“In a recent article in this journal, Felicitas Kraemer discusses a case in which deep-brain stimulation (DBS) treatment compromises a person’s decision-making competence but reduces feelings of alienation.1 She proposes that, since the patient may find these two conditions mutually exclusive options, this generates a potential conflict between a patient’s ‘autonomy’—understood as competence—and their ‘authenticity’. Against this I shall argue that ‘competence’ and ‘authenticity’ are conditions necessary to a satisfactory analysis of autonomy; Kraemer’s observation that the two may conflict thus renders problematic interpretations of respect for autonomy that rely solely on the former. Integrating the importance of competence and authenticity conditions into respect requires that we move beyond the simple doctrine of non-interference with a patient’s decisions to the more sensitive approaches advocated by some theorists of relational autonomy."
http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2013/05/21/medethics-2013-101419.full
