Anthony P Smith

There has been a generalised anxiety concerning the future of continental philosophy of religion as a discipline, with a number of books, articles, conferences, and presentations taking up this theme. This anxiety exists because as a discipline continental philosophy of religion lacks a clear claim to an identity. This article analyses the anxiety concerning the future of continental philosophy of religion as an anxiety of reproduction. By locating the philosopher’s anxiety within a wider anxiety of reproduction we begin to understand this anxiety through the queer anti-social critique of Lee Edelman. This anxiety is traced through three processes of reproduction: intellectual reproduction, disciplinary reproduction, and institutional reproduction. The article goes on to sketch out a position against the reproduction of continental philosophy of religion by taking on and celebrating the discipline’s improper nature. Appealing neither to secular reason nor to established traditions, we draw on the Malleus Maleficarum (as read through queer theory and non-philosophy) to craft various models for thought. Here we find abortion prized over the future of the race, miscegenation over blood purity, and impotence and infertility over the sovereign power of the father. These models are explored both in terms of their historical context and as providing a different image of the work that can be carried out in the discipline of continental philosophy of religion. The article concludes by suggesting other perverse lines of relation that may be opened up when one gives up on the reproduction of the discipline.

Anthony P. Smith argues that it is a mistake to morally proscribe psychoactive drug use simply on the basis of the risk of harm that it may involve. After discussing how there are many risky behaviors that are not so proscribed, he provides a two-fold justification for their not being so. The first (following Laura Buchak) is that agents can rationally set their own risk “profile” (i.e., attitude). That is, they can determine for themselves just how risky they want to be as no risk profile is rationally obligatory. The second (following Amartya Sen) is that agents have a moral right to take risks. Smith then applies this two-fold justification to the case of psychoactive drug use, arguing that, like the many other risky behaviors that are not morally proscribed, psychoactive drug use should not be morally proscribed either.

The Dead Donor Rule is intended to protect the public and patients, but it remains contentious. Here, I argue that we can abandon the Dead Donor Rule. Using Joel Feinberg’s account of harm, I argue that, in most cases, particularly when patients consent to being organ donors, death does not harm permanently unconscious (PUC) patients. In these cases, then, causing the death of PUC patients is not morally wrong. This undermines the strongest argument for the Dead Donor Rule—that doctors ought not kill their patients. Thus, there is nothing wrong with abandoning the Dead Donor Rule with regard to PUC patients. Importantly, the harm-based argument defended here allows us to sidestep the thorny debate surrounding definitions of death. What matters is not when a patient dies but whether their death constitutes some further harm.