Competence and Vulnerability in Biomedical Research

In this book, the author develops a novel justificatory framework for making judgments of decisional competence to consent to biomedical research with reference to five groups of cognitively vulnerable individuals - older children and adolescents, adults with intellectual disabilities, adults with depression, adults with schizophrenia and adults with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. Using this framework, the author argues that we can make morally defensible judgments about the competence or incompetence of a potential participant to give contemporaneous consent to research by having regard to whether a judgment of competence would be more harmful to the ‘generic rights’ of the potential participant than a judgment of incompetence. The argument is also used to justify an account of supported decision-making in research, and applied to evaluate the extent to which this approach is evident in existing ethical guidelines and legal provisions. The book will be of interest to bioethicists as well as psychiatrists and academic medical lawyers interested in normative questions raised by the concepts of competence and capacity.