Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal

A complete defense of deceptive placebo use must address this ethical objection: deceptive placebo use violates patient autonomy, because deceiving a patient about the placebo nature of a proposed treatment prevents her from giving informed consent to the treatment. Unfortunately, this objection isn’t always recognized and clearly disambiguated from other ethical concerns. I consider how well several bioethicists who write about placebo use have responded to, or evaded, this objection. I conclude that defenders of deceptive placebo use should, following the lead of Onora O’Neill, argue that deceptive placebo use is compatible with informed consent.