Autonomy and the folk concept of valid consent

Bioethics: Experimental Approaches

“…To this end, rather than relying on unrealistic, abstract thought experiments to identify the contours of what is morally at stake in some issue (e.g., Thomson's "violinist" analogy in arguments about abortion; for discussions, see Walsh 2011;McMillan 2018), bioxphi tends to deal with cases that are more directly inspired by real-world dilemmas and decisions. These might pertain, for example, to specific healthcare policy options or standards of clinical practice (Kingsbury and Hegarty 2022), to medical research and rules proposed to protect participants' rights (Dranseika et al unpublished), to the understanding, use, or application of relevant legal concepts (Sommers 2020;Demaree-Cotton and Sommers 2022), to evaluation and regulation of cognitive enhancement or other emerging biotechnologies (Faber et al 2016;Mihailov et al 2021b), or (more generally) to human-technology and human-biosphere relations (for overviews, see Earp 2019;Earp et al 2020aEarp et al , 2021Earp et al , 2022.…”

Why Children Believe They Are Owned

“…One reason for this may be that humans are seen as autonomous—as having the right and ability to make decisions for themselves. Autonomy is relevant to how we think about responsibility (Feltz & Cova, 2014 ), personal rights (Nucci & Lee, 1993 ), consent (Demaree-Cotton & Sommers, 2022 )—and ownership. Because owners decide what happens to their property, a fully autonomous being cannot be owned.…”

Respect for autonomy: Consent doesn’t cut it

“…those we would expect to be patients or potential research participants) infer a clear distinction between the concept of autonomy and the concept of consent. 16 This means that if we are genuinely committed to the principle of respect for autonomy, then the employment of informed consent is unlikely to be a suitable way of demonstrating that commitment.…”