ABSTRACT
It is generally believed that, from the point of view of persons who hold autonomy to be valuable, a person’s having more choices is better than her having fewer.1 It has, for example, been argued by some bioethicists that persons who value autonomy should be in favor of markets in human kidneys and ova,2 commercial surrogate pregnancy,3 elective amputation and radical cosmetic surgery,4 and prenatal genetic diagnosis.5 The view that persons who value autonomy should prefer persons to have more choices rather than fewer has, however, recently been subject to a great deal of criticism.6 Indeed, rather than holding that persons who value autonomy should favor persons having more choices rather than fewer, it is now widely believed that they should favor the absence of certain types of choices from persons’ choice-sets-that is, that they should favor persons having fewer choices rather than more. Three types of arguments are mustered in support of this initially counterintuitive conclusion: arguments from constraining options, arguments from irresistible offers, and arguments from ambivalence-inducing temptation. In this chapter each of these arguments will be considered in turn, and, in so doing, it will be shown that none of them successfully establish that a valuer of autonomy should favor persons having fewer options rather than more. The argument in this chapter is not, however, a purely negative one. In responding to these three types of arguments in favor of the view that a valuer of autonomy should favor persons having fewer choices rather than more the relationship between autonomy and choice will become clear. Indeed, it will be argued that in certain very specifi c cases a valuer of autonomy should indeed prefer persons to have fewer options rather than more-although for reasons that are different in kind from those offered by the proponents of the standard arguments in favor of this conclusion.7
