← Chapter 4
Applied Ethics · Chapter 4

The Consent Audit

The most consequential deontological document of the twentieth century was written by judges. Build a research protocol feature by feature, audit it against the Nuremberg Code, and find out which real study you have just designed. Then raise its scientific value as high as you like and watch what happens to the verdict.

Design the protocol

Scientific value — how much this study would teach
55
Treat this as generous: at 100 the study reliably saves many thousands of future lives and the knowledge is unobtainable any other way.

The audit

Scientific value 55
Consent integrity 0%
Against the ten points of the Code (Nuremberg, August 1947)

What have you just designed?

Every duty, read as a right

Deontology and rights talk are close kin: if I have a duty not to deceive you, you hold a corresponding claim against me. Wesley Hohfeld’s analysis, published in the Yale Law Journal in 1913 and 1917, separated the vocabulary lawyers and ethicists still use. Each duty you have switched off below reappears as something the subject holds.
Why the vocabulary mattersRobert Nozick called rights side constraints in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): not goals to be maximised but boundaries on what may be done to individuals, an idea he traced straight to Kant. So when a nurse says “the patient has a right to refuse,” she is speaking the descendant language of duty-based ethics — and the sentence means the refusal is not up for cost-benefit review.