Profoundly important ethical and political controversies turn on the question of whether biological life is an essential aspect of a human person, or only an extrinsic instrument. Lee and George argue that human beings are physical, animal organisms - albeit essentially rational and free - and examine the implications of this understanding of human beings for some of the most controversial issues in contemporary ethics and politics. The authors argue that human beings are animal organisms and that their personal identity (...) across time consists in the persistence of the animal organisms they are; they also argue that human beings are essentially rational and free and that there is a radical difference between human beings and other animals; criticize hedonism and hedonistic drug-taking; present detailed defenses of the prolife positions on abortion and euthanasia; and defend the traditional moral position on marriage and sexual acts. (shrink)

Though most children can easily answer the question, "Who's your daddy?", the concept of paternity is complex and multifaceted. Courts have stumbled in answering it. In order to ground paternal rights and obligations in a satisfactory way, we need to disaggregate the various elements of stereotypical paternity. It is not sufficient merely to separate social from biological paternity. The latter concept, itself, is complex. We need to separate the procreative element of paternity from the genetic relationship.

It is often stated in international and domestic legal documents that children have a right to be loved. Yet there is very little explanation of why this right exists or what it entails. Matthew Liao has recently sought to provide such an explanation by arguing that children have a right to be loved as a human right. I will examine Liao?s explanation and in turn argue that children do not have a right to be loved. The first part of the (...) paper will be concerned with showing that Liao cannot support his empirical claims. I will then argue that loving cannot be a duty, and that even if we were willing to concede that it is, love is not always accompanied by loving treatment. Finally, I consider two alternative interpretations of the right to be loved and argue that even given these, children do not have a right to be loved. (shrink)

Most of us accept that we have special obligations to our family members: to, e.g., our parents, our siblings, and our grandparents. But it is extremely difficult to offer a plausible grounding for such obligations, given the apparent fact that familial relationships are not voluntarily entered. I did not choose to be my mother's daughter or my brother's sister, so why suppose that such facts about me are morally significant? Why suppose that I owe more to my mother or to (...) my brother than natural duty requires that I do for all and any persons? Special obligations appear more problematic the less the relationships that supposedly generate them are akin to the relationship between promiser and promisee, a voluntarily assumed relationship. Thus, for example, special obligations to friends might appear less problematic than do those to family members, because it seems that we voluntarily choose our friends, and, thus, voluntarily choose to bear more for them than natural duty requires. (shrink)

This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient for addressing the (...) question whether and why there is a right to parent one’s biological child. Such a right is important because, in its absence, fairness towards adequate prospective parents who are involuntarily childless would demand a ‘babies redistribution’; moreover, in societies with entrenched histories of injustice there may be reasons of fairness for shuffling babies amongst all recent parents. I supplement the Brighouse-Swift account of fundamental parental rights by an account of how adequate parents acquire the right to parent their biological babies. I advance two arguments to this conclusion: by the time of birth, the birth parents will have already shouldered various burdens in order to bring children into existence, and are likely to have formed an intimate relationship with the future baby. Denying birth parents who would make at least adequate parents the right to keep their baby would be unfair to them and would destroy already formed parent-baby relationships which, I assume, are intrinsically valuable. (shrink)

Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...) that most of us will find very disturbing. (shrink)

Unlike surrogacy and cloning, reproduction via gamete donation is widely assumed to be morally unproblematic. Recently, a number of authors have argued that this assumption is mistaken: gamete donors, they claim, have parental responsibilities that they typically treat too lightly. In this paper I argue that the ‘parental neglect’ case against gamete donation fails. I begin by examining and rejecting the view that gamete donors have parental responsibilities; I claim that none of the current accounts of parenthood provides good reason (...) for ascribing parenthood to gamete donors. I then argue that even if gamete donors do have parental responsibilities for ‘their’ children, it is not clear that they treat these responsibilities too lightly. I conclude the paper by examining the wider question of just what kind of responsibilities gamete donors might have towards the children that they have a role in creating. (shrink)

A number of international organizations have claimed that children have a right to be loved, but there is a worry that this claim may just be an empty rhetoric. In this paper, I seek to show that there could be such a right by providing a justification for this right in terms of human rights, by demonstrating that love can be an appropriate object of a duty, and by proposing that biological parents should normally be made the primary bearers of (...) this duty, while all other able persons in appropriate circumstances have the associate duties to help biological parents discharge their duties. I also consider some policy implications of this right. (shrink)

This volume is a philosophical introduction and exploration of the nature and value of personal relationships. It is an ideal text for introductory philosophy, ethics, or applied ethics courses.

