Protect the patient’s health and welfare

• The physician can be neglectful, overconfident or want to promote science or his personal career rather than her medical interests
• The patient has other non-medical interests as well, and is typically the best judge of her own good and mind it far more than he does, even when he is convinced that he acts in her best interests

• In cases when many physicians and patients are fairly certain that she is not making a good decision on her medical interests, then it’s unlikely that all of them are neglectful, overconfident or have hidden agenda
• She can be biased and ignorant as well
• She is not the only one who deeply care about her other non-medical interests. Her family, friends, and even herself before, can mind far more than her as well

Autonomy

• Concordance between our care and our values is often key to our continued satisfaction and cooperation
• Autonomy is inherently good for us. First, self-rule is central to a good life, perhaps because it makes us less self-alienated and more worthy of praise for our virtuous decisions. Second, autonomous choices promote our ultimate goals, on the non-controversial assumption that medicine affects non-technical and controversial matters of value and faith on which physicians are not experts (say, a Jehovah’s Witness’s faith), and the controversial assumption that these goals define how well our lives go
• Kant’s formular of humanity: we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself We have an authority to determine our own actions

• The cost of ensuring that a single decision is absolutely autonomous may be a severe, permanent, or fatal health problem
• No theory of well-being—neither desire satisfaction, hedonic state, nor objective list—does it seem to follow that either informed consent or autonomous choice invariably makes one’s life better. And if they did, then it would be absurd to claim that informed consent and the principle of autonomy are distinct from, or conflict with, or even supersede, the principle of beneficence.
• Kant associated respect for persons with treating them only in ways that they could possibly or rationally consent to, not with treating them in ways that they have actually consented to—rationally, voluntarily, or otherwise
• Many gross violations of informed consent do not directly block our actions
• Violating informed consent can have positive impact on autonomy. Sometimes closing off an option enables more important freedoms

Prevention of abusive conduct

• Physicians should make some effort to explain information again if they discover that their patients misunderstand crucial risks. Intuitively, this is so even if the patient was given an excellent explanation, one that worked with similar patients and which would rule out reasonable suspicion of deceit, exploitation, or fraud
• Hardly leave room for strong reasons against coercive medical intervention when third parties perform the coercion; for example, against extracting a live kidney from a consenting patient who consents only due to her family’s coercion, yet such reasons are widely recognized

Trust

• Ongoing societal trust in caretakers and medical institutions is important
• What is likeliest to inspire public trust is unconditional commitment to one’s immediate patient’s alleged consent rights
• Honor the trust that the patient has placed in the physician, and as part of the fiduciary role that the physician has undertaken

• Intuitively, informed consent can remain necessary even when the public could never find out that a core violation of the requirement took place
• Invasive interventions without a person’s informed consent are usually thought to wrong that person, not to wrong only the potential future victims of a decline in public trust
• The backward-looking version of the trust rationale has difficulty explaining the need for informed consent outside pre-existing caretaker-patient relationships. Forced bodily trespass, for example, seems (not much less) wrong when it comes from complete strangers

Self-ownership

• Self-ownership may just mean that the individual should be the final arbiter in the relevant sphere, and that seems like a part of what informed consent requires—hardly an edifying rationalization for requiring informed consent
• A further challenge is that the self-ownership rationale fails to clarify why touching sensitive areas of the body without consent seems worse than touching less sensitive areas without consent. Property violation is not usually a matter of degree
• Why must physicians disclose and ensure our comprehension of information prior to intervention, something which proprietary rights seldom require? Indeed, the notion of self-ownership could be used against coercing doctors to give patients that information—because such coercion may violate these physicians’ self-ownership rights to interact as they will

Non-domination

Personal integrity

• Would this account condemn the use of a magic wand to treat an unwilling patient’s ailments without cutting his skin and so?
• Would it also condemn threat of fines that coerces patients to move their bodies in certain ways, even without touching them?