Informed consent requirements for medical research have expanded over the past half-century. The Declaration of Helsinki now includes an explicit positive obligation to inform subjects about funding sources. This is problematic in a number of ways and seems to oblige researchers to disclose information irrelevant to most consent decisions. It is argued here that such a problematic obligation involves an “informational fallacy.” The aim in the second part of the paper is to provide a better approach to making sense of (...) how a failure to inform about funding sources wrongs subjects: by making appeals to obligations to refrain from misleading by omission. This alternative approach—grounded in a general obligation to refrain from misleading, an obligation that is independent of informed consent—provides a basis for a norm that protects subjects’ interests, without the informational fallacy. The approach developed here avoids the problems identified with the currently specified general obligation to inform about funding sources. (shrink)

A few years ago, the New York City Department of Health introduced a public health campaign entitled “Cut Your Portions, Cut Your Risk”, a series of posters in which images of food in increasingly large portion sizes appear. In one example, three packets of french fries are featured; in another, cheeseburgers are shown. In a red box in each, the text, in large, all-capital letters in English and Spanish, reads “Portions have grown,” and, below this, in all capitals, “so has (...) obesity, which can lead to many health problems” or “so has type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations.” Beneath the food, the posters admonish, again in all-capital... (shrink)