Patrick Findler

This essay replies to Phillip Reichling’s recent article in this journal defending a principle of rescue I proposed, but rejected, in my paper, ‘Climbing high and letting die’ (2021). I argued that ‘the comparable risk principle’ imposes unreasonable demands on adventure sport athletes, for it implies that because they assume substantial risks for sport, they have duties to assume comparable risks to rescue others – duties that would otherwise be supererogatory precisely because of the risks involved. Reichling (2022) defends the principle and contends that once these athletes have assumed substantial risks for sport, they cannot reasonably claim that a rescue that involves comparable risks is too risky. I argue here, however, that Reichling fails to recognize that one can have good personal reasons for assuming risks that do not prevent one from reasonably citing comparable risks as a justification for not rescuing others. So although adventure sport athletes assume risks for personal reasons, it does not follow that they have a duty to assume comparable risks to rescue others. Reichling’s defence of the comparable risk principle is therefore unsuccessful.

Hsiao has recently developed what he considers a ‘simple and straightforward’ argument for the moral permissibility of corporal punishment. In this article we argue that Hsiao's argument is seriously flawed for at least two reasons. Specifically, we argue that a key premise of Hsiao's argument is question-begging, and Hsiao's argument depends upon a pair of false underlying assumptions, namely, the assumption that children are moral agents, and the assumption that all forms of wrongdoing demand retribution.

On May 15, 2006, 34 year-old mountaineer David Sharp died in a small cave a few hundred meters below the peak of Mount Everest in the aptly named “death zone”. As he lay dying, Sharp was passed by forty-plus climbers on their way to the summit, none of whom made an effort to rescue him. The climbers’ failure to rescue Sharp sparked much debate in mountaineering circles and the mainstream media, but philosophers have not yet weighed in on the issues. This is surprising, since Sharp’s case raises interesting puzzles about the duty to rescue. Commonsense morality suggests that it was wrong for the climbers to put their summit bids ahead of saving a human life. But rescuing Sharp was extremely risky. If you and I are not required to assume significant risks to rescue others, why think the climbers had a moral duty to do this? My primary focus is on a new principle of rescue, which I dub the comparable risk principle, that has not been discussed in the duty-to-rescue literature. More generally, I explore the limits of the duty to rescue not just in Sharp’s case, but in relevantly similar high-risk environments common in action sports.

In this updated second edition, Debating Health Care Ethics explores contemporary moral challenges in health care, providing students with the essential tools to understand and critically evaluate the leading arguments in the field and to develop their own arguments on important moral problems in health care. Written in a clear and concise way, the textbook’s first three chapters explore the nature of arguments and ethical theories, while the remaining chapters introduce students to moral problems in health care through case studies and dramas that feature complex scenarios involving patients, family members, and health care providers. Each case study and drama is followed by a lively debate where the authors defend their unique approaches to the dilemma. This new edition now includes more gender inclusive dramas, an expanded discussion of feminist ethics, a case study on euthanasia that highlights changes to Canadian law, and an update on fetal consciousness that informs the debate on abortion. Emphasizing critical issues in health care from a Canadian perspective, this essential textbook will benefit students in philosophy, nursing, and health studies.

In recent years, John McDowell has famously suggested that moral properties are importantly analogous to colors and other "secondary qualities". The general proposal is that just as color properties are dispositions to elicit visual images, so moral properties are dispositions to elicit motivational states. The appeal of this view is that it promises to capture several attractive theses about morality. Chief among these is internalism---the view that there is a metaphysically necessary connection between moral considerations and our motivations. The central tasks of my dissertation are, first, to explicate and refine the incomplete theory McDowell introduces, and second, to determine whether this account can fulfill the promise to deliver a plausible form of internalism. ;Chapter 1 explains and motivates the central issues. In chapter 2, I introduce and develop McDowell's proposal that moral properties are analogous to colors. McDowell's position, as I interpret him, is that moral properties are dispositions to elicit "besires"---states that are at once both beliefs and desires---in virtuous persons when they have, and fully appreciate, all relevant information. In chapter 3, I address a number of important objections to this view and argue that a suitably refined version of the theory can meet all of these objections. As I explain, the refined version of the theory departs in detail from McDowell's view in several important ways. ;Chapter 4 of the dissertation involves a close examination of internalism. I argue that plausible versions of internalism must be able to accommodate familiar cases of motivational failure due to amoralism, wickedness, and depression. But they must make room for these cases without losing the very feature that makes internalist views attractive to begin with: their ability to explain the special "practical" character of morality. In the fifth and final chapter of the dissertation, I argue that the account of moral properties developed and refined in chapters 2 and 3 entails plausible versions of internalism. I further argue in an appendix that this theory is more attractive than the structurally similar view recently advanced by Michael Smith

In recent years, Pop Warner, the world’s largest youth football organization, has seen its numbers decline. This decline is due to concerns about new research establishing a link between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a debilitating neurodegenerative disease. Hundreds of thousands of parents are now struggling with a difficult ethical issue: should kids play football? Since parents have an obligation to help children develop the capacities required for autonomous choice, the risks posed by football establish a strong presumption against allowing kids to play the game. I consider whether this presumption can be defeated by the arguments for allowing kids to play dangerous sports offered by John Russell in his papers ’The Value of Dangerous Sport’ and ‘Children and Dangerous Sport and Recreation’. While Russell does not argue that kids should be permitted to play football, and agrees that some sports may be too risky for children, he argues that kids should often be allowed to participate in..