Helen Watt

In responding to an unjust legal situation involving human rights abuses, one approach is to seek a selective ban on some abuses if a more comprehensive ban is not feasible politically. While such an approach to embryo research or abortion, for example, can reasonably be applied, much harder to defend is regulation—that is, giving permission or instructions for others to do or prepare to do what we believe is morally wrong. Regulation necessarily involves us in wrongly intending that others choose wrongly, that is, in formal cooperation with evil. We should choose other means of making a bad situation better: selective banning or discouragement by, for example, withholding funding, and the mandating of acts that are good or potentially good in the context in which they are mandated.

What are the duties of carers and health professionals to people with mental incapacity? How ought we to think about the ethical and legal issues? What can any of us do to improve and safeguard the lives of those cared for? This book seeks to examine in detail and find ethically robust answers to such questions. Among the topics discussed are withholding treatment, tube-feeding patients with dementia, the 'persistent vegetative state', medical research, and sterilisation of intellectually disabled adults. Contributors come from a wide range of disciplines, including psychiatry, nursing, philosophy, theology and law. The book includes an account by Wendy Hiscox of non-voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands and Belgium, and a chapter by John Finnis exploring some aspects of Britain's Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Cooperation in evil or wrongdoing is one of the most perplexing areas in bioethics, both for those working in the field and those seeking their advice. The papers collected in this book are written by philosophers, theologians and lawyers who have studied these problems and / or by those who have faced these problems in their own work in law, healthcare and research, and political campaigning. The volume includes both general treatments of the subject of cooperation and conscientious objection, and more specific treatments of topics such as voting to improve unjust laws, research on fetal / embryonic cells, and care of suicidal patients. The book is offered as a guide to a field which is both of academic interest and of personal concern to those who face cooperation problems in their own life and work. Contributors include: Bishop Donal Murray, Bishop Anthony Fisher OP, Jane Adolphe, Mike Delany, John Finnis, Luke Gormally, Colin Harte, Cathleen Kaveny, Richard Myers, Charlie O'Donnell, Alexander Pruss, Neil Scolding and Helen Watt.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) raises serious moral questions concerning the parent-child relationship. Good parents accept their children unconditionally: they do not reject/attack them because they do not have the features they want. There is nothing wrong with treating a child as someone who can help promote some other worthwhile end, providing the child is also respected as an end in him or herself. However, if the child's presence is not valued in itself, regardless of any further benefits it brings, the child is not being treated as an end in the full sense of the term. In this paper, I argue that these principles apply to human embryos, as well as to born human offspring: the human moral subject is a bodily being, whose interests and rights begin with the onset of his or her bodily life. The rights of the living, bodily human individual include a right not to be attacked/abandoned because of his or her genetic profile. PGD is harmful to the parent-child relationship, and we give mixed messages to parents by expecting them to show unconditional commitment to offspring after birth, while inviting them to take a very different approach at the prenatal stage

The proposal for reproducing human generations in vitro raises the question to what extent parenthood is possible in embryos and to what extent human rights and interests are dependent on conscious awareness. This paper argues that the interest in not being made a parent non-consensually for the benefit of others persists throughout the lifespan of the individual human organism. We do not become genetic parents by learning that we are parents; rather, we discover (or fail to discover) an existing genetic relationship between our offspring and ourselves. The claim to genetic parenthood of an embryo used for reproduction in vitro is, if anything, clearer than the claim of the adult for whom gametes are derived via ips cells, in that an embryo’s cells, unlike an adult’s somatic cells, are already functionally geared to producing gametes (among other types of cell). An embryo used to make gametes that are used in reproduction is immediately and non-consensually made a genetic parent and to that extent is wronged whether or not the parent embryo survives – as some could survive – the harvesting of cells. All human individuals carry objective interests in benefits appropriate to the kind of being they are; these include the stake in not being made a parent without one’s consent, whether posthumously or otherwise.