Fair Consent Transactions and Ethical Pluralism

According to the fair transaction view, consent is morally powerful when it occurs in the context of a larger consent transaction that is fair, rather than when one's consent is valid. This fair transaction view represents a novel approach to the ethics of consent and puts pressure on the standard focus on valid consent. If correct, the fair transaction model promises to alter our understanding of when consent in medicine matters morally. In this paper, I examine the prospects for the fair transaction view. I raise both good and bad news for the theory. On the one hand, I show this new approach to consent captures something important when it says that we ought to weigh a number of competing demands fairly. Yet on the other, I argue that this insight is better explained by the larger moral system of ethical pluralism.