Our flawed approach to undue inducement in medical research

Some worry that offering too much money to participate in medical research can seduce people into participating against their better judgment. These overly attractive offers that impair judgment are often referred to as 'undue inducements'. The current approach to prevent undue inducement is to limit the size of such offers. The hope is that smaller offers will not be attractive enough to impair judgment. Even if this is true, I argue that we should reject this solution. In Section 1, I go over the problem of undue inducement, and our current approach to preventing it, in more detail. In Section 2, I argue that, like money, therapeutic benefits of medical research may also unduly induce. In Section 3, I argue that the current approach to preventing undue inducement is absurd in the case of therapeutic inducements. In Section 4, I argue that our current approach is analogously problematic in the case of monetary inducements.