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What It Takes to Defend Deceptive Placebo Use
- Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 21, Number 3, September 2011
- pp. 219-250
- 10.1353/ken.2011.0015
- Article
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A complete defense of deceptive placebo use must address this ethical objection: deceptive placebo use violates patient autonomy, because deceiving a patient about the placebo nature of a proposed treatment prevents her from giving informed consent to the treatment. Unfortunately, this objection isn’t always recognized and clearly disambiguated from other ethical concerns. I consider how well several bioethicists who write about placebo use have responded to, or evaded, this objection. I conclude that defenders of deceptive placebo use should, following the lead of Onora O’Neill, argue that deceptive placebo use is compatible with informed consent.