ABSTRACT
The doctrine of informed consent has been anchored in countless legal and institutional rules since the 1970s, and has since been one of the most widely discussed subjects in biomedical ethics and medical law. Starting with a short outline of the conventional understanding of the doctrine of informed consent and its core elements, this chapter focuses on the disclosure element of the doctrine. It is shown that both scope and content of the physician’s obligation to disclose information about a proposed medical treatment to the patient depend upon the kind of justification that is given for the informed consent rule as a whole.
