This is a critical part of developmental psychology. It comes into play in developing as a person, defining morality, participating in politics and ultimately how people derive ethics. It is not necessary a value, but probably is required for you to even have values in the first place. Autonomy is generally defined as the capacity to make a decision. An decision that is not coerced and well informed.
One thing that is really important is that anyone who is more self actualized, or has obtained a perspective of themselves that is close to accurate, will act autonomously, and independently and tend to be far more productive than others. The absolute worst thing you can do to someone like this is to reduce, restrict or limit their autonomy.
In the field of medicine this is probably the top of the ethics consideration. You can just absolutely, never, ever take away a patient’s right to decide what outcome that they want. This for good reason, as it seems, we develop in this world growing into mature adults by gaining autonomy, we should definitely leave this world with autonomy as well.
People that have more autonomy enjoy their life and their jobs. People that do not have autonomy will be miserable. People would rather make bad decisions with serious consequences and have autonomy then to be safe and have none.
Autonomy is the mother of all human values and the drive the pushes humans to improve.
Guy Reams
