Killing, letting die, and withdrawing aid

One of the aims of this article is to contribute to the identification of the empirical criteria governing the use of the concepts of killing and letting die. I will not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the concepts but will limit the inquiry to certain problematic cases -- namely, cases involving the removal or withdrawal of life-supporting aid or protection. The analysis of these cases will, however, shed light on the criteria for distinguishing killing and letting die in other cases as well. My overall aims in the article are partly constructive and partly skeptical. I hope to advance our understanding of the nature of the distinction between killing and letting die. This, I believe, will enable us to defend the moral relevance of the distinction against certain objections -- in particular, objections that claim that the distinction fails to coincide with commonsense moral intuitions. Yet I will suggest that, as we get clearer about the nature of the distinction and the sources of its intuitive appeal, it may seem that the intuitions it supports are not so well grounded as one could wish.     

Killing, letting die, and simple conflicts

Proponents of the moral equivalence of killing and letting die argue that in cases of simple conflict, where one agent must either perform a positive act and kill one person, or not perform that act and allow another person to die, the agent's alternatives are clearly morally equivalent. Malm rejects this view in a three part essay. He argues that in cases of simple conflict, the acts of killing and letting die are morally different, and that killing is not in itself worse than letting die. Malm considers and rejects the suggestion that the agent should decide randomly between the two alternatives. He concludes that while simple conflict cases require us to recognize a morally significant difference between killing and letting die, they do not require us to recognize a morally significant difference between acting and refraining.     

Puzzling cases about killing and letting die.

Discussions of euthanasia often appeal to the distinction between killing people and letting them die. Favor asks whether this distinction is morally important--in particular, whether killing is worse than merely letting someone die, even when the motivations and consequences are the same. She explores our moral intuitions via a discussion of various subtly different hypothetical examples.     

Forgiveness in marriage: putting the benefits into context.

The current longitudinal study examined the consequences of spouses' tendencies to forgive their partners over the first 2 years of 72 new marriages. Though positive main effects between forgiveness and marital outcomes emerged cross-sectionally, spouses' tendencies to forgive their partners interacted with the frequency of those partners' negative verbal behaviors to predict changes in marital outcomes longitudinally. Specifically, whereas spouses married to partners who rarely behaved negatively tended to remain more satisfied over time to the extent that they were more forgiving, spouses married to partners who frequently behaved negatively tended to experience steeper declines in satisfaction to the extent that they were more forgiving. Similar patterns emerged for changes in the severity of husbands' problems, such that husbands married to wives who frequently behaved negatively reported sharper increases in problem severity to the extent that they were more forgiving but reported more stable problem severity to the extent that they were less forgiving. These findings question whether all spouses should benefit from forgiveness interventions and thus highlight the need for further research on the most appropriate targets for such interventions.     

Race, pharmacogenomics, and marketing: putting BiDil in context

This article endeavors to place into context recent developments surrounding the United States Food and Drug Administration recent approval of BiDil (isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine hydrochloride) (NitroMed, Inc., Lexington, MA) as the first ever race-specific drug--in this case to treat heart failure in African Americans. It focuses in particular on both commercial incentives and statistical manipulation of medical data as framing the drive to bring BiDil to market as a race-specific drug. In current discourse about pharmacogenomics, targeting a racial audience is perceived as necessary because at this point the technology and resources do not exist to scan efficiently every individual's genetic profile. The article argues that medical researchers may say they are using race as a surrogate to target biology in drug development, but corporations are using biology as a surrogate to target race in drug marketing. Pharmacogenomics may hold great promise, but on our way to that Promised Land, it is imperative to review such short cuts with a critical eye.     

Club shaft weight in putting accuracy and perception of swing parameters in golf putting

This study assessed how shaft weight influenced golf putting accuracy and subjective perception of swing parameters. Three putters of different shaft weight (100, 420, and 610 gm) were tested by 24 club players. Distance and deviation in direction were measured, and subjective ratings of the putters recorded. Subjects hit the ball further with lighter shafts. The mean distance hit was 100.2, 99.3, and 98.1% of the target distance for the normal, medium, and heavy putter shafts, respectively. Subjectively, the medium heavy putter was rated best on "overall feeling" and it was also rated better than the normal on"feeling of stability in the downswing." The heaviest putter was rated as too heavy by 23 of 24 subjects. There were no significant differences between the putter clubs in distance and directional putting accuracy. The major findings are that the golfers putted 2.1% longer with the 100 gm shaft than with the 610 gm shaft and that the perception of overall feeling of the putter club was not related to performance.     

