Among the many remarkable aspects of the June 2016 introduction of legislation to permit medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in Canada, is the central and even dominant role that women have played in moving this legislation forward, and their ongoing influence as the law continues to be reviewed and revised. The index medical cases on which the higher courts have deliberated concern women patients, and the legal decisions in the various courts have been presided over by women justices. Since the (...) legislation has become law in Canada, women have been among the most vocal and enthusiastic proponents for expanding the criteria to ensure MAiD is more accessible to more Canadians. In this paper, I discuss how the voice of women in this debate is not the ‘different voice’ of second wave feminism first articulated by Carol Gilligan and then adapted and expanded in the ethics of care and relational ethics literature. Instead it is the very familiar voice of the ethics of personal autonomy, individual rights and justice which feminist critics have long decried as inadequate to the task of articulating a comprehensive social morality. I argue for the need to reassert the different voice of relational ethics and the ethics of care into our ongoing discussion of MAiD. (shrink)

A normatively adequate public health ethics needs to be anchored in political philosophy rather than in ethics. Its central ethical concerns are likely to include trust and justice, rather than autonomy and informed consent.

We tend to think that the difficulties in bioethics spring from the novel and alarming issues that arise due to discoveries in the new biosciences and biotechnologies. But many of the crucial difficulties in bioethics arise from the assumptions we make about ethics. This paper offers a brief overview of bioethics, and relates ethical ‘principlism’ to ‘ethical fundamentalism’. It then reviews some alternative approaches that have emerged during the second phase of bioethics, and argues for a neo-Aristotelian approach. Misconceptions about (...) ethical principles and ethical reasoning not only distort our views of the business of bioethics, but they also prevent us from facing up to the formidable problems posed by ethical pluralism in so-called liberal societies. (shrink)