Consent Is Not Enough

The Case for Abolishing Consent in Data Privacy Law

Consent in data protection law is highly contentious. Critics argue that enabling people to make their own decisions is not feasible, as people are generally poor decision-makers. However, proponents insist on the value of consent as a tool of empowerment. This Article challenges the foundational assumptions of this debate: that consent is conducive to privacy; that the decision to share one’s data concerns mainly the person sharing them; and that if we were to bridge the gap between the layperson and the ideal decision-maker, we would achieve an optimal level of data privacy protection. Setting aside these false assumptions, this Article aims to resituate the consent debate in a framework that rests on more solid theoretical ground. First, it connects the economic concept of data externalities with the philosophical idea of the harm principle. This highlights how unilaterally imposing burdens on others, without consideration of their interests, is morally unjustifiable, thereby depriving consent of its normative justification. Second, it examines privacy as a public good, demonstrating that even rational decision-makers are bound to freeride on each other’s data privacy and make everyone worse-off, thereby rendering consent undesirable. Therefore, this Article concludes that we should abolish consent, while retaining individual control over data through data privacy rights.

Conscience Rights, Naturalism, and Moral Knowledge: In Defense of Conscience Absolutism.

Informed Consent without Autonomy.

Ethics: Action, Power, and Moral Autonomy

What is morality, and where does it come from? Ethics: Action, Power, and Moral Autonomy answers boldly: Morality cannot be understood solely as a code prescribed by nature or God. but the work of a being who must create meaning, responsibility, and value in a world that offers none ready-made. Tracing the long passage from nomos — the archaic order of fear, custom, and survival — to ethos, the freedom of a self that gives itself its own law, this book retells the birth of conscience as a profound anthropological transformation, where the inherited fog of mystery gives way to reason and obedience gives way to autonomy. Yet autonomy is not the end of the story. Drawing on Aristotle and Hegel, on existential thought and the Islamic ethics of amānah and akhlaq, it builds a vision of ethical life grounded in personality and conscience, sustained by an ontology of Love, and bound to others through justice — the "stone arch" that joins individual conscience to law, institutions, and the common good. Against the modern "invasion of things," which quietly surrenders human judgment to economic and technical machinery, this book makes an urgent case for the human being as a moral creator of the world: ethical life as an unfinished project, a workshop of human becoming in which dignity, justice, and meaning must be reclaimed again and again, toward a shared Planetary Ethos broad enough for all of humanity.

Applying Medical Ethics to the Informed Consent Process: Minimizing Legal Risks for Healthcare Professionals

Ideally, informed consent constitutes an ethical and legal process that safeguards patient autonomy while providing legal certainty for medical professionals. In practice, however, informed consent may still be reduced to an administrative formality, creating a gap between das sollen and das sein, particularly in communication, patient understanding, documentation, and compliance with professional standards. This study aims to analyze the application of medical ethics in the informed consent process, identify factors affecting its effectiveness, and examine its implications for the legal risks faced by medical professionals. This study employs normative legal research using statutory and conceptual approaches. Primary legal materials consist of health-related legislation, particularly Law Number 17 of 2023 on Health, while secondary materials comprise legal scholarship, medical ethics literature, and relevant scientific articles. The materials are analyzed using descriptive-analytical and prescriptive methods. The findings indicate that the effectiveness of informed consent depends on the quality of information, communication, decision-making capacity, documentation, and compliance with professional standards. Substantive application of medical ethics strengthens the legitimacy of medical interventions while serving as a preventive mechanism for minimizing disputes and potential legal liability of medical professionals.

Grammar of 'understanding' in informed consent: a Wittgensteinian diagnosis.

Ethical accounts of informed consent require that patients understand the risks, benefits and alternatives of a proposed intervention. Recent philosophical work has examined what content must be understood and how much understanding is sufficient, but a prior question remains unresolved: what kind of concept 'understanding' is in this context. In current institutional practice, understanding is treated as a private mental state produced by receiving information. On this reception model, the consent process is organised around information transfer, and understanding is presumed to follow from adequate disclosure. This article argues that the reception model rests on a grammatical confusion that Wittgenstein diagnoses in Philosophical Investigations §§148-155. Wittgenstein shows that 'understanding' is not a mental process or inner event but a capacity demonstrated in use: to say that someone understands is to say something about what they can do, not about what has occurred inside them. Applied to informed consent, this analysis reveals that the consent process as standardly practised verifies understanding using the wrong kind of evidence, collecting self-reports about an interior state rather than demonstrations of a capacity. The diagnosis explains an otherwise puzzling empirical pattern: readability-focused consent interventions produce inconsistent improvements in comprehension, while demonstration-based methods such as teach-back succeed more consistently. The article develops four implications for consent process design: evaluating adequacy by demonstrated comprehension rather than disclosure completeness; adopting teach-back as the standard approach to verification; redesigning consent forms for elicitation rather than readability alone; and narrowing the conceptual gap between ordinary consent and formal capacity assessment.