It is crucial to distinguish the specific applications and intentions with the Right of Autonomy to avoid conflictions with other moral issues. To reiterate: The Right of Autonomy pertains only to the rights of mind, body, and life. Through one's autonomy, an individual may, only through a conscious, independent decision, forfeit or sacrifice any number of these rights. In reference to The Right of Mind, such sacrifice has least impact; you may forfeit an idea or thought, one which you could otherwise maintain only to yourself, to others; by forfeiting Right of Body, you may donate organs, hair, or semen; by forfeiting Right of Life, you submit yourself to being euthanized if put in a physical condition deemed undesirable as defined by previously constructed terms you yourself construct. By forfeiting your Right of Autonomy, you allow others to place you in controls and systems to which you must abide or face punishing consequences. Examples of this are mandatory schooling; if you desire to learn in the public school system, a certain amount of your autonomy must be forfeited.
The opposition to this proposition is that by providing persons to the right of life and the right of autonomy, it is impossible to provide limitations on what an individual may do with their life and autonomy. By this, persons are entitled to the right to act immorally, which would include, in this case, inflicting negative impact on another's rights, such as murder. Also, conflictions with the autonomy claim is that when one does act against another's rights, no other individual may [morally] take action against the offender, or else commit, hypocritically, the same offense.
Moral issues
Thusly, the following actions are permissible by one's Right to Self: suicide, euthanasia, racism, and drug use. In contrast, the following actions are impermissible through the breach in one's Right to Self: capital punishment, abortion, establishment and greater punishment of hate crimes, and any enforced laws set forth by any institution or figure of authority which demand a certain act of living that does not pertain to the protection of others, such as mandatory schooling or illegality of drugs.
First, we address the issue of capital punishment by making the claim that no institution, morally, may extinguish another's life, or else conflict with their Right to Life; note that legality and morality, while legality often tries to derive from morality, are not related in cases of making moral claims. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” However, if the offender consents to an execution for whatever reason, the action may be followed. This delves into the category of suicide, protected by one's Right to Life and autonomy of it, and doctor assisted suicide in that some are without the means to take their desired course of action.
Controversy arises in the morality of abortion. The state of the morality of abortion is when the being becomes a person. Humans are different from persons; humans have no rights, in that they have no qualities other than physical composition that make up a person. Being incapable of having autonomy over your body removes your Right to Body; being incapable of having autonomy over your thoughts, or the ability to produce thoughts, removes your Right to Mind; being incapable of surviving on one's own or do what one wishes to with their body, mind, and ultimately life, removes the Right to Life.
The counter for this claim is that a child is not self sufficient, or capable of autonomous actions over body and mind, until a period after birth; very few would argue that it is morally permissible to kill a newborn child. Furthermore, it can be said that the growth of any being is movement, thus movement of the body, which entitles the being to Right of Body. It would follow, then, that at the being is entitled to Right of Body and Life at the moment of conception when the being begins to grow. Whether the being is conscious of this growth is irrelevant, as that only pertains to Right of Mind, and only the Right of Body or Right of Mind is necessary for Right of Life.
In response, if the opposition accepts that consciousness is irrelevant to the Right of Body, then the child's movement in the womb is sufficient to support that the being as Right to Body. Growth, however, is not a form of movement, it is not autonomous, it is natural and at the point of conception through many weeks of growth the being has no movement of oneself, conscious or not.
The common ground found between the two arguments is that, regardless of where the line of life is drawn on the being, it is impermissible to deny it the Right to Life.
