Revisiting foundations of autonomy and beneficence in genetic counseling

Respect for autonomy of clients and helping clients to achieve the good they desire are now recurring themes in genetic counseling literature. In professional discourses on the clinical encounter involving genetic counseling these ideas are frequently employed in a manner which suggests that a client enters the conversation lacking only some technical information needed to make a decision. However, decision-making autonomy is developed and sustained over a lifetime through dependencies on social partners; including with the genetic professional. In an operational sense autonomy is reflected in the capacity of a client to do informed analytical work, to engage in reality testing of alternative decisions, and to do moral testing of decisions. The counselor's role can extend to assisting the client in developing the skills needed for the tasks of moral deliberation. This work develops a theoretical framework for conceptualizing autonomy of clients and the resulting relationship between counselor and client. This framework is more foundational than current debates about the relative merits of directive versus nondirective counseling, and points toward a relationship between counselor and client which differs from that implied by either of these two traditional relational paradigms.