ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a poststructuralist narrative hermeneutic approach to informed consent, based on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Paul Ricoeur can increase sensitivity to individual, relational, and cultural factors through reformulating informed consent as an experiential, expressive, and interpretive action and act. Moreover, while the right to informed consent in the current dominant model belongs to the patient, the responsibility for both the procurement of the consent and the results of any intervention is usually thought to fall solely on the physician. This grounding of narrative identity in language and discourse interconnects the subject's mind and body through the importance of speech and action of speech as action. the poststructuralist narrative hermeneutic approach to informed consent described here, grounded in and illuminating individual and collective moral terms, resists the Scylla and Charybdis of a loss of moral weight and a divorce from the detail of the particular story, the two dangers Nelson identifies for narrative ethics.
