The Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy will host a public lecture by Professor David Enoch (of Hebrew University at Jerusalem) on Thursday, January 28, at 5:15pm in Room B16 of the Law Faculty Building.
The title of the lecture is "The Normative (In)Significance of Hypothetical Consent". Here is an abstract of the lecture: "A patient arrives at your emergency room, unconscious. A blood transfusion will save her life. A blood transfusion is the kind of treatment that usually requires consent - without consent, it is usually morally impermissible to administer a blood transfusion. And the patient in front of you is not giving her consent. Of course, she cannot - she's unconscious. But perhaps you can still administer the life-saving treatment, for surely, had she been conscious, she would have given her consent. And perhaps this is enough to render the treatment morally permissible. In this and many other cases in ethics and political philosophy, the resort to hypothetical consent seems natural. And yet there is something deeply puzzling about hypothetical consent - there seem to be principled reasons to think that hypothetical consent never really matters. In this paper, I explain the suspicions regarding hypothetical consent; I show under what conditions some normative role for hypothetical consent can nevertheless be secured; and go some way towards answering the question - when does hypothetical consent matter?" _________________________________ Matthew H. Kramer Professor of Legal & Political Philosophy, Cambridge University Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge Director of Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy Fellow of the British Academy _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
