Some reflections on the problem of advance directives, personhood, and personal identity

In this paper, I consider objections to advance directives based on the claim that there is a discontinuity of interests, and of personal identity, between the time a person executes an advance directive and the time when the patient has become severely demented. Focusing narrowly on refusals of life-sustaining treatment for severely demented patients, I argue that acceptance of the psychological view of personal identity does not entail that treatment refusals should be overriden. Although severely demented patients are morally considerable beings, and must be kept comfortable whilst alive, they no longer have an interest in receiving life-sustaining treatment.     

Divine timelessness and personhood

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Dispositional accounts of evil personhood

It is intuitively plausible that not every evildoer is an evil person. In order to make sense of this intuition we need to construct an account of evil personhood in addition to an account of evil action. Some philosophers have offered aggregative accounts of evil personhood, but these do not fit well with common intuitions about the explanatory power of evil personhood, the possibility of moral reform, and the relationship between evil and luck. In contrast, a dispositional account of evil personhood can allow that evil is explanatory, that an evil person can become good, and that luck might prevent evil persons from doing evil or cause non-evil persons to do evil. Yet the dispositional account of evil personhood implies that some evil persons are blameless, which seems to clash with the intuition that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation. Moreover, since it is likely that a large proportion of us are disposed to perform evil actions in some environments, the dispositional account threatens to label a large proportion of people evil. In this paper I consider a range of possible modifications to the dispositional account that might bring it more closely into alignment with our intuitions about moral condemnation and the rarity of evil persons. According to the most plausible of these theories, S is an evil person if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions when in conditions that favour S’s autonomy.     

Who/se we are: baptism as personhood.

The attempt to arrive at some consensus on precisely what qualifies a human as a persons represents one of the more persistently debated and widely significant issues in modern biomedical ethics. The attribution of personhood has been and continues to be a powerful tool in moral discourse. Biomedical and bioethical debates about personhood seem especially morally significant in late modernity given the recent trends in biomedical technology. Our attempts to formally articulate universally agreed upon criteria for personhood represent some of the last vestiges of the hope that we can achieve substantial moral agreement in an otherwise morally fragmented world. In this essay, we argue that, from the perspective of certain strands of the Christian tradition, all bioethics grounded in attempts to develop formal, objective criteria by which we may designate a given individual a person are misguided. Criteria centering on the possession of reflective mental capacity, moreover, are for Christians especially problematic. We suggest that there are no morally neutral ways of designating personhood.     

Hylemorphism,remnant persons and personhood

Animalism is the doctrine that we human beings are – are identical with – animals. Hylemorphism is a form of animalism. In this paper, I defend hylemorphism by showing that while other forms of animalism fall prey to the problem of ‘Remnant Persons,’ hylemorphism does not. But hylemorphism's account of personhood seems to have some very implausible implications. I address one of those implications, and argue that it isn't nearly as objectionable as it might at first appear.     

Some recent Soviet works on Marcuse and the Frankfurt school

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Some recent Soviet works on Marcuse and the Frankfurt school

     

Some recent studies on the extraretinal contribution to distance perception

Some recent studies on the extraretinal contribution to distance perception are reviewed. These experiments demonstrate that vergence can provide reliable information for judgments on the distance of proximal targets in the absence of all other cues. We argue that, although vergence is an unreliable cue at large fixation distances and is subject to a strong contraction bias when studied in isolation, these facts do not imply a minor role for vergence in near-space perception. When additional depth and distance cues are added, the contribution of vergence information becomes more complicated. We present results which indicate that the different cues to depth and distance are combined in a manner that can result in unexpected distortions of visual space. A simple heuristic model which can produce the observed distortions is outlined.