CLAIM
“Love your neighbour as yourself” suggests that the care you give yourself becomes the pattern for how you treat others. It implies that the way you protect your own well-being, respect your own limits, and seek relief from suffering should guide how you respond to someone else’s needs. If you believe you deserve dignity, safety, and compassion, then your neighbour deserves the same.
REPLY
But you know you have the right to refuse alleviation of your suffering or any intervention that extends your life. So that makes this pattern very subjective and random. The commandment then has to harm many people.
You know you have the right to refuse help no matter how much it hurts those who want to help or how much you are needed. You have every right not to even consider them.
There is a tacit commandment in how the Bible speaks of the rule. It is to be done within the framework of the commandment to love God with total commitment.
Thus if God commands you to chose those interventions there is a conflict with personal autonomy. There is a conflict between how all you have and are are really his if he made you from nothing and the right to reject help no matter how much good it does for you.
CLAIM
Respect for the body and for personal autonomy comes before calculations about wellbeing or happiness. This priority is not grounded merely in the idea that forcing someone might be harsher or more painful; it holds even in situations where coercion might appear beneficial, even where the person might later feel grateful. The point is that a human being is not simply a vessel for future satisfaction or improved outcomes, but a moral agent whose bodily integrity and capacity to choose have intrinsic value. To override that agency for the sake of a predicted good treats the person as something to be managed rather than someone to be respected. Autonomy matters not because it may produce good results, but because it defines what it means to relate to a person as an end in themselves rather than as a means to an outcome.
REPLY:
Believers in God argue that you are a child of God and you owe him gratitude so your life is not yours - he made you from nothing. They see that as too selfish. They also say that there is a soul to worry about - not just a body. They say that self-harm harms your soul so even if it could be a right otherwise, the soul puts paid to that. It is not clear how if your autonomy gives you the right to choose a terrible path how the soul makes a difference!
I say that
QUESTION: If autonomy alone matters or mainly matters then how does it matter? Intrinsically. Instrumentally? If autonomy is intrinsically valuable, then it is good simply because it is autonomy — even if it doesn’t lead to anything else. If autonomy is instrumentally valuable, then it matters because it helps produce something else — like happiness, dignity, well-being, or moral responsibility.
ANSWER: I reject instrumentally for it leads to choice being policed. If it matters intrinsically, then a person has the right to refuse even a treatment plan that is easy and will save her life so she can care for her children. There is no policing.
Instrumentally does not say if you or your autonomy are worth anything. If my rights and dignity are only instrumental—valuable only because they are useful to some principle or God or someone else—then I am reduced to a tool, a means to an end rather than an end in myself. My worth would rise and fall with my productivity, my compliance, or my convenience.
Rejecting instrumentally is just rejecting instrumentally. I can argue, I am only going for intrinsically for that is all that is left. It is a stopping point. This is pragmatic or strategic rather than philosophical. It means: “Given that instrumental justifications fail or lead to problems (like policing), I will proceed as if autonomy is intrinsically valuable.” It is very pessimistic or cynical because it emphasizes lack of alternatives rather than a principled commitment.
If one does not affirm autonomy as intrinsically valuable but only resolves
to treat it as if it were, then people’s lives and needs are recognized only as
instruments for avoiding harm or achieving manageable outcomes, rather than as
genuinely worthy in themselves. This approach effectively reduces autonomy to a
kind of policy to be enforced, rather than a real moral claim: lives are treated
as “projects” to be managed or affirmed for external purposes, not respected for
their own sake. In this sense, refusing to affirm intrinsic value leaves us
trapped in a stance where we respond to people’s choices conditionally, rather
than acknowledging the inherent worth of their projects and needs. Autonomy
becomes a tool for avoiding conflict, not a principle that recognizes the moral
significance of a person’s life.
If you help others with such an attitude, it will be no time before people sense
they are being seen as projects. Harm will result. All harmers start
off treating people as things in a mild way.
OBJECTION:
If I love my neighbour as myself and harm is not really important, that empties the command of any real meaning. It amounts to, "Respect your neighbour's autonomy as my own."
Consider the argument, "If I choose harmful autonomy that does not mean I can choose it for somebody else. It is up to each person."
We all, unwittingly perhaps, compromise our autonomy.
REPLY:
FINALLY
We have proved that if morality