PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - William Simkulet
TI  - The Cohen problem of informed consent
AID  - 10.1136/medethics-2019-105858
DP  - 2020 Sep 01
TA  - Journal of Medical Ethics
PG  - 617--622
VI  - 46
IP  - 9
4099  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/46/9/617.short
4100  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/46/9/617.full
SO  - J Med Ethics2020 Sep 01; 46
AB  - To avoid potential abuse and respect patient autonomy, physicians have a moral obligation to obtain informed consent before performing any significant medical intervention. To give informed consent, a patient must be competent, understand her condition, options and their expected risks and benefits and must freely and expressly consent to one of those options. Shlomo Cohen challenges this conception of informed consent by constructing cases based on Edmund Gettier’s classic counterexamples to traditional theories of knowledge. In this paper, I argue Cohen-style cases are not genuine threats to the concept of informed consent, however they provide an interesting challenge to theories of conscientious objection.