i) I’m now struck by the need to defend an idealized naturalistic account of the philosophical development of autonomy. One may do this, as usual, by considering alternative accounts in the development of autonomy, and wondering how plausible they are as candidates. (For the sake of convienience, we have to do this presupposing idealized conditions, i.e., where the ideas are produced by philosophizing and not necessarily by coercion, etc. Nothing hinges on this, I don’t think; though as you point out, interesting questions may be raised. We should also presuppose that the three items - agency, equality, and autonomy — have value, though this may be challenged. By “incorrigible”, I mean a value which is inevitable, inescapable.) The important alternatives would include:
- Account-A, which sees autonomy as being of incorrigible value independently of human interaction;
- Account-B, which argues that agency is not natural or incorrigible as a value, as the value of agency only arises out of interaction; or
- Account-C, which disputes that equality is involved in the development of an idea of “autonomy” at all.

My immediate intuitions are that a) the dignity (and hence autonomy) of persons is robbed of them all the time, and sometimes for very good and moral reasons (i.e., to prevent terrible consequences); and c) in moderate form makes good as a challenge for making the concept of “equality” clear, but leaves open the possibility of an idea of autonomy which is narrowly egoistic, i.e., “My autonomy is primary, everyone else can go to hell”, which is possible for kings and tyrants, but from which philosophers would cringe due to constant interaction and wisdom gained from social experience. And the dispositions of tyrants is not itself of interest. I’m not sure how I would reply to b), except to say that since happiness is of intrinsic value, and happiness requires experience of happiness, and the experience of happiness is often done either by satisfaction of (or anticipation of) preferences and choices in mind, agency will inevitably be of value.

Your point regarding limited equality is well taken. Kohlberg (and presumably others) used the word “equity” to describe the practice of establishing the social threshold for equal consideration. Nevertheless, relative to the group under investigation, the idea of equality *might be* the same between a charitable group and an uncharitable one; it’s just that they may use the idea differently. In other words, my clique of friends may be quite elitist, and this other band of friends may be very chummy and see everyone as a peer; but the idea of equality that both make use of may be the same relative to how they use it. (Or maybe not. Now that I think of it, I have doubts. But I just wanted to point out the possibility that the concept may be roughly the same, not to argue that it is. It’s certainly an interesting thing to think about.) In any case, yeah, this would fall outside of the optimistic tone by which the proposal was made.

ii) By “conventionalist”, I essentially meant the idea that the validity of a value arises out of its association with some community norm. The kind of interactionist view that you seem to take it more in line with my view, but perhaps our common ground may not be philosophically significant to the issue at hand. Suppose that the categories of value/notvalued are created by emergent negotiation over a historical period, reinforced by habit. That doesn’t seem to change the problem.

By a kind of two-tables account, you have to resort to a change in the lexical meaning of the word “autonomy” in order to make a change in values. This is plausible, but I think the naturalistic account is more conceptually powerful. And rhetoric doesn’t have to suffer so long as we still have the language of rights at our disposal.

iii) This is departing a bit from our present topic, but I think utilitarianism passes the homicide test once we take remoter effects seriously. IE: the social impact of killing the one to save the five is to reduce the social worth of human life to a mere commodity, which will simply break the social world for the worse, given how humans learn, make decisions in a social environment, the standard of precedent, etc. The trouble which caused me to bring the issue up was that *relative to the dying individual*, utilitarianism seems to give no comfort; rather, it would look at the effects upon society, etc. This seems rather bloodless to people, as if utilitarians had missed an important point. Still, there are other ways to argue about this and show how and where the intuitions at play are consistent with utility.

Either side of the euthanasia debate might be defended, but from my point of view, the pro-euthanasia argument is far more powerfully and plausibly endorsed by the utilitarian argument. I also endorse the view, given certain dire circumstances. From my view, to deny a person the choice to remove themselves from their own suffering under an inescapable illness is to foster a culture of misery which I find ethically abhorrent.