Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Being targeted by Nir Eyal's ingenious argument,1 I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond. It is fairly obvious that my utilitarian argument accomplishes what it is supposed to accomplish, namely a defence of the idea that the notion of informed consent should take roughly the form it takes in Western medicine. But does it fly in the face of commonsense moral thinking? I will argue that it does not.
My argument is based on hedonistic utilitarianism.2 This means that it is an instance of the general pattern of argumentation that Eyal presents. It takes slightly different forms in its defence of the place of informed content in research and in the clinic. For reasons of space I will focus exclusively on the clinic.
The thrust of the argument is as follows. In many cases, we should allow people to refuse treatment for the simple reason that they presumably know best what is in their interest. As J S Mill used to argue, each person has a privileged position with respect to her own life, which, as it were, she experiences from the inside, and from which she cannot walk away. …
Footnotes
-
Competing interests None.
-
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
Copyright information:
Linked Articles
- Feature article
- Commentary
- Commentary
- The concise argument
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Irish views on death and dying: a national survey
- The convention on human rights and biomedicine and the use of coercion in psychiatry
- Principlism and communitarianism
- Consent for anaesthesia
- Successful treatment of total placenta previa by multidisciplinary therapy in a Jehovah ’s Witness patient who refused blood transfusions
- The ethics of sexual reorientation: what should clinicians and researchers do
- Some principles of Islamic ethics as found in Harrisian philosophy
- UK public calls for legislation over living wills
- Transfusion contracts for Jehovah ’s Witnesses receiving organ transplants: ethical necessity or coercive pact
- Why some Jehovah 's Witnesses accept blood and conscientiously reject official Watchtower Society blood policy