Abstract

Patient choice, we might think, is the popular version of the ideas of informed consent and the principle of respect for autonomy and intimately connected to the politics of liberal individualism. There are various accounts to be given for why patient choice, in all its forms, has dominated thinking in bioethics and popular culture. All of them, I suggest, will make reference to the decline of paternalism. The bad old days of ‘doctor knows best’ are gone and were replaced by the primacy of patient choice and informed consent.The response to the dominance of the principle of patient choice has been slow in building but it has come in a number of ways. Two sets of papers in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics show just how far this response has come and the degree to which the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction. Neil Levy's Feature article, ‘Forced to be free? Increasing patient autonomy by constraining it’, argues that we should go to greater lengths to correct patients' mistaken decisions . In the ‘Author meets critics’ section, Sarah Conly's book, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism is the focus of comment . Both authors draw on a similar range of empirical evidence to undermine the sanctity of patient and individual choice. An array of commentators draw on these target pieces to give a clear picture of the ways in which the popular view can justifiably be undermined.Levy's paper focuses on the process of informed consent in clinical contexts. He argues that, while this process is crucially important, it systematically fails because of well-documented frailties of human reason. The evidence of these frailties comes from cognitive and social psychology, on biases and heuristics. The key question is how …