Evaluating Trade-Offs between Autonomy and Wellbeing in Supported Decision Making (Preprint)

A core challenge for contemporary bioethics is how to address the tension between respecting an individual’s autonomy and promoting their wellbeing when these ideals seem to come into conflict (Notini et al. 2020). This tension is often reflected in discussions of the ethical status of guardianship and other surrogate decision-making regimes for individuals with different kinds or degrees of cognitive ability and (hence) decision-making capacity (Earp and Grunt-Mejer 2021), specifically when these capacities are regarded as diminished or impaired along certain dimensions (or with respect to certain domains).