. Declaring life at the crossroads of death: Victims’ anti‐death penalty views and prosecutors’ charging decisions. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 41-57.

It has been argued that, on Kantian grounds, pedophiles, rapists and murderers are morally obligated to take their own lives prior to committing a violent action that will end their moral agency. That is, to avoid destroying the agent's moral life by performing a morally suicidal action, the agent, while he still is a moral agent, should end his body's life. Although the cases of dementia and the morally reprehensible are vastly different, this Kantian interpretation might be useful in the (...) debate on the permissibility of suicide for those facing dementia's effects. If moral agents have a duty to act as moral agents, then those who will lose their moral identity as moral agents have an obligation to themselves to end their physical lives prior to losing their dignity as persons. (shrink)

In the mid to late 1980s a debate arose over the moral and legal authority of advance medical directives. At the center of this debate were two point-counterpoint law journal articles by Rebecca Dresser and Nancy Rhoden. What appeared to have the makings of an ongoing critical dialogue ended with the untimely death of Nancy Rhoden. Rebecca Dresser, however, has continued her challenge of advance directives in numerous publications, most recently in a critique of Ronald Dworkin's Life's Dominion. Like Rhoden, (...) Dworkin has been a staunch advocate of advance directives as an exercise of what has come to be referred to as prospective or precedent autonomy. In this paper I will consider a number of the issues that Dresser has repeatedly raised about the infirmities of advance directives, and suggest that it is from an understanding of and appreciation for the narrative dimension of the life of a person that advanced directives draw one of their most powerful justifications. (shrink)

Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

There is a flood of papers being published on new ways to diagnose Alzheimer disease before it is symptomatic, involving a combination of invasive tests , and pen and paper tests. This changes the landscape with respect to genetic tests for risk of AD, making rational suicide a much more feasible option. Before the availability of these presymptomatic tests, even someone with a high risk of developing AD could not know if and when the disease was approaching. One could lose (...) years of good life by committing suicide too soon, or risk waiting until it was too late and dementia had already sapped one of the ability to form and carry out a plan. One can now put together what one knows about one's risk, with continuing surveillance via these clinical tests, and have a good strategy for planning one's suicide before one becomes demented. This has implications for how these genetic and clinical tests are marketed and deployed, and the language one uses to speak about them. The phrase ‘there is nothing one can do’ is insulting and disrespectful of the planned suicide option, as is the language of the Risk Evaluation and Education for Alzheimer's Disease studies and others that conclude that it is ‘safe’ to tell subjects their risk status for AD. Further, the argument put forward by some researchers that presymptomatic testing should remain within research protocols, and the results not shared with subjects until such time as treatments become available, disrespects the autonomy of people at high risk who consider suicide an option. (shrink)

Ethical issues relating to the withdrawal of dialysis are discussed, comparing dialysis with other life-support systems, particularly artificial ventilation. It is argued that there is no ethical difference between discontinuing treatment in each case. One practical difference between the two is that patients with chronic renal failure are less likely to have reduced autonomy, and so can engage in discussions with their doctors regarding the situations in which their life-supporting treatment might be discontinued. It is argued that doctors caring for (...) patients on dialysis have an ethical duty to discuss with these patients the circumstances in which they may wish to discontinue dialysis. (shrink)

Within the Western bioethical framework, we make adistinction between two dominant interpretations of the meaning of moral personhood: thenaturalist and the humanist one. While both interpretations of moral personhood claim topromote individual autonomy and rights, they end up with very different normativeviews on the practical and legal measures needed to realize these values in every daylife. Particularly when we talk about the end of life issues it appears that in general thearguments for euthanasia are drawn from the naturalist interpretation of (...) moral personhoodwhile the arguments against euthanasia, for their part, are derived from the idealistand/or humanist understanding of the same concept. This article focuses onexamining the metaphysical assumptions and internal contradiction found behind the opposingarguments presented by two prominent philosophers of these two traditions:Peter Singer and Ludger Honnefelder. The author claims that neither side of thedebate succeeds in defending its normative position without reconsidering how to takethe social aspects of moral personhood into account. The author holds that, despite ourneed to set individual's decision making into social context, the currentcommunitarian narrative concept of personhood fails to offer a convincing alternative.Instead of merely trying to replace psychological and atomistic view of personhood with acollective understanding of an individual's moral identity, we need to discuss thenormative relation between the concept of `moral personhood' and the demand for respect ofindividual autonomy in Western bioethics within a wider philosophical perspective. (shrink)