Why even inappropriate parental consent might be enough to justify minimal risk pediatric research without clinical benefit Author: Dr David Hunter, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham, Email: d.hunter@bham.ac.uk David Wendler offers an interesting new justification for pediatric research without clinical benefit, in his paper A New Justification for Pediatric Research Without Clinical Benefit and I believe his argument here is relatively sound. (Wendler forthcoming) However I want to suggest that he was too quick to reject one of the alternative justifications that he considers - that of parental authority. In effect I want to argue that his argument holds researchers to an unreasonably high standard in regards to parental decision making, a much higher standard than we would hold parents to making similarly risky decisions. Hence for Wendler's argument to work we would need a justification for research exceptionalism – holding researchers to a much higher standard than others. (Wilson & Hunter 2010) The idea of parental authority is derived reasonably straightforwardly from our standard treatment of the parent/child relationship, namely that we generally defer to parents as decision makers on behalf of children, unless their decisions are particularly and obviously bad, or perhaps the risks they choose to run are too high. Hence we might suggest that at least minimal risk pediatric research without clinical benefit can be justified via parental consent – if parents authorise it then it is morally permissible to conduct it and hence this is all research ethics committees ought to require. 1