This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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The United States may have the most litigious culture in the world, but Britain is catching up.

Nowhere are the implications of this being more deeply felt than in the medical profession.

Increasingly, patients are being asked to sign long and complex consent forms before doctors and surgeons will treat or operate on them.

Baroness O'Nora O'Neill, a distinguished philosopher and former head of a Cambridge College,

believes this trend has already gone far too far.

Inora O'Neill, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

It's very nice to be here.

Now the topic I want to focus on today is consent in the medical area. Consent clearly means different things in different contexts. What is consent in the medical context? It's been used in two contexts there. One is in research on human beings and then since the 1970s it's been taken to be absolutely fundamental for medical treatment and that's why you have to sign a

consent form when you have an operation or when you go to the dentist for a course of treatment

and so on. Of course you don't sign consent forms for every trivial thing. For example, when you go to your

GP and she says, I think we better do some blood tests. You don't sign a particular form permitting the taking of

blood but that's presumably implied consent because if I withdrew my arm I'm

clearly not giving consent in that situation and a doctor who continued to take blood would be doing

something wrong to me. Indeed because they would have to override that implied

refusal and in effect coerce you by sticking a needle into holding you down and all the rest of it. But usually

implied consent is taken nowadays to be insufficient. People want explicit

consent and that means documents, signatures, sometimes witnesses to the signatures.

It means record keeping.

A lot of the reason this has become so important is because people are fearful that there may be complaints or even litigation

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