Autonomy

1
Autonomy

• Individual autonomy is an idea that is generally
  understood to refer to the capacity to be one's
  own person, to live one's life according to
  reasons and motives that are taken as one's own
  and not the product of manipulative or distorting
  external forces.

2
Rights

• A right is the power or privilege to which one is
  justly entitled or a thing to which one has a
  just claim.
• Human rights refers to the concept of human
  beings as having universal rights, or status,
  regardless of legal jurisdiction, and likewise
  other localizing factors, such as ethnicity and
  nationality.
• Inalienable rights (or unalienable rights) refers
  to a set of absolute rights that are endowed by
  God, not awarded by any human power and not
  capable of being repudiated or transfered to
  another power. The phrase is most famously used
  in the United States Declaration of Independence,
  where "unalienable rights" are said to include
  "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
• Civil rights are the protections and privileges
  of personal liberty given to all citizens by law.
  
• Contractual rights are those based on laws agreed
  upon between persons for whom those laws are
  valid.

3
Rights

• Legal
• a right is the legal or moral entitlement to do
  or refrain from doing something
• Moral
• Positive
• oblige others in some way
• Negative
• free oneself from obligation or coercion

4
Rights

• Rights entail duties.
• A right-holder has control over the incidence of
  the duty
• Rights protect freedom.

5
Beings, Human Beings and Persons

• Ultimate question in Medical Ethics (or any
  ethics)
• What makes human life valuable?
• Why is it more valuable than other forms of life?
• Save a person rather than a dog if we can only
  save one

6
Beings, Human Beings and Persons

• Day-to-day decisions taken in medical practice
  presuppose answers to those questions
• Abortion could only be permissible in cases where
  there is no danger to mother and foetus is normal
  on the assumption that it is somehow less
  valuable than adults and lacks rights afforded to
  them.
• Are mentally or physically handicapped less
  valuable than others?- then anyone who considers
  detection of abnormality in a foetus is grounds
  for abortion must accept they believe the person
  to be less worth saving or less entitled to life.

7
Beings, Human Beings and Persons

• Similar considerations occur at the other end of
  the spectrum
• Should we continue to devote resources and
  resuscitation of the aged of terminally ill, or
  those in a coma, or PVS etc?
• If we divert resource allocation to more
  worthwhile cases are we treating those lives as
  less valuable than those we choose to help?

8
So what is a person?

• Human being?
• Are all humans persons?
• Active Personal Identity?
• Sense of self
• Conscious mind?
• Does that exclude some humans? (babies and
  dementia)
• Are there degrees of personhood?
• D. Parfit