Respect for Autonomy and Dementia Care in Nursing Homes: Revising Beauchamp and Childress’s Account of Autonomous Decision-Making

Specifying the moral demands of respect for the autonomy of people with dementia (PWD) in nursing homes (NHs) remains a challenging conceptual task. These challenges arise primarily because received notions of autonomous decision-making and informed consent do not straightforwardly apply to PWD in NHs. In this paper, I investigate whether, and to what extent, the influential account of autonomous decision-making and informed consent proposed by Beauchamp and Childress has applicability and relevance to PWD in NHs. Despite its otherwise practical orientation and suitability for acute care settings, I identify three problems with this account when applied to PWD in NHs. These problems include (1) intentionality as an all-or-nothing condition of autonomous decision-making, (2) construing consent as one-off authorization, and (3) unresolved ambiguities around the primacy of precedent autonomy over best interest considerations. To address these problems, I propose and defend a number of revisions to Beauchamp and Childress’s account. First, I suggest that we consider intentionality as a non-binary criterion of autonomous decision-making. Second, I argue for a model of process consent to overcome the moral inadequacy of construing consent as one-off authorization in NHs. And, to overcome the third problem, I suggest accounting for both precedent and extant autonomy of PWD, considering mandates of precedent autonomy not as prescriptive but as informative, and drawing a less rigid distinction between autonomy considerations and best interest judgements. I conclude that this revised version of Beauchamp and Childress’s account fares better than the original version in capturing relevant autonomy considerations to care for PWD in NHs.