ABSTRACT
Scott Kim claims that the criteria for assessing decision-making capacity (DMC) are incomplete. This chapter examines whether it is possible to assess evaluative outlooks as part of DMC assessment. Better framework is needed for thinking about what patients are doing when they make decisions, and how evaluative thinking plays into this. The chapter talks about what is good for a person, and about the relationship between evaluative outlooks on the one hand, and judgments of personal good on the other. It focuses three important ethical constraints. Two of these are epistemic constraints, that is, they are constraints on the kinds of inferences one can safely make, given the tenuous nature of our knowledge of certain facts. These two serve as reminders to be epistemically humble given the complexity of what we are dealing with. The third is also a constraint on inference, but it derives more directly from facts about the existing moral framework.
