‘You don't need proof when you've got instinct!’: gut feelings and some limits to parental authority

There is widespread acceptance that there should be limitations on parental authority in shared decisions, yet parental authority is ill-defined, and without some agreement on the source of parental authority it is difficult to limit it either cogently or consistently. This chapter presents results from an empirical ethics investigation into shared decision-making in the paediatric intensive care unit, a study that focused on critical decisions in which an infant child’s treatment or non-treatment would be decided. It uses intuition to characterise an instinctive sense that something is the case – what is sometimes termed a ‘gut instinct’. In Best Interests in Paediatric Intensive Care, intimacy also gave parents a strong sense of intuition about their child’s best interests, and the contributions to shared decisions that parents reported relied strongly upon their intuitions.