• Ethics- Research

Anna Smajdor offers a fresh perspective on why assent is morally required in research practices involving people who (are considered to) lack the capacity to consent.1 Smajdor holds that seeking (and documenting) assent can be a mechanism to recognise those who (are considered to) lack the capacity to consent as participants ‘in our moral sphere’.1 Smajdor suggests that this approach can function as a counter to the ‘reifying’ attitudes (often) taken towards people who (are judged to) lack the capacity to consent.1 Smajdor’s approach also offers novel resources to overcome what Giles Birchley characterise as ‘the problems of the binary approach to incapacity’.2

Particularly in the context of dementia research, Smajdor’s proposal can be seen as a promising direction for going beyond the conventional (primarily) ‘protective’ approach taken by research ethics committees.3 The conventional approach asks researchers to obtain autonomous authorisation from research participants and (at times, implicitly) relies on the assumption that the ability to give consent is the only autonomy-related ability or, in other words, the assumption that the inability to give consent indicates vulnerability due to non-autonomy/non-agency. But this assumption, as Smajdor notes, seems problematic. The ability to assent (or dissent) is also an autonomy-related ability. Many …