Consent and End of Life Decisions.

• Author: Harris, John
• Position: Abstracts

John Harris, Consent and End of Life Decisions, 29 J. MED. ETHICS 10 (2003).

This article discusses the role of consent in decisionmaking generally and its role in end of life decisions in particular. It outlines a conception of autonomy that explains and justifies the role of consent in decisionmaking and criticizes some misapplications of the idea of consent, particularly the role of fictitious or "proxy" consents.

Where the inevitable outcome of a decision must be that a human individual will die and where that individual is a person who is competent to give informed consent, then that decision is ethical only if the individual consents. In very rare and extreme cases such a decision...