work autonomy is an essential aspect of nurses' professional lives. The aim of this research was to study American nurses' work autonomy and, in particular, autonomy over patient care and unit operations decisions. Data were collected electronically during July of 2004. A total of 300 American nurses were recruited from two clinical listserves in which nurses communicate electronically as a gro...

One of the main aims of the education agenda in the last decade has been to develop critical thinking and autonomy among children, in order to educate them to be activeand involved persons in society.  The present study sought to examine the relationship between Iranian male and female EFL learners’ autonomy and their critical thinking ability. To this aim, the researcher used a language profic...

Respect for patient autonomy is a fundamental ethical principle in clinical health care. In most conceptions of patient autonomy, it is required that the patient considers information and knowledge that is relevant to the matter in question. Thus, the metaphor of navigating knowledge landscapes describes something that patients need to do in order to exercise their autonomy (1,2). This paper di...

Smoking cessation counseling by practitioners occurs at low rates in spite of strong evidence that counseling increases quit rates and reduces patient mortality. In a preliminary study, 1060 New York State physicians completed a survey concerning use of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) Guidelines, perceived autonomy and perceived competence for counseling, perceived autono...

Increased use of autonomy also increases the need for humans to interact with or manage autonomy. We propose a new variation of sliding autonomy useful for planning problems over a spatial region. With this approach, the user can influence the behavior of the autonomous system via spatial constraints and temporal constraints. We present a set of user interface designs to implement sliding auton...

In patient-centred care, shared decision-making is advocated as the preferred form of medical decision-making. Shared decision-making is supported with reference to patient autonomy without abandoning the patient or giving up the possibility of influencing how the patient is benefited. It is, however, not transparent how shared decision-making is related to autonomy and, in effect, what support...