Informed consent is an application of which Belmont principle?

Informed consent is fundamentally linked to the principle of respect for persons. This principle emphasizes the importance of recognizing individual autonomy and acknowledging the rights of individuals to make informed decisions regarding their own participation in research. Informed consent involves providing potential research participants with comprehensive information about the study, including its purpose, risks, benefits, and their rights, allowing them to make a voluntary and informed choice about whether to participate.

Respect for persons requires that participants are treated as autonomous agents, capable of making informed decisions about their own lives. This is expressed through the practice of obtaining informed consent, where individuals are given enough information to understand what they are agreeing to and can consent without coercion or undue influence. The integrity of this process ensures that participants are respected as individuals with their own values and choices.

While the other principles—non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice—play vital roles in ethical research, they do not specifically encompass the process of informed consent in the same way. Non-maleficence focuses on avoiding harm to participants, beneficence involves maximizing potential benefits and minimizing harm, and justice addresses fair distribution of the research benefits and burdens. However, none of these alternatives directly address the need for participants to have the autonomy and information requisite