Jacqueline A. Laing

This is a compact, nicely written book that provides a rejuvenating alternative to the utilitarian orthodoxy that dominates contemporary bioethics. There is currently a dearth of bioethical literature presenting what might be called a more traditional approach to medicine and health care. This contribution is a short and useful introduction to such an approach. The book announces itself as being written with “both the general reader and students and professionals in medicine, nursing, law, philosophy and related areas in mind”. Accordingly, it assumes no prior knowledge of ethics. It gives a neat introductory overview of some ethical concerns raised by reproduction, death, and dying. The issues considered include euthanasia and withdrawal of treatment, the persistent vegetative state, abortion, cloning, and in vitro fertilisation. By beginning the early chapters with a real-life case, Watt captures the interest of the reader. The case is introduced and discussed dispassionately. It is then employed as a springboard for a general discussion of principles often thought dry and difficult. Newcomers to the study of ethics will …

The Groningen Protocol and contemporary defences of the legalisation of infanticide are predicated on actualism and personism. According to these related ideas, human beings achieve their moral status in virtue of the degree to which they are capable of laying value upon their lives or exhibiting certain qualities, like not being in pain or being desirable to third party family members. This article challenges these notions suggesting that both ideas depend on arbitrary and discriminatory notions of human moral status. Our propensity to sleep, fall unconscious, pass out and so on, demonstrates that we very often exhibit our status as “potential persons.” Our abilities can and do fluctuate. The equal dignity principle, distinguished in turn from both the excesses of vitalism and consequentialism, is analyzed in the context of human rights logic and law. The normalization of non-voluntary euthanasia, via such ad hoc practices as the Groningen Protocol is considered. Substituted ‘consent’ to the euthanasia of infants or others, is scrutinized and the implications of institutionalizing non-voluntary euthanasia in the context of financial, research and political interests are considered. The impact on the medical and legal professions, carers, families and coroners, as well as public attitudes more generally, is discussed. It is suggested that eroding the value of human life carries with it significant destructive and hazardous long-term implications for societies. To elevate some long-term implications whilst ignoring others demonstrates the irrational nature of the effort to institutionalize euthanasia.

The Natural Law Reader features a selection of readings in metaphysics, jurisprudence, politics, and ethics that are all related to the classical Natural Law tradition in the modern world. Features a concise presentation of the natural law position that offers the reader a focal point for discussion of ancient and contemporary ideas in the natural law tradition Draws upon the metaphysical and ethical categories put forth and developed by Aristotle and Aquinas Points to the historical significance and contemporary relevance of the Natural Law tradition Reflects on a revival of interest in the tradition of virtue ethics and human rights

The article discusses questions on the significance of blood relatedness in the context of identity arguments about artificial reproduction (AR). Kinship, origins, and biological connections are significant to human beings. The author explains that family relationships bear on the identity of human beings. Moreover, she emphasizes that once these principles are neglected, it is possible to create people in ways that threaten significant human bonds and alienate people who are naturally related spelling loss, confusion and grief for them.

Law, we are told, is a system of rules, created by men to govern human behaviour. Students of law, introduced to legal systems, become familiar with varied sources of law – legislative, judicial and executive in character. There are undoubtedly prescriptive human rules that govern men set up by public authorities that are advertised as being for the common good. These appear as visible, socially constructed systems in different jurisdictions and even as international systems across jurisdictions. But is this all there is to law? Is law merely a human construct subject to flux, different according to time and place? Or must law, in its fullest sense, be seen as an activity that needs to be interpreted aright, binds the human conscience and is answerable to certain universal and timeless demands? Is there any natural moral law common to all men, universal and timeless?

A consideration of monotheism. The term ordinarily suggests belief in one God and derives from the Greek monos meaning “one” and theos meaning “god.” In the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the one god is regarded as supreme lord and creator of the universe, almighty, all-knowing, and all-good. Traditionally, Christianity has taught that God revealed himself to our first parents, Adam and Eve, as the one true God in Genesis. The Old Testament reveals a jealous God who forbids the worship of strange and multifarious gods. God's chosen people, the Jews, are destined to prepare the way for the coming of the universal religion available not just to a privileged few.

Introduction to the book Human Lives: Critical Essays on Conseequentialist Bioethics. This book aims to redress the imbalance in moral philosophy created by the dominance of consequentialism and utilitarianism, the view that criterion of morality is the maximisation of good effects over bad without regard to intrinsic rightness or wrongness. this approach has become the orthodoxy over the last few decades partticularly in bioethics, where moral theory is applied to bioethics. Human Lives critically examines the assumptions and arguemnts of consequentialism reviviing in the process such concepts as rights, justice, innocence, natural integrity, flourishing, the virtues and the fundamental value of human life.

