And how do we assess whether "someone understands the risk"? Often, I suspect nobody really "understands" the risk of some minimally-tested, experimental treatment.
Yes, I suppose it could be taken that way. I wasn't intending to argue one way or the other, merely to point out that such an apparently simple condition ("if someone understands...") actually encompasses a huge amount of uncertainty, and so doesn't necessarily represent the "easy answer" that it might at first appear.
Which why in a lot of instances in our lives we are not allowed full personal autonomy. We try to minimize collateral damage as well as self-damage to some extent.
