There is an ongoing debate in medicine about whether patients have a ‘right not to know’ pertinent medical information, such as diagnoses of life-altering diseases. While this debate has employed various ethical concepts, probably the most widely-used by both defenders and detractors of the right is autonomy. Whereas defenders of the right not to know typically employ a ‘liberty’ conception of autonomy, according to which to be autonomous involves doing what one wants to do, opponents of the right not to know often employ a ‘duty’ understanding, viewing autonomy as involving an obligation to be self-governing. The central contribution of this paper is in showing that neither view of autonomy can reasonably be said to support the extreme stances on the right not to know that they are sometimes taken to. That is, neither can a liberty view properly defend a right not to know without limits, nor can a duty view form the basis of an absolute rejection of the right not to know. While there is still theoretical distance between these two approaches, we conclude that the views are considerably closer on this issue than they first appear, opening the way for a possible compromise.

中文翻译：

---

不知情权：达成妥协的一些步骤

关于患者是否有“不知道”相关医学信息的权利，例如改变生命的疾病的诊断，医学界一直存在争论。虽然这场辩论使用了各种伦理概念，但权利的捍卫者和批评者使用最广泛的可能是自治。不知情权的捍卫者通常采用自主的“自由”概念，根据该概念，自主意味着做自己想做的事，而不知情权的反对者通常采用“义务”理解，将自主视为涉及自治的义务。本文的核心贡献在于表明，任何一种自治观点都不能合理地支持关于不知道有时被采纳的权利的极端立场。那是，自由观也不能无限制地适当地捍卫不知情权，责任观也不能构成绝对拒绝不知情权的基础。虽然这两种方法之间在理论上仍有距离，但我们得出的结论是，在这个问题上的观点比最初出现的要近得多，为可能的妥协开辟了道路。