The modern language of rights provides a contemporary idiom for certain ancient and perennial questions about the nature of morality. These include debates about the objectivity and universality of ethics and the nature of human obligation, freedom and action. Jeremy Bentham famously denounced natural rights, arguing that if morality was founded upon pain and pleasure, then there could be no such thing as natural rights: ‘Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts’ (Bentham 1970: 30–1). This article considers the concept of rights more generally and considers its relation to law.

Wars have been entered into as a means of gaining property, taking slaves and dominating and controlling peoples. The pacifist claims that no form of war can ever be justified. By contrast, just war theory holds that it is possible for a war to be morally justified, an idea that underlies much international law, as can be seen in the Geneva Conventions. Teichman introduces us to such thinkers as Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, John Rawls and Elizabeth Anscombe on the very idea of a just war.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Laing contends that the practice of eugenics has not disappeared. Conceptually related to the utilitarian and Social Darwinist worldview and historically evolving out of the practice of slavery, it led to some of the most spectacular human rights abuses in human history. The compulsory sterilization of and experimentation on those deemed “undesirable” and “unfit” in many technologically developed states like the US, Scandinavia, and Japan, led inexorably and most systematically to Nazi Germany with the elimination of countless millions of people for their race, class, political views, sexuality, religion or disability. She argues that the new eugenics collapses into the old variety because of its fixation on producing “the better” or even more implausibly, “the best”. It was this very idea that drove much of the injustice of the twentieth century. Ethically questionable strategies were at the time viewed as progressive and socially evolutionary. The new eugenics, she thinks, fares no better and spells disaster for people regarded as deficient in some way. She rejects the idea that autonomous efforts to choose “better” or the “best” children are less problematic for being freely chosen. The fact that one freely chooses to give one’s children away into slavery or medical experimentation or to end one’s life, is no bar to the action’s being part of a eugenic agenda and independently at odds with intergenerational justice and the common good. She points out that misinformation, propaganda and behaviour modification techniques, subliminal or otherwise, are celebrated ways of getting people to act in a way that destroys their own interests. Laing regards eugenics as an ongoing threat to the defenceless in particular, but the ‘deficient’ classes more generally.

The recent revelation that the rolling out of the Liverpool Care Pathway as the NHS National End of Life Care strategy in 2008 had been financially incentivised and implemented with astonishing compliance emerged as a thought-provoking development. Many of us have been warning for years of the financial, political and research interests that there are in institutionalising sedation-and-dehydration regimes, and then, inevitably, medical homicide. Freedom of Information Act requests exposed the millions of pounds that have been paid for the implementation of this national end-of-life care strategy. Much more interestingly, it showed that some hospital trusts had been paid these funds for ensuring that up to two thirds of all deaths were Pathway deaths. Given that the very livelihood of health professionals was being judged against the new Commissioning for Quality Innovation (CQUIN) ’Gold Standards Framework’, professional observance of the pathway was predictable. The revelation of management targets, despite the best efforts of the regime’s proponents to play them down, radically alters the debate. Unlike education or housing targets, these ones are potentially homicidal.

The Mental Capacity Bill endangers the vulnerable by inviting human rights abuse. It is perhaps these grave deficiencies that prompted the warnings of the 23rd Report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights highlighting the failure of the legislation to supply adequate safeguards against Articles 2, 3 and 8 incompatibilities. Further, the fact that it is the mentally incapacitated as a class that are thought ripe for these and other kinds of intervention, highlights the Article 14 discrimination inherent in this and related legislation. The financial, medical and research interests that underpin the legislation highlight how the legilsation endangers the ulnerable. It appears to be both a responsibility shifting exercise. Most alarmingly of all, efforts to permit non-therapeutic research on the non-consenting vulnerable as well as sterilisation and abortion on those who do not consent suggest that the legislation heralds a new era o gross human rights abuse in instutions around the UK.

Helga Kuhse suggested in 1985 at a session of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies in Nice, that once dehydration to death became legal and routine in hospitals, people would, on seeing the horror of it, seek the lethal injection. The strategy of legalising passive euthanasia is itself flawed. Laing argues that the Mental Capacity Bill threatens the vulnerable by inviting breaches of arts 2,3,5,8, and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Most at risk are the disabled and incapacitated. Sections permitting non-therapeutic research and non consensual sterilisation are at odds with the Nuremberg Code. New third party powers to dehydrate the vulnerable permit new systemic human rights abuse of a clinical though not historically unfamiliar variety.

A critic of utilitarianism, in a paper entitled “Innocence and Consequentialism” Laing argues that Singer cannot without contradicting himself reject baby farming (a thought experiment that involves mass-producing deliberately brain damaged children for live birth for the greater good of organ harvesting) and at the same time hold on to his “personism” a term coined by Jenny Teichman to describe his fluctuating (and Laing says, discriminatory) theory of human moral value. His explanation that baby farming undermines attitudes of care and concern for the very young, can be applied to babies and the unborn (non-persons on his view) and contradicts positions that he adopts elsewhere in his work.