Conflating Capacity & Authority
Why We're Asking the Wrong Question in the Adolescent Decision‐Making Debate
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20333302 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erica K Salter (0000-0001-9766-2200, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 32-41 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Hastings Center Report (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0093-0334 • E-ISSN: 1552-146X |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/hast.666 |
| PMID | 28074581 |
| OpenAlex | W2577080055 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 27 |
Whether adolescents should be allowed to make their own medical decisions has been a topic of discussion in bioethics for at least two decades now. Are adolescents sufficiently capacitated to make their own medical decisions? Is the mature‐minor doctrine, an uncommon legal exception to the rule of parental decision‐making authority, something we should expand or eliminate? Bioethicists have dealt with the curious liminality of adolescents—their being neither children nor adults—in a variety of ways. However, recently there has been a trend to rely heavily, and often exclusively, on emerging neuroscientific and psychological data to answer these questions. Using data from magnetic resonance imaging and functional MRI studies on the adolescent brain, authors have argued both that the adolescent brain isn't sufficiently mature to broadly confer capacity on this population and that the adolescent brain is sufficiently mature to assume adolescent capacity. Scholars then accept these data as sufficient for concluding that adolescents should or should not have decision‐making authority. Two critical mistakes are being made here. The first is the expectation that neuroscience or psychology is or will be able to answer all our questions about capacity. The second, and more concerning, mistake is the conflation of decision‐making capacity with decision‐making authority
Law and economics · Political science · Sociology · Child and Adolescent Health · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development · Ethics and Legal Issues in Pediatric Healthcare · Psychology
Assessment of executive functions
Decision-making in the adolescent brain
Physician Recommendations and Patient Autonomy
The Adolescent Brain
Reconceiving the Family
Affirming the Decisions Adolescents Make about Life and Death
Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Assessing and Enhancing the Research Consent Capacity of Children and Youth
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.57 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |