Philosophical and Legal Foundations of Informed Consent

Abstract

Ethical deliberation has been an important component of human culture since the dawn of political and legal thought. Ethical theories analyze the moral acceptability of human actions from the perspective of a set of principles that, in turn, are derived from the process of implementing, in social practice, some human values considered fundamental at the level of a given society or culture. Ethical theories, similarly to scientific theories, shape the reality in which we live, and although they do not constitute the real world, but only a perspective on it, they allow us to understand and react to facts that occur in the real world. Even if the world is perceived in the form of a social construction - we rather react to social perceptions of events and phenomena, which are most often subjective, through the consequences that our own perceptions or the social perceptions we adhere to have on us and on those with whom we interact with.