Informed Consent without Autonomy

This paper presents a new view on the moral foundations of the practice of informed consent in clinical medicine. It draws on the ideal of "Hippocratic Consent" and the principle of respect for bodily integrity to develop a justification for informed consent in clinical medicine that does not appeal to the principle of patient autonomy. The paper contends that these two notions, once clarified and appropriately distinguished from autonomy, can explain much of what is valuable in the practice of informed consent in this context. After outlining the advantages of this approach over the standard autonomy-based approach to informed consent, the paper discusses a limited role for the principle of autonomy to play on the margins of clinical medicine, rather than at its core.