Communicating Consent (Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics) (Book Review‪)‬

Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics. By Neil C. Manson and Onora O'Neill. Cambridge University Press, 2007. 226 pages. $34.99. Paperback. It is by now a platitude that informed consent is one of the most central and discussed concepts in bioethics. In Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics, Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill argue that the notion of informed consent has been fundamentally distorted and in various ways overemphasized in bioethical discourse and in medical practice. Drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's discussion of structuring metaphors, they argue that bioethicists have understood the informed consent process as a kind of abstract transfer of "containers" of information along "conduits" that run between doctors and patients. In contrast, they draw upon pragmatic speech act theory in the philosophy of language to develop an account of informed consent as a communicative transaction: a concrete, norm-bound social transaction by way of speech acts.