Nudging and Informed Consent

Special issue of The American Journal of Bioethics on nudging and informed consent (Volume 13, Issue 6, 2013), abstract of focus article below:

Libertarian paternalism's notion of “nudging” refers to steering individual decision making so as to make choosers better off without breaching their free choice. If successful, this may offer an ideal synthesis between the duty to respect patient autonomy and that of beneficence, which at times favors paternalistic influence. A growing body of literature attempts to assess the merits of nudging in health care. However, this literature deals almost exclusively with health policy, while the question of the potential benefit of nudging for the practice of informed consent has escaped systematic analysis. This article focuses on this question. While it concedes that nudging could amount to improper exploitation of cognitive weaknesses, it defends the practice of nudging in a wide range of other conditions. The conclusion is that, when ethically legitimate, nudging offers an important new paradigm for informed consent, with a special potential to overcome the classical dilemma between paternalistic beneficence and respect for autonomy.

Link to paper: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15265161.2013.781704

Commentaries:

1) Nudging, Autonomy, and Valid Consent: Context Matters.

 

2) Presumed Consent Models and Health Information Exchanges: Hard Nudges and Ambiguous Benefits.

 

3) Nudging and the Complicated Real Life of “Informed Consent”.

4) Nudging Without Ethical Fudging: Clarifying Physician Obligations to Avoid Ethical Compromise.

5) Trust Versus Paternalism.

6) Should We Nudge Informed Consent?

7) Context Is All Important in Investigating Attitudes: Acceptability Depends on the Nature of the Nudge, Who Nudges, and Who Is Nudged.

8) And as for the Nudgees?

 

9) Habits, Nudges, and Consent.

 

10) “Nudging” and Informed Consent Revisited: Why “Nudging” Fails in the Clinical Context.

11) On Nudging and Informed Consent—Four Key Undefended Premises.

12) Nudging in Interpersonal Contexts.

13) Nudging the Older Person Into Care: An End to the Dilemma?