In Western societies, autonomy is widely regarded as a value of central importance. It figures prominently in the various types of normative ethical theories presently at issue among us, and emphasis upon it, whether in a Kantianism, contractualismp rightstheory, or utilitarianism, appears to place beings judged to lack autonomy, such as infants, the very severely mentally-enfeebled, the seriously brain-damaged, the irreversibly comatose, and animals at a certain risk.

For example, the most prominent rights-theories now on display, all of which feature a right to life, make a good deal of autonomy or agency, and it is easy to see how infants, defective humans, and animals can lose out on such theories. If agency is regarded as the ground for the possession of moral rights, then these beings will lack such rights unless they can plausibly be made out to be'agents; and if the usual demands of agency, such as rationality and action upon reasons, self-consciousness, self-critical control of one's desires, the application of norms to one's conduct, and deliberative choice, are not relaxed, it seems unlikely that they can be so regarded. Thus, non-autonomous beings seem to fall outside the central terms of reference of these theories, with the result that they lack a right to life or, at the very least, that the threshold for killing them is lower than that for killing autonomous beings or normal adult humans. 1 do not share the contemporary enchantment with moral rights;, 1 but non-autonomous beings come out at risk on other theories as well.(1 have elsewhere discussed this matter. 2), I shall not bother with other theories here, since nothing in what follows turns upon the particularities of the theory within which emphasis upon autono",", y is embedded.