ABSTRACT

This chapter considers cases in which a particular form of treatment of a person is morally permissible not because the person consented to the treatment, but, instead, because he would have consented to it in a hypothetical situation. It is permissible to operate on the unconscious patient, for instance, because were he awake and thinking clearly he would consent to the operation. A central puzzle addressed here is why it is that what a non-actual hypothetical person would consent to is even relevant to the morality of treatments applied to real, actual people. After discussion of the grounds for skepticism about the moral import of hypothetical consent, it is suggested that hypothetical consent matters because often what hypothetical people would do is relevant to the question of what forms of treatment respect the autonomy of those to whom those treatments are applied.