Autonomy, Well-Being, and the Value of Genetic Testing for Adopted Persons

This paper argues that the value of genetic-relative family health history (GRFHx) information and the notion that lack of this information is a disadvantage can be established through its role as a nested goal in comprehensive life projects independent of documentation of particular health outcomes. Health information often plays a significant role in a person's formulation of life goals and projects, as well as in identification of plausible effective means to realize these goals. If health outcomes are valuable in part because of the nested role these play in the successful realization of a person's life projects and goals, then other, similarly nested contributors to such success must also be valued on a similar scale. Some of these other contributors to a successful life may themselves be nested with health considerations, as illustrated in the relationship that will be the focus of this paper. Health information --independent of outcomes per se - influences relationships, reproduction, and the formulation of plausible comprehensive life goals in intricate and very influential ways. Although such information may be valued in part because it is predictive of health outcomes, this relationship does not reduce such information, nor the comprehensive life goals and projects such information promotes, to health outcomes. That is, while health status can both enhance and detract from the autonomous (successful) pursuit of life projects formulated in the context of health information, the value and weight of these projects is independent of particular health status or outcomes, even while in part shaped by them.