Bailey, TomWoodworth, Steven JosephPomeroy, Allison Grace2025-06-032025-06-032025Pomeroy, Allison Grace. "Autonomy Refigured: Kantian and Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relations". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2025.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/1056Thesis (B.A. in Humanistic Studies, Minors in Philosophy and Classical Studies)--John Cabot University, Spring 2025.As it stands today, contemporary moral philosophy seeks to revise past ethical systems in order to account for previously overlooked moral values. In particular, the value of personal relations is purported to be the most significant. As I argue, Immanuel Kant, often criticized for neglecting personal relations in his ethics, remains a key figure in these debates. Feminist philosophers, particularly through the concept of relational autonomy, challenge Kant’s exclusion of these relations. However, I turn to two paradigmatic interpreters of Kant’s ethics, Christine Korsgaard and J. David Velleman, as a means of responding to, and perhaps even resolving, this tension. I begin by detailing further the charges feminist philosophers make against Kant, as well as their positive alternative proposal which they maintain resolves these worries. I then turn to Christine Korsgaard and her account which asserts that the personal relation is indeed permissible in a Kantian system of ethics, and review how she addresses the feminist worries. I take a similar approach in my review of J. David Velleman’s Kantian account of love, which attempts to resolve the tension between love as partial and Kantian morality as impartial. I then conclude by offering a synthesis of these three chapters, in which I argue that Kantian ethics is indispensable for resolving the worries raised by relational autonomy theorists.vii, 55 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Modern ethicsImmanuel Kant, 1724-1804Feminist theoryThesis