A fundamental requirement of both ethics and the law is that medical treatment cannot be given to competent patients without their "informed consent." This represents a rejection of more traditional authoritarian or paternalistic accounts of the physician/patient relationship in which the physician had decision-making authority in favor of a process of shared decision making between physicians and patients. In this respect informed consent helps shape the nature of nearly all health-care treatment decision making. Informed consent also has special importance in a narrower class of cases in which patients and their physicians are unable to agree on a course of treatment. In these cases a competent patient is given the right to refuse any recommended treatment, even including life-sustaining treatment, no matter how strongly the physician or others believe that the treatment should be undertaken.

There are two principal moral values that are served by...