Abstract

This article sets out to counteract HM Evans’s “fair’s fair argument” in support of abolishing veto to research participation. Evans’s argument attempts to assimilate ordinary clinical practice to clinical research. I shall refer to this attempt as “assimilation claim”. I shall attempt to show that this assimilation, as it is carried out in Evans’s argument, is misleading and, ultimately, logically undermines the conclusion. I shall then proceed to show that when the fair’s fair argument is proposed independently of the assimilation claim, Evans’s conclusion is not unavoidable and possible alternatives are equally open within the terms of the argument itself.