The dominant value in much of contemporary clinical ethics and research ethics has been that of autonomy understood as individual choice and with informed consent as the primary mechanism through which autonomy is exercised. This emphasis on autonomy is discussed here in the light of a critique formulated by Onora O’Neill. Given that there is something to this critique, two main lines of response are identified. The first is to replace the mainstream conception of autonomy with an alternative conception, like the Kantian one. The second is to keep the standard notion, but to embed it within a richer set of person-centered values, with a human-rights approach being a prime example. It is then argued that the latter approach is the preferable one.