A modern myth--that letting die is not the intentional causation of death: some reflections on the trial and acquittal of Dr. Leonard Arthur

ABSTRACT If a doctor kills a severely handicapped infant, he commits an act of murder; if he deliberately allows such an infant to die, he is said to engage in the proper practice of medicine. This is the view that emerged at the recent trial of Dr Leonard Arthur over the death of the infant John Pearson. However, the distinction between murder on the one hand and what are regarded as permissible lettings die on the other rests on the Moral Difference Myth, according to which deliberate lettings die in the practice of medicine are not instances of the intentional causation of death.
I argue that a doctor who refrains from preventing a handicapped infant's death, causes that infant's death and does so intentionally. He commits an act of murder. But, I suggest, not all instances of the intentional causation of death are morally wrong. To the extent that they are not, killing rather than letting die will often be the preferable option because more economical of suffering. Hence what is required is the abolition of the Moral Difference Myth and legislation to the effect that those doctors who justifiably cause a patient's death—whether by an action or by an omission—commit no offence.     

Killing and the Time-relative Interest Account

Jeff McMahan appeals to what he calls the “Time-relative Interest Account of the Wrongness of Killing” to explain the wrongness of killing individuals who are conscious but not autonomous. On this account, the wrongness of such killing depends on the victim’s interest in his or her future, and this interest, in turn, depends on two things: the goods that would have accrued to the victim in the future; and the strength of the prudential relations obtaining between the victim at the time of the killing and at the times these goods would have accrued to him or her. More precisely, when assessing this interest, future goods should be discounted to reflect reductions in the strength of such relations. Against McMahan’s account I argue that it relies on an implausible “actualist” view of the moral importance of interests according to which satisfactions of future interests only have moral significance if they are satisfactions of actual interests (interests that will in fact exist). More precisely, I aim to show that the Time-relative Interest Account (1) does not have the implications for the morality of killing that McMahan takes it to have, and (2) implies, implausibly, that certain interest satisfactions which seem to be morally significant are morally insignificant because they are not satisfactions of actual interests.     

Privacy and the encryption debate

Conclusion Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land as well as countless other science fiction stories, once claimed that "The sole thing achieved by any privacy law is to make the bugs smaller." Heinlein may be correct, but that travesties will happen does not sanction them—and maybe we will invent bugs to root out and foil other bugs. I have argued for individual privacy rights or rights to control sensitive personal information. The explosion of digital technology has made possible severe violations of individual privacy by corporations, news agencies, and the government. If I am correct about all of this, one commonly used "public interest" argument given for limiting privacy rights has been undermined. It is also far from true to claim that the prevalence of strong encryption technology will lead to disaster. While I do not adhere to the view that "rights hold, though the heavens may fall," in this article I have maintained that the security arguments of law enforcement do not come close to meeting the threshold for violating privacy rights. The heavens are far from falling. He is the author of, "Employee Monitoring and Computer Technology" (forthcoming in Business Ethics Quarterly), "Intangible Property: Privacy, Power, and Information Control," American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (October 1998) and is the editor of Intellectual Property: Moral, Legal, and International Dilemmas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), in which he contributes "Introduction to Intellectual Property" and "Toward A Lockean Theory of Intellectual Property."     

Reanalysis and perspective in the heat--aggression debate

B. J. Bushman, M. C. Wang, and C. A. Anderson argued that a reanalysis of E. G. Cohn and J. Rotton's Minneapolis data shows no inverted-U curvilinear relationship between temperature and aggression. Although B. J. Bushman et al.'s claim of no general inverted-U trend in the data might well be supported statistically, more careful examination of the subset of the data most likely to include the hottest temperatures in the study may offer at least some support for the inverted-U relationship. Aggregating data to describe a general trend minimizes the influence of outliers that may reflect alternative relationships, and such alternatives may be important practically and theoretically.