Ralf Stoecker

The developement of intensive care and transplantation medicine gave rise to ethical problems of the proper treatment of dying patients: How long should they be upheld and from which point on could their organs be removed? Brain oriented concepts of death promised to ease these problems, but on closer look turn out to be untenable. Hence, an alternative attitude towards death and the morally proper treatment of the dying is urgently needed. In former times, before intensive care was developed, death always had comprised various different changes, usually losses, which do not necessarily or conceptually belong to death, but which none the less were responsible for the moral weight we still attach to death. Modern medicine cut the joints between these losses, and hence dissolved the traditional, morally weighty concept of death. This leaves medical ethics with the task to inquire, one by one, into the ethical consequences of these different losses. Die Entwicklung der Intensiv- und Transplantationsmedizin hat eine Reihe neuartiger medizinethischer Probleme entstehen lassen: die Fragen, bis wann man einen Menschen mit allen Mitteln am Leben erhalten und ab wann man ihm lebensnotwendige Organe entnehmen darf. Die Identifikation des menschlichen Todes mit dem Hirntod bot eine attraktive Auflösung dieser Schwierigkeiten, ist aber in den letzten Jahren zunehmend in die Kritik geraten, weil die begrifflich/weltanschaulichen Argumente, die für diese Gleichsetzung angeführt werden, einer Überprüfung nicht standhalten. Es gilt anzuerkennen, daß die medizinische Entwicklung nicht etwa eine Neudefinition des Todes erforderlich, sondern jede derartige Definition müßig gemacht hat, weil die Auffächerung der Sterbeprozesse in der Intensivmedizin die herkömmliche Annahme, daß mit dem Tod ein plötzlicher Umschwung im moralischen Status eines Menschen verbunden ist, ihrer Legitimation beraubt. An ihre Stelle tritt die Anerkennung einer ganzen Reihe verschiedener moralisch folgenreicher Veränderungen , die ein Mensch im Laufe seines Sterbens durchmacht. Es ist die Aufgabe der medizinischen Ethik, die Auswirkungen dieser Veränderungen auf die Patienten-Arzt-Beziehung zu erforschen.

The main topic of Rudiger Bittner's book 'Doing Things for Reasons' is action theory. We learn what it is to have reasons for action and how acting in response to reasons should be construed; we learn to what extent these reasons are elements of our mental life (and in particular that they aren't mental at all). Almost at the end of the book, however, in chap. 12, all of a sudden we learn something more. We receive an answer to the very core question of anthropology: who we are, as men and women, and what is so special about us - or rather that there is nothing special about us. It is this last part of the book, easily overlooked, that I want to concentrate on in my contribution.

Do we sometimes know what will happen in the future? There are two intuitively plausible answers. The prognostic thesis says that we frequently know what will happen, the agnostic thesis says that we never do. Examining the question in the light of different conditions of knowledge supports the prognostic thesis. Yet there is still room for the agnostic intuition, as an expression of oUf necessarily suboptimal epistemic situation with respect to the future, but also of our freedom, in principle, to shape the world as we like to.

Is self-respect a necessary condition for human dignity ? On the one hand, if it were a necessary condition, we could neither respect nor violate the human dignity of small children, severely mentally disabled and unconscious persons, which would certainly be an absurd consequence. On the other hand, it seems to be characteristic for violations of human dignity that they are humiliating for the victim, and humiliation usually is construed as a violation of self-respect. The dilemma is solved when we realize that self-respect is a disposition to take care of one’s personal dignity, and that human dignity basically consists in having the opportunity of maintaining one’s personal dignity. Since personal dignity does not disappear when a person looses her ability to take care of it, respecting human dignity may consist in taking care of someone’s personal dignity who has lost self-respect. Therefore, self-respect is not necessary for human dignity

I offer a justification for the received view that the characteristic feature of agents is to be found in the particular way their behaviour is explainable. Agents are people who have acquired three skills: (i) to act in accordance with inner or public deliberation; (ii) to do many things almost as if they had deliberated; and (iii) to recognize situations where it is worthwhile to switch from the second to the first skill. We can therefore assume that agents behave as if they were accompanying their behaviour by constant thinking although they don't actually deliberate all the time. This view allows for some attractive solutions for notorious problems in action theory but has the surprising ontological consequence that, although there are agents in action, there are no actions.

Given the many marvelous things animals can do and moreover the success we have in employing the intentional stance towards animals, it seems to be almost unthinkable to say that animals could not act at all. Nonetheless, this is exactly what I argue for. I claim that strictly speaking there is no animal action, only behaviour. I defend this claim in three steps. Firstly, I recapitulate some of the weighty grounds that speak in favour of animal agency. Secondly, I explain why I still doubt that animals act. The argument is that the account of agency that I take to be the most attractive one entails that animals can't act. Since this account of agency is non-standard, I spend the bulk of the paper with providing a sketch of what, according to it, actions are. Finally, I explain why it is still so natural and promising to regard animals as agents, although in fact they aren't. As one might put it: of course they act, only strictly speaking they don't