Limits of Autonomy in Biomedical Ethics? Conceptual Clarifications

In biomedical ethics the principle of autonomy is closely connected with the moral and legal claim to informed consent. After World War II and the dramatic misuse of medicine in Nazi Germany, informed consent regulations were expected to help avoid similar misuse in the future, to help overcome the traditional medical paternalism, and to advance the liberty rights of patients and human subjects of research. With the rise of the new field of bioethics in the 1970s, the traditional beneficence-based model of medical ethics shifted in the direction of an individual autonomy model.