PATIENT AUTONOMY AND THE ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY

Abstract

[...]he mainly faults physicians themselves for succumbing to economic and organizational influences and permitting society to substitute a legal-contract model of the patient-physician relationship, in which the ethical principle of autonomy in the form of individual self-determination is made operational in the legal doctrine of informed consent, for the virtues of trust and trustworthiness that ought to characterize a superior patient-physician model -- namely, an ethics of responsibility instead of rights.