An international conference “From informed consent to no consent? The challenges of new ethical frameworks” took place on 4.-6. November 2010 in Tartu, Estonia.
The conference was organised by the Centre for Ethics of the University of Tartu, Faculty of Philosophy, the Estonian Genome Center, Graduate School of Biomedicine and Biotechnology and the Doctoral School of Behavioural, Social and Health Sciences.
The conference aimed to scrutinise the ethical debates of the past decade and offered an assessment of the so-called communitarian turn. How successful has it been, both in theoretical debates as well as in the more applied fields of regulation? Surely traditional concepts like autonomy, consent and privacy have not lost their relevance but can we really hope to accommodate both the values of liberal individualism and communitarianism? How should the complex notion of public interest be construed and protected and what are the conditions under which the public interest may override individual interests? How to assess the present developments in biometrics and other new technologies where security and solidarity seem to prevail over privacy and autonomy? What are the potential difficulties that accompany the employment of these new concepts for novel sociotechnical purposes like digitalized health records and biobanks?
The discussion was broadly divided among the following foci:
Changing ethical frameworks - historical and theoretical considerations. Changes in regulation.
Spillover effect - moving the new ethical frameworks into adjacent fields of electronic health records and security technologies.
Possible future developments - from liberalism to communitarianism and beyond. The fate of absolute values in a pluralist world.
