Evaluating Tradeoffs between Autonomy and Wellbeing in Supported Decision Making

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This article refers to:

Supported Decision Making With People at the Margins of Autonomy

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Notes

1 Utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill have long emphasized the importance of autonomy precisely because individual agents (albeit availed of advice from their relational networks) are typically better positioned to know what is best for them, rather than, say, the government. For further discussion with qualifications, see the section “Autonomy as an ethical tool” (p. 75) in Earp and Savulescu (2020).

2 This parallels a discussion within the animal ethics literature, where certain kinds of freedom for animals are advocated without asking whether this is in their bests interests or what they value; in fact, different animals are likely to value control over their circumstances or other forms of agency in different ways and to different degrees, and this should inform how they are treated (Browning & Veit 2020; 2021).