Autonomy and Loyalty

FAIN: FT-60266-12

Daniel Groll
Carleton College (Northfield, MN 55057-4001)

I am seeking an NEH summer stipend to work on a paper about the relationship between autonomy and loyalty, which is part of a larger project about living well. The concept of autonomy has practical implications for liberal political thought and for contemporary bioethics where patient autonomy is treated as a kind of master value. Understanding the precise nature of autonomy and its connection to another core social value, loyalty, will shed light on issues that arise in a pluralistic society where citizens often pay fealty to different conceptions of the good life. I will use the summer stipend to support writing a full draft of "Autonomy and Loyalty" in 2012 (at the beginning of a sabbatical) and to defray the costs of travel I plan to do to present my work and to reside as a visitor at Georgetown University and The University of Chicago. I aim to present the paper at various conferences before publishing it in a top generalist philosophy journal.