ABSTRACT
It is clear from the previous discussions in this volume that autonomy has instrumental value; it is this that justifi ed the claim that a valuer of autonomy should prefer that persons have more choices rather than fewer, as well as justifying concern for both the maintenance of patient confi dentiality and securing patients’ informed consent to their treatments.1 But noting that autonomy is of instrumental value leads immediately to the question of what further value it is instrumental in securing. From the discussions in Chapters 6, 8, and 9, it seems clear that the best candidate for the value that autonomy is instrumental in securing is that of enabling persons to act to attempt to satisfy their own desires and secure their own goals. It was argued in Chapter 6 that a valuer of autonomy should prefer that persons have more choices rather than fewer because in such a situation persons would be more likely to be able to exercise their autonomy to satisfy their own desires or achieve their own goals. Similarly, in Chapter 8 it was argued that patient confi dentiality should be respected because doing so would be more likely than the alternative to create a situation in which persons could exercise their autonomy effectively to achieve these ends, while in Chapter 9 it was argued that healthcare professionals should secure their patients’ informed consent to their treatment on the grounds that this would be most likely to facilitate their using their autonomy in this way. This is, of course, a fairly loose account of what the value that autonomy is instrumental in securing is. However, without further analysis of the value of enabling such act-attempts it would be unwise to speculate further as to how this should be more precisely characterized. It might, for example, be that it transpires that the value that the exercise of autonomy is instrumental in securing is that of human well-being.2 Alternatively, it might be that autonomy is instrumentally valuable in securing such actattempts as part of a eudaimonistic human life (where the understanding of this concept is not reducible to an analysis of well-being), or that these act-attempts are simply valuable in their own right.
