HEAR A RECORDING OF THIS LECTURE 

Informed consent is now seen as fundamental to research and clinical ethics.  Huge recent literatures advocate supposedly improved consent requirements.  Consenting, it is said, should be explicit; and consent, it is said, should be specific.  This does not tell us what standards are required, and there is much empirical evidence that highly specific and explicit consent set excessive standards.  There is little ethical merit in advocating impractical or impossible requirements for informed consent, or in pretending that such standards can be met.

Onora O’Neill shall argue that informed consent is better seen as a way for patients, research subjects and others to waive others’ obligations, such as their obligations not to perform invasive or intrusive actions, on a specific occasion.  Informed consent is an important way of adjusting fundamental obligations that requires both parties to observe the   epistemic and ethical norms required for genuine consent transactions.

Onora O’Neill has been President of the British Academy since 2005.  She was elected a Fellow in 1993.  She writes on ethics and political philosophy, with particular interests in questions of international justice, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and in bioethics.  Her books include Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Development and Justice (1986), Constructions of Reason: Exploration of Kant's Practical Philosophy (1989), Towards Justice and Virtue (1996), Bounds of Justice (2000), Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (2002), A Question of Trust (the 2002 Reith Lectures) and most recently Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics (2007), written jointly with Neil Manson.