Fear of Risks and our Personal Autonomy (MA Thesis)
Marthe Kerkwijk
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Abstract
It is not at all difficult to become afraid of an endless range of things. Just so much as opening the newspaper in the morning will do. A brief glance over the headlines will be sufficient to make you afraid of the food you were planning to eat today, since it will increase your chances of getting cancer; of your neighbor, since he's Muslim and for all you know he might be among that percentage of Muslims in your country who have 'extremist' opinions of some sort, or his son might be an alienated second generation adolescent who is likely to commit all sorts of crime out of sheer frustration; of the streets after dark, since someone in your town has been raped again; of the office where you work, since any of your colleagues might be infected with some new pandemic flu virus; of traveling, since a terrorist has tried to explode a train and there has been a plane crash as well and add that to the yearly death rate caused by traffic accidents. The list can be extended far beyond the limited amount of pages assigned to this paper. The function of the information offered to us by the media seems to be not just to inform us, but also to make us aware of the things we should worry about, of the risks we face.
Key takeaways
- Global autonomy concerns the question what it means to be an autonomous person in general, while local autonomy concerns the question what it means to act autonomously 2 .
- The active dimension of local autonomy lies in the fact that we can only acquire the authority of our acts and decision needed for autonomous agency by actively taking ownership of our actions.
- If our risk perception is subject to political strategy and social interaction, if it is affected by the actions and risk perceptions of others and if our risk perception in turn affects our decisions, then our autonomy must in some way or other be affected by our fear of risks.
- I have discussed in this chapter several ways in which fear of risks can affect our personal autonomy.
- Although in my view each of these authors stresses an important point, none of them tells the entire story of the relation between our fear of risks and our personal autonomy.
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