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Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 2008 33(4):321-336; doi:10.1093/jmp/jhn018
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Kant and Therapeutic Privilege

Chris Brown

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Address correspondence to: Chris Brown, National University of Singapore, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 3 Arts Link, Singapore 117570. E-mail: cabrown{at}u.arizona.edu.


  Abstract

Given Kant's exceptionless moral prohibition on lying, one might suspect that he is committed to a similar prohibition on withholding diagnostic and prognostic information from patients. I confirm this suspicion by adapting arguments against therapeutic privilege from his arguments against lying. However, I show that all these arguments are importantly flawed and submit that they should be rejected. A more compelling Kantian take on informed consent and therapeutic privilege is achievable, I argue, by focusing on Kant's duty of beneficence, which requires us to aim at furthering others’ ends. But I show that there are some cases in which furthering a patient's ends requires withholding material medical information from her. Although I concede that these cases are probably quite rare, I conclude that the best Kantian thinking agrees with that of therapeutic privilege's advocates.

Keywords: informed consent, Kant, lying, therapeutic privilege


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