The principle of respect for patient autonomy and the right of self-determination dominate medical decision-making in developed countries. The concept of prospective autonomy proposes that personal choices ought to inform healthcare decisions for decisionallyincapacitated patients. Such extension of patient’s autonomy is accomplished through advance directive and surrogate decisionmaking; patie...

Respect for patient autonomy is a fundamental ethical principle in clinical health care. In most conceptions of patient autonomy, it is required that the patient considers information and knowledge that is relevant to the matter in question. Thus, the metaphor of navigating knowledge landscapes describes something that patients need to do in order to exercise their autonomy (1,2). This paper di...

The paper proposes a context-driven approach to decision making in flexible networked organisations for the purpose of selecting partners for a specific task. The main idea of the approach is to represent the members of the networked organisation by services they provide. This makes it possible to replace the configuration of the networked organisation with that of services constituting it. Suc...

The debate over whether germ-line genetic engineering is justified on the basis of the consent or presumed consent of future generations is mired in philosophical confusion. Because of this, the principle of informed consent fails to provide a reason to restrict germ-line genetic engineering. Most recent bioethicists ground the consent requirement on individual autonomy. While conceptually cohe...

UNLABELLED Free and informed consent is generally acknowledged as the legal and ethical basis for living organ donation, but assessments of living donors are not always an easy matter. Sometimes it is necessary to involve psychosomatics or ethics consultation to evaluate a prospective donor to make certain that the requirements for a voluntary and autonomous decision are met. The paper focuses ...

Scientific research that requires space flight has always been subject to comparatively strong external control. Its agenda has often had to be adapted to vacillating political target specifications. Can space scientists appeal to one or the other form of the widely acknowledged principle of freedom of research in order to claim more autonomy? In this paper, the difficult question of autonomy w...