Abstract

The question of decision-making capacity for informed consent to experimental brain surgery for severely ill anorectic patients is about as dramatic an ethical issue one can imagine. Sabine Muller and her co-authors (2015) should be commended for this extremely timely and original clinical and ethical discussion of decision-making capacity in relation to the issues raised by informed consent to such therapies. In this commentary, I elaborate on the new account of the nature of anorexia nervosa that the authors allude to in order to frame their discussion. This is the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa is a passion: a view with important implications for how we think about decision-making capacity in anorexia nervosa and elsewhere