This is a biorethic bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Bioethics Bites is made an association with Oxford's Uyherers Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by

Grant from the Welcome Trust. For more information about bioethics bites go to

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radically new techniques are opening up exciting possibilities for those working in

health care for psychiatrists doctors surgeons for those and what sort of consent should doctors elicit from patients before treatment.

Is the trend towards detailed consent forms helpful or should we trust doctors to make

good decisions for us? The philosopher Anora O'Neill, formerly principal

of Newnham College, Cambridge, has written extensively on the issue of trust. Trust is vital in most areas

of human interaction, but nowhere more so than in health and medicine.

Andor O'Neill, welcome to Bioethics Bites.

Hello, I'm very glad to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is trust. You've spent a lot of time

thinking about trust and mistrust or possibly distrust in the areas of media ethics and medicine particularly.

We want to look at it in the area of bioethics, but could you say something general about trust?

I think the thing that came to interest me about trust is that there seems to me to have been a very great change in the way we discuss it in the last 15 years.

It used to be thought of as a matter of trusting. in the last 15 years.

It used to be thought of as a matter of trusting relationships,

and of course it was very close to the sort of implied

or implicit consent that people often assumed underlay professional relationships.

It wasn't, of course, merely an attitude.

The implied consent and trust always involved judgment about what the other person was saying,

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