Keywords: AsianBioethics,autonomy,individualism,interdependence.IntroductionThe (appropriately) provocative title of this group ofpapers – ‘Should Ideology be Allowed to Trump Pa-tient Wellbeing?’ – immediately raises associationswith recent gross abuses of medicine: for example,the use of psychiatric institutions in the USSR un-der Stalin to detain political dissidents; or the com-plicity of the medical profession in Apartheid SouthAfrica in the torture and murder of the humanrights campaigner, Steve Biko (and many others);or, perhaps most obviously, the powerfully influen-tial eugenic philosophy in both Europe and the USAearly last century, which led to the atrocities of theNaziera in Germany.However,thistitlealsoinvitescritiqueofaratherdif-ferent ideology in medicine – that of the new medicalethics that has influenced medical practice, at leastin the West, since the 1960s. It suggests that ourclaimtobeactingethicallymayinfactbepoorlycon-cealedimpositionofaninappropriateideology,whichistothedetrimentofpatients.(Thisseemslikeakindof commentary on what T.S. Eliot, in Murder in theCathedral,describesas‘thegreatesttreason’–‘Todotherightdeedforthewrongreason.’[1])Invited to make this kind of critique of modernmedical ethics, Haker has singled out respect forthe autonomy of patients as the chief culprit [2].This may not be the only example of an ideologicalbias in modern medical ethics (another might bethe favouring of ‘rescue medicine’ over long-termcare, with its attendant denial of both morbidityand mortality), but I do agree that we need to lookvery carefully at both the interpretation and thepractical applications of the concept of autonomy.Thus, my response to Haker will not be negativelycritical of her main conclusions [2]. Instead, I willamplify two aspects her argument. First, I shallsuggest that we can understand the concept ofautonomy in a way that aligns it with concerns forjustice and with concepts of the good society; andsecondly, in the light of the fact that I now work inAsia, I shall explore the question of plurality invalues in relation to the debate about ‘AsianBioethics’.AutonomyandIndividualismAfrequentconfusioninusesofthetermautonomyisto conflate it with the idea of self-sufficiency or inde-pendence.Ashorthandwayofdescribingthiserroristhat autos (self) has engulfed nomos (law). A correctunderstandingofmoralautonomy,Iwouldargue,de-scribes a regulated life in the company of others, nottherandomnessandpotentialchaosofactingasonechooses at any given moment. This error is com-pounded by supposing that we can act in total isola-tion from others, rather than recognizing the funda-mental relatedness and dependency of humanexistence. I have tried in an earlier publication tostresstheinterrelatednessofhumanlife:To be a creature is to be born of others, to know our-selves through them, to depend on them and createdependency, to know the pain of losing them and fi-nallytobetheinstanceofthatpaintoothers.[3]If we leave this kind of nai¨ve individualism unques-tioned, we quickly erode the basis of morality itself,becausethissurelydependsonreciprocalrightsandobligations between ourselves and others (as Hakernotesinherpaper[2]).Toexpandonthispoint,IturntoOnoraO’Neill’sGif-fordLectures, AutonomyandTrustinBioethics.O’Ne-illoffersanexpositionofKant’sapproachtomoralityintermsofprincipledautonomy.Shewrites:[Kant]doesnotseeautonomyassomethingthatsomeindividualshavetoagreaterandotherstoalesserde-gree, and he does not equate it with any distinctiveformofpersonalindependenceorself-expression,letalone with acting on some rather than other sorts ofpreferences.Kantianautonomyismanifestedinalifeinwhich duties are met, inwhich there is respect for