Abstract

In the context of medical ethics, how can the concept of informed consent be effectively implemented in a traditional society such as Japan? If the need for more openness and transparency is not felt in the practice of medicine and welfare, the clients must remain under the spell of paternalistic data. Patients and health-care professionals other than doctors are taken to be "responsible for what they do but not to be accountable for their conduct" because they do not participate in a decision-making process. I explore the possibility of the concept's full implementation against the particularists' and communitarian ethicists' effort to reject the universal nature of the concept.