Ch 3: Personal Autonomy and Moral Agency- Ethical Choices

1. Competent Choice: A moral agent (a) makes an independent choice and (b) execises his capacities to engage in rational deliberation.

2. Independent Choice: A moral agent exercices his capacity to choose while being under no constraint or compulsion.

3. Authentic Choice: A moral agent makes both (a) independent choice and (b) a competent choice and (c) exercices his capacity to authentically asses his values.

4. Moral Deference: Respecting another person's choices without interferring.

5. Paternalism: Overruling people's choices and actions for their own good.

6. Moral Responsibility: Being morally accountable to others for one's own choices (deserving blame or praise)

7. Autonomous: Able to make free choices as a self-determining individual.

8. Implications of Autonomy

9. Moral Agent: A person who satisfies the conditions of autonomy and is able to appropiately apply these capacities to a specific choice.

10. Relational Autonomy: Rejects individualism and emphasizes the role of human interdependencies in self-discovery, establishing intentity, developing authentic values, and trusting oneself.

11. Substantive Autonomy: The view that maximum autonomy requires that our basic values be consistent with human fulfillment and flourishing, including the foundational values of morality.

12. Authenticity Condition: A person must have the capacity to discern and personally assess his own values.

13. Moral Capacity: Fulfilling the three autonomy conditions; when one's state precludes autonomy for a period of time, one lacks capacity over that time.

14. Competency Condition: A person must have the capacities necessary to rationally deliberate about her choices.

15. Independence Condition: A person must have the capacity to make choices and not to be under the control of an external constraint or inner compulsion.

16. Other Conceptions of Autonomy

16.1. Value-neutral autonomy: The view that maximum autonomy amounts to choosing our values without constraint and that any set of values can serve equally well as the basis for a person's choices.