This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body. _One Body_ begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by components (...) of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought. Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity, and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics. "This is a terrific—really quite extraordinary—work of scholarship. It is quite simply the best work on Christian sexual ethics that I have seen. It will become the text that anyone who ventures into the field will have to grapple with—a kind of touchstone. Moreover, it is filled with arguments with which even secular writers on sexual morality will have to engage and come to terms." —_Robert P. George, Princeton University __ "_One Body_ is an excellent piece of philosophical-theological reflection on the nature of sexuality and marriage. This book has the potential to become a standard go-to text for professors and students working on sex ethics issues, whether in philosophy or theology, both for the richness of its arguments, and the scope of its coverage of cases. " — Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina_ "Alexander Pruss here develops sound and humane answers to the whole range of main questions about human sexual and reproductive choices. His principal argument for the key answers is very different from the one I have articulated over the past fifteen years. But his argumentation is at every point attractively direct, careful, energetic in framing and responding to objections, and admirably attentive to realities and the human goods at stake." —_John Finnis, University of Oxford _. (shrink)

We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism —the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning : dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.

Sperm donation is a widely accepted and increasingly common practice. In the standard case, a sperm donor sells sperm to an agency, waives his parental rights, and is absolved of parental responsibility. We tend to assume that this involves no problematic abandonment of parental responsibility. If we regard the donor as having parental responsibilities at all, we may think that his parental responsibilities are transferred to the sperm recipients. But, if a man creates a child accidentally, via contraception failure, we (...) tend to assume that the man does indeed have parental responsibilities. Assessing these contrasting conclusions requires a theory of parental responsibility. I analyze prevalent theories of what makes someone parentally responsible and show that none of these theories can withstand scrutiny. I propose a new theory of parental responsibility, which, I argue, is more plausible than the alternatives. My theory of parental responsibility is based on our ownership and control over hazardous materials, namely, our gametes. I show that neither my theory, nor the theories I reject, can support our contrasting intuitions. I conclude that sperm donors are fathers, with parental responsibility. I argue that the alternative conclusion, that neither sperm donors nor accidental fathers are parentally responsible for their resulting offspring, is less plausible. I then consider whether parental responsibility can be transferred and argue that it is far from clear that it can. Finally, I address objections and consider some practical implications of these views. (shrink)

The recent success in generating live offspring from embryonic stem cell –derived gametes in mice sparked visions of growing tailor-made sperm for men faced with infertility. However, although this development will almost certainly lead to new insights into the processes underlying spermatogenesis and thus in the possible causes of male infertility, it is less certain if deriving sperm from ES cells, which are in turn derived from a sterile man, can make someone a genetic parent. As the gap between newly (...) envisioned reproductive technologies and natural reproduction widens, the question thus needs to be asked if these possible therapies still lead to genetic parenthood. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that the overwhelming majority of gamete donors are amongst those who treat decisions about bringing children into existence too lightly. The argument proceeds through the following stages. 1) People have a presumptive responsibility for rearing children who result from their gametes. 2) The responsibility people have to rear their offspring is a responsibility not merely to provide a minimum of care, but also to attend to the details of nurturing children and fostering their flourishing. (...) 3) Gamete donors transfer their responsibilities for raising their genetic offspring to those who will raise it. 4) Responsibilities for rearing children are weighty ones. 5) Treating weighty responsibilities too lightly is morally wrong. 6) Gamete donors' decisions to transfer their responsibilities for rearing their offspring to others, almost always involves treating parental responsibilities too lightly. 7) Therefore, gamete donation is almost always morally wrong. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Does genetic relatedness define who is a mother or father and who incurs obligations towards or entitlements over children? While once the answer to this question may have been obvious, advances in reproductive technologies have complicated our understanding of what makes a parent. In a recent publication Bayne and Kolers argue for a pluralistic account of parenthood on the basis that genetic derivation, gestation, extended custody and sometimes intention to parent are sufficient (but not necessary) grounds for parenthood.1 Bayne (...) and Kolers further suggest that definitions of parenthood are underpinned by the assumption that ‘being causally implicated in the creation of a child is the key basis for being its parent’.2 This paper examines the claim that genetic relatedness is sufficient grounds for parenthood based on a causal connection between genetic parents and their offspring. I argue that parental obligations are about moral responsibility and not causal responsibility because we are not morally accountable for every consequence to which we causally contribute. My account includes the conditions generally held to apply to moral responsibility, i.e. freedom and foreseeability. I argue that parental responsibilities are generated whenever the birth of a child is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of voluntary actions. I consider the implications of this account for third parties involved in reproductive technologies. I argue that under some conditions the obligations generated by freely and foreseeably causing a child to exist can be justifiably transferred to others. (shrink)