Killing and Relevantly Similarly Letting Die

Winston Nesbitt has argued that the usual examples appealed to as supporting the view that killing is no worse than letting die are misleading in that the comparison cases are not set up properly to tap our intuitions. Making various adjustments to the cases he judges killing to be intuitively worse than letting die and suggests that such a result is meta-ethically appropriate to one view of the point of ethics. I contest each of these claims.     

Killing and Letting Die: the Similarity Criterion

abstract   Applied ethics engages with concrete moral issues. This engagement involves the application of philosophical tools. When the philosophical tools used in applied ethics are problematic, conclusions about applied problems can become skewed. In this paper, I focus on problems with the idea that comparison cases must be exactly alike, except for the moral issue at hand. I argue that this idea has skewed the debate regarding the moral distinction between killing and letting die.
I begin with problems that can arise from attempts to produce comparison cases that are exactly alike, except for the moral issue at hand. I then argue that attempts to produce such examples are doomed to failure. Finally, I argue that abandoning concerns about similarity advances the debate regarding the moral distinction between killing and letting die.     

Abortion,Killing, and Maternal Moral Authority

A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion‐as‐evacuation'’ as equivalent to “abortion‐as‐killing.'’ This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion‐as‐killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.     

Parental Responsibility and the Morality of Selective Abortion

It is now a common opinion in Western countries that a child's impairment would probably place an unexpected burden on her parents, a burden that the parents have not committed themselves to dealing with. Therefore, selective abortion is in general a morally justified option for the parents. I argue that this view is based on biased information about the quality of life of individuals with impairments and their families. Also, a conscious decision to procreate should bring about conscious assent to assuming obligations as a parent. This implies a duty of caring for any kind of child. Consequently, if the child's condition is not such that it would make its life not worth living, and if the parents live in an environment where they are able to provide their child and themselves an adequate well-being, they do not have a morally sufficient reason to terminate the pregnancy on the grounds of fetal abnormality.     

Robert Baker: The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion,Death, and the Bioethics Revolution

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice -     

Killing, wrongness, and equality

This paper examines accounts of the moral wrongness of killing persons in addition to determining what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the morality of killing persons about the (in)equality of persons, and vice versa. I will argue that a plausible way of thinking about the moral wrongness of killing implies that the permissibility of killing innocent, nonthreatening persons depends on a person’s age. I address objections to this conclusion and discuss some potential implications of the view.     

Letting in the Jungle

ABSTRACT The destruction of the environment is a matter for moral concern and cannot be halted in the long term by appeals to human utility. However, the inadequacy and naïvety of humanist styles of ethical argument become apparent when attempts are made to extend them to environmental issues. They usually abstract certain supposed features of natural objects, e.g. sentience, and reify these as essential characteristics which operate to carry or ground ethical values. These arguments necessarily lead to the exclusion of objects which are, in fact, ethically valued or entail an unacceptably expansive egalitarianism. Such egalitarianism is often followed by a return to human-centred prejudices opposed to the originally stated aims of 'biocentric'ethicists like Taylor. Similarly, those physical and ecological holisms which rely not upon shared 'natural'features, but upon sharing in nature itself cannot solve this dilemma as they are incapable of explaining differential ethical values. The attempt to place boundaries on moral considerability should be abandoned in favour of an ethical pluralism which places emphasis on the context of valuations.     

Drugs, Morality and the Law

Arguments for and against the legal prohibition of drugs are surveyed. Various kinds of argument are identified and analysed: arguments against prohibition from a moral right to personal liberty; utilitarian and contractualist arguments for a right to personal liberty; arguments for prohibition from liberty–limiting principles (the harm principle, legal paternalism, legal moralism, Kantian duties to oneself, legal perfectionism, traditional conservatism, and communitarianism); utilitarian argument for prohibition; utilitarian argument against prohibition. It is concluded that none of the arguments for drug prohibition is convincing.     

Terrorism,War, and The Killing of the Innocent

Commonsense moral thought holds that what makes terrorism particularly abhorrent is the fact that it tends to be directed toward innocent victims. Yet contemporary philosophers tend to doubt that the concept of innocence plays any significant role here, and to deny that prohibitions against targeting noncombatants can be justified through appeal to their moral innocence. I argue, however, that the arguments used to support these doubts are ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, the philosophical positions in question tend to misunderstand the justification of both the prohibition against targeting noncombatants, and that of the permission to attack combatants, for which the paper offers a new account. Such misunderstandings make it all too easy to justify both terrorist actions and morally objectionable actions on the part of nations at war. Taking proper account of the role of innocence in the context of armed conflict will alter our ordinary ways of thinking about the ethics of war, with respect to both jus in bello and jus ad bellum.

Buddhism,Abortion and the Middle Way

What have modern Buddhist ethicists to say about abortion and is there anything to be learned from it? A number of writers have suggested that Buddhism (particularly Japanese Buddhism) does indeed have something important to offer here: a response to the dilemma of abortion that is a 'middle way' between the pro-choice and pro-life extremes that have polarised the western debate. I discuss what this suggestion might amount to and present a defence of its plausibility.     

Abortion,Property, and Liberty

In “Abortion and Ownership” John Martin Fischer argues that in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case you have a moral obligation not to unplug yourself from the violinist. Fischer comes to this conclusion by comparing the case with Joel Feinberg’s cabin case, in which he contends a stranger is justified in using your cabin to stay alive. I argue that the relevant difference between these cases is that while the stranger’s right to life trumps your right to property in the cabin case, the violinist’s right to life does not trump your right to liberty in the violinist case.     

Letting Go: For Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Health

This article weaves together some fundamental spiritual and psychological principles, and draws on different perspectives on how people in the West can find healthy release in the concept of letting go.