as one pleases

Bodily autonomy doesn't only apply to reproductive freedom, the right to identify as one pleases or access to clean air and water.

Inami's team is developing a series of technologies rooted in the idea of "jizai", an Japanese term that he says roughly denotes autonomy and the freedom to do as one pleases.

“The real meaning of liberty: the power to do as one pleases, the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges, it’s the power of choice,” notes another.

But if “freedom gains meaning in relation to its limits,” as Nelson argues, then we must attend to the nexus between the libertarian freedom to act as one pleases and the concurrent right to be free from the negative effects of others’ actions.

On the right, the word has come to signal the kind of slavish devotion to individual freedom — the permission to do as one pleases — that justifies, say, not wearing a mask; on the left, it has come to be regarded as a smokescreen for neoliberal, racist, misogynist and homophobic agendas that propped up the faux-despotism of Donald Trump.