This paper argues that the current stock of anti-personnel cluster bombs are temporally indiscriminate, and, therefore, unjust weapons. The paper introduces and explains the idea of temporal indiscriminateness. It argues that to honor non-combatant immunity—in addition to not targeting civilians—one must adequately target combatants. Due to their high dud rate, cluster submunitions fail to target combatants with sufficient temporal accuracy, and, thereby, result in avoidable serious harm to non-combatants. The paper concludes that non-combatant immunity and the principle of discrimination require (...) a moratorium on the use of current cluster munitions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIs offering hazard pay ethically permissible when the pay premium is the only reason that a dangerous job is accepted? Robert C. Hughes argues that it is not. Central to his argument is the claim that in such cases, workers intend the foreseeable risks of harm as a means to the pay premium. Herein I question the plausibility of this claim and then develop a conception of the concept of means sufficient to make it plausible. By so doing, I provide (...) support for Hughes’s stringent position. (shrink)

Arming uninhabited vehicles is an increasing trend. Widespread deployment can bring dangers for arms-control agreements and international humanitarian law. Armed UVs can destabilise the situation between potential opponents. Smaller systems can be used for terrorism. Using a systematic definition existing international regulation of armed UVs in the fields of arms control, export control and transparency measures is reviewed; these partly include armed UVs, but leave large gaps. For preventive arms control a general prohibition of armed UVs would be best. If (...) that is unattainable, several measures should be taken. An explicit prohibition of autonomous attack, that is without a human decision, should be added to IHL. Concerning armed UVs remotely controlled by a human soldier, recommendations differ according to type or mission. New kinds of uninhabited nuclear-weapon carriers should be banned. Space weapons should be prohibited in general. UVs smaller than 0.2–0.5 m should be banned. Bigger remotely controlled armed UVs not equipped with weapons of mass destruction should be subject to numerical limitations in various categories. For these the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe is an important precedent. (shrink)

I discuss three topics. First, there is a philosophical connecting thread between several recent trends in the abortion discussion, namely, the issue of our animal nature, and physical embodiment. The philosophical name given to the position that you and I are essentially human animals is “animalism.” In Section II of this paper, I argue that animalism provides a unifying theme to recent discussions of abortion. In Section III, I discuss what we do not find among recent trends in the abortion (...) discussion, namely “the right to privacy.” I suggest some reasons why the right to privacy is conspicuous by its absence. Finally, I address Patrick Lee's claim that the evil of abortion involves “the moral deterioration that the act brings to those who are complicit in it, and to the culture that fosters it.”. (shrink)

In this essay, I outline fundamental anthropological and moral principles related to human sexuality and gender identity and then apply these principles to analyze and evaluate the views of several authors who attempt to carve out a “middle way” between liberal and traditionalist approaches to these issues. In doing so, I engage especially with the claim that gender dysphoria, rather than being a psychological issue, is a type of biological intersex condition in which one’s “brain sex” is out of line (...) with one’s genital and chromosomal sex. I argue that understanding the human person as a unity of body and soul and recognizing human sexuality as ordered toward the human good of marriage understood as inseparably unitive and procreative reveals the flaws in this position and helps to show why hormonal or surgical gender reassignment therapy is not a medically or ethically appropriate response to gender dysphoria. I also offer an alternative characterization of gender dysphoria and suggestions for responding with true compassion to those who suffer from it. (shrink)

This essay argues on behalf of a hybrid theory for an ethics of self-defense understood as the Forfeiture-Partiality Theory. The theory weds the idea that a malicious attacker forfeits the right to life to the idea that we are permitted to prefer one's life to another's in cases of involuntary harm or threat. The theory is meant to capture our intuitions both about instances in which we can draw a moral asymmetry between attacker and victim and cases in which we (...) cannot. I develop the theory by attending to instances of intentional, villainous harm and instances of involuntary danger—the latter of which are a matter of bad luck. I call some bad luck cases "Interpersonal Lottery Conflicts." These cases refer to potentially lethal conflicts into which parties are thrown as victims of circumstance. Although neither party has a moral advantage over another, that fact does not preclude permissible self-defense. (shrink)

I argue that contraception is morally wrong but that periodic abstinence (or natural family planning) is not. Further, I argue that altered nuclear transfer—a proposed technique for creating human stem cells without destroying human embryos—is morally wrong for the same reason that contraception is. Contrary to what readers might expect, my argument assumes nothing about the morality of cloning or abortion and requires no premises about God or natural teleology. Instead, I argue that contraception and altered nuclear transfer are morally (...) wrong because they fail to treat humanity as an inviolable end. (shrink)

Questions concerning the role (or lack thereof) of God in morality are implicitly or explicitly important in Western philosophical ethics. I describe some of the different ways philosophers treat (or ignore) God and the foundations of morality more generally, and I highlight some of the implications of these approaches for bioethics. I demonstrate that the starting points we choose for morality set the course for fundamentally different accounts of what is permissible and impermissible, good and bad, and right and wrong.

The term ‘culture wars’ has been used to describe deep, apparently intractable, disagreements between groups for many years. In contemporary discourse, it refers to disputes regarding significant moral matters carried out in the public square and for which there appears to be no way to achieve consensus or compromise. One set of battle lines is drawn between those who hold traditional Christian commitments and those who do not. Christian bioethics is nested in a set of moral and metaphysical understandings that (...) collide with those of the dominant secular culture. The result is a gulf between a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed in the face of a transcendent God and a final judgment versus a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed as if the world were without ultimate meaning and as if death were the end of personal existence. These approaches are separated by a moral and metaphysical gulf that sustains incompatible life worlds and incompatible understandings of bioethics. Attempts to bridge the gulf with secular reason are ineffective because there is no shared conception of reason or standard of evidence. Efforts to use the state to enforce a particular set of metaphysical and moral commitments, whether secular or religious, lead to public disputes with a war-like character. (shrink)

This first volume in a series entitled Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought, by John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, is the most comprehensive and detailed treatment in print of Aquinas’s political and ethical thought. Finnis is already well known for his 1980 book, Natural Law and Natural Rights, his Thomistic-inspired theory of “basic human goods” in Fundamentals of Ethics, and his attack on the morality of nuclear deterrence, written with Joseph Boyle and Germain Grisez. (...) The present work is an effort to understand and critique Aquinas’s political and ethical thought as philosophy rather than theology, to correct what Finnis considers “one-sided or wrong” beliefs about his thinking, and to see how well it stands up as “a critical theory” today. Thanks to modern technology, Finnis is able to draw upon the full sixty volumes of Aquinas’s works, over 8.5 million words, rather than restricting the discussion as earlier works have done, to the early Commentary on the Sentences, the two Summas, and his advice to the King of Cyprus. (shrink)

This first volume in a series entitled Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought, by John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, is the most comprehensive and detailed treatment in print of Aquinas’s political and ethical thought. Finnis is already well known for his 1980 book, Natural Law and Natural Rights, his Thomistic-inspired theory of “basic human goods” in Fundamentals of Ethics, and his attack on the morality of nuclear deterrence, written with Joseph Boyle and Germain Grisez. (...) The present work is an effort to understand and critique Aquinas’s political and ethical thought as philosophy rather than theology, to correct what Finnis considers “one-sided or wrong” beliefs about his thinking, and to see how well it stands up as “a critical theory” today. Thanks to modern technology, Finnis is able to draw upon the full sixty volumes of Aquinas’s works, over 8.5 million words, rather than restricting the discussion as earlier works have done, to the early Commentary on the Sentences, the two Summas, and his advice to the King of Cyprus. (shrink)