Arianne Shahvisi

In this paper, I argue that the conscience clause around abortion provision in England, Scotland and Wales is inadequate for two reasons. First, the patient and doctor are differently situated with respect to social power. Doctors occupy a position of significant moral and epistemic authority with respect to their patients, who are vulnerable and relatively disempowered. Doctors are rightly required to disclose their conscientious objection, but given the positioning of the patient and doctor, the act of doing so exploits the authority of the medical establishment in asserting the legitimacy of a particular moral view. Second, the conscientious objector plays an unusual and self-defeating moral role. Since she must immediately refer the patient on to another doctor who does not hold a conscientious objection, she becomes complicit, via her necessary causal role, in the implementation of the procedure. This means that doctors are not able to prevent abortions, rather, they are required to ensure that they...

The demand for informed consent in clinical medicine is usually justified on the basis that it promotes patient autonomy. In this article I argue that the most effective way to promote autonomy is to improve patient understanding in order to reduce the epistemic disparity between patient and medical professional. Informed consent therefore derives its moral value from its capacity to reduce inequalities of power as they derive from epistemic inequalities. So in order for a patient to have given informed consent, she must understand the treatment. I take this to mean that she has sufficient knowledge of its causal mechanisms and has accepted the explanations in which the treatment is implicated. If this interpretation of informed consent is correct, it is unethical for medical professionals to offer or endorse ‘alternative medicine’ treatments, for which there is no known causal mechanism, for if they do, they may end up widening the epistemic disparity. In this way, informed consent may be understood as an effective way of ruling out particular treatments in order to improve patient autonomy and maintain trust in the medical profession