ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 starts with the case of Rambha Gajre, a young woman from India, who consents to paid participation in a clinical trial only to earn the money needed for her son’s medical care and to avoid being evicted from her apartment. The chapter illustrates with Rambha’s case the importance and the difficulties involved in assessing the voluntariness of a person’s consent. It then states the main proposal of this book, a view called Interpersonal Consenter–Consentee Justification (ICCJ): consent is voluntary unless it is motivated by an influence that cannot be interpersonally justified. Finally, the chapter explains that it supports this proposal with a two-part method, a Top-Down defence in Part Two of the book, which supports ICCJ on the basis of general theoretical considerations, and a Bottom-Up defence in Part Three, which supports ICCJ in its application to key challenges in clinical practice.
