 The Substituted Judgment standard: The surrogate's task is to reconstruct what the patient himself would have wanted, in the circumstances at hand, if the patient had decision-making capacity. Substantive advance directives are here thought of as a helpful mechanism for aiding the application of Substituted Judgment. The moral principle underlying this legal standard is the principle of  respect  for   autonomy,  supplemented by the idea that when a patient is not currently capable of making a decision for himself, we can nonetheless respect his autonomy by following or reconstructing, as best we can, the autonomous decision he would have made if he were able. In a subset of cases, a substituted judgment can implement an actual earlier decision of the patient, made in anticipation of the current circumstances; this is known as precedent autonomy.