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TERMINAL SEDATION DURING THE 1990s During the 1990s a discussion took place in scholarly journals concerning a measure within palliative care that had earlier attracted little attention, to wit, the sedation of dying patients. There seem to have been two main reasons why the practice came under debate. On the one hand, some people felt that, when palliative medicine had advanced and methods to control symptoms had improved, it was no longer justified to sedate the patients in a manner that had often been done in the past. The system of 1 terminal sedation had turned into ‘euthanasia in disguise’ or ‘slow euthanasia’. On the other hand, there were people sympathetic to the recently es...
A collection of essays by the celebrated philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. This collection includes papers on human nature and practical philosophy, together with the classic 'Modern Moral Philosophy'
A comprehensive defense of the principle of double effect and the importance of intentions for normative ethics.
An expansion of the discipline of ethics demonstrates that Aquinas’s “infusing of virtue” makes better sense of the moral life than finding a method to guide action While teaching ethics is universally applauded, how one goes about it is much more difficult and contested than is often recognized. On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics addresses what it means to teach and learn ethics through a thorough comparison of two ethicists, Henry Sidgwick and F. D. Maurice. Where Sidgwick understood ethics as developing a method for guiding voluntary action to what is right, Maurice maintained that ethics concerns life as a whole, and that requires placing it within a metaphysical and theolog...
Whether euthanasia or assisted suicide should be legalized is one of the most pressing and profound questions facing legislators, health care professionals, their patients, and all members of society. Regrettably, the debate is too often characterized by rhetoric rather than reason. This book aims to inform the debate by acquainting anyone interested in this vital question with some of the major ethical, legal, clinical and theological issues involved. The essays it contains are authoritative in that they have been commissioned from some of the world's leading experts, balanced in that they reflect divergent viewpoints (including a vigorous debate between two eminent philosophers), and readable in that they should be readily understood by the general reader.
How important is conscience for the Christian moral life? In this book, Matthew Levering surveys twentieth-century Catholic moral theology to construct an argument against centering ethics on conscience. He instead argues that conscience must be formed by the revealed truths of Scripture as interpreted and applied in the church. Levering shows how conscience-centered ethics came to be—both prior to and following the Second Vatican Council—and how important voices from both the Catholic and Protestant communities criticized the primacy of conscience in favor of an approach that considers conscience within the broader framework of the Christian moral organism. Rather than engaging with cur...
After assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for assisted suicide and euthanasia, Gorsuch builds a nuanced, novel, and powerful moral and legal argument against legalization, one based on a principle that, surprisingly, has largely been overlooked in the debate; the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong. At the same time, the argument Gorsuch develops leaves wide latitude for individual patient autonomy and the refusal of unwanted medical treatment and life-sustaining care, permitting intervention only in cases where an intention to kill is present.
Elizabeth Anscombe's forthright philosophy speaks directly to many religious and ethical issues of current concern.This collection of her essays forms a companion volume to the critically acclaimed Human Life, Action and Ethics, published in 2005.
The essays in Intention and Identity explore themes in Finnis's work touched on only lightly, if at all, in Natural Law and Natural Rights, developing profound accounts of personal identity and existence; group identity and common good; and intention and choice as action- and self-shaping. In his many-faceted study of what it is to be a human person, and a human community, Finnis not only engages with contemporary philosophers and bioethicists such as Peter Singer, Michael Lockwood and John Harris, with thinkers from other traditions such as Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II), and with judges in the highest courts. He also offers illuminating and deeply considered readings of Shakespeare and Aquin...