The justification for advance directives is grounded in the notion that they extend patient autonomy into future states of incompetency through patient participation in decision making about end-of-life care. Four objections challenge the necessity and sufficiency of individual autonomy, perceived to be a defining feature of liberal philosophical theory, as a basis of advance care planning. The...

Some theoreticians argue that the stability of liberalism is to a large extent an outcome of a continued existence of traditional and other forms of life in communities, which are able to slow down or hinder the immoderate expansion of individualism, but that liberal societies are liable to destroy that foundation of their stability. However, liberal society cannot allow the destruction of the ...

The Wilson-Patterson conservatism scale was psychometrically evaluated using homogeneity analysis and item response theory models. Results showed that this scale actually measures two different aspects in people: on the one hand people vary in their agreement with either conservative or liberal catch-phrases and on the other hand people vary in their use of the "?" response category of the scal...