Discussions of informed consent—the cornerstone of twentieth- and twenty-first-century biomedical ethics—have largely unfolded in isolation from other fields where consent is equally central, such as sexual ethics, contract law, and political philosophy. Yet developments in IT, Big Data, AI, and human–computer interaction demand closer dialogue between bioethics and contract law. Emerging technologies—including genetic testing, biomarker analysis, wearable sensors, brain imaging, drones, social media, and smartphones—raise ethical and legal concerns about access to private data, evidence of agreement, and the boundaries of autonomy. This paper brings the bioethical notion of informed consent into conversation with legal conceptions of consent, showing how each can enrich the other. Insights from visual and comic contracting demonstrate how legal design can make consent more genuine and comprehensible in biomedical contexts. Conversely, bioethics’ commitment to “two-way” informed consent offers a model for more relational and ethically grounded approaches to legal contracting.
Andreotta et al. (Thu,) studied this question.