Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics

Informed consent is a central topic in contemporary biomedical ethics. Yet attempts to set defensible and feasible standards for consenting have led to persistent difficulties. In Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics, first published in 2007, Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill set debates about informed consent in medicine and research in a fresh light. They show why informed consent cannot be fully specific or fully explicit, and why more specific consent is not always ethically better. They argue that consent needs distinctive communicative transactions, by which other obligations, prohibitions, and rights can be waived or set aside in controlled and specific ways. Their book offers a coherent, wide-ranging and practical account of the role of consent in biomedicine which will be valuable to readers working in a range of areas in bioethics, medicine and law.

1. Consent: Nuremburg, Helsinki and beyond; 2. Information and communication: the drift from agency; 3. Informing and communicating: back to agency; 4. How to rethink informed consent; 5. Informational privacy and data protection; 6. Genetic information and genetic exceptionalism; 7. Trust, accountability and transparency; Some conclusions and proposals.

Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics, first published in 2007, offers a coherent, wide-ranging and practical account of the role of consent in biomedicine which will be valuable to readers working in a range of areas in bioethics, medicine and law.

Neil C. Manson is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University.
Onora O'Neill is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent publications include A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002 (2002) and Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (2002).