 The simplest rationale for the informed consent requirement is that it protects study participants’ and patients’ health and welfare. It protects participants from investigators’ overzealous attempts to promote science and personal careers, even on participants’ backs, and it also protects regular patients from neglectful clinicians or from overconfident, but often wrong,  paternalistic  ones. While many moral doctrines oppose harming study participants or patients, bioethicists’ expositions of this instrumental rationale typically echo utilitarian philosopher  John Stuart Mill,  for whom “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (Mill 1990, 135; see also ch. 3). They explain that patients and research participants are typically the best judges of their own good and mind it far more than the doctor does, even when the doctor is convinced that he or she acts in their best interests (compare Mill 1990, e.g. 215). They add that doctors’ training scarcely prepares them to know patients’ distinctive non-medical interests.