Child Versus Childmaker
Child Versus Childmaker

Author: Melinda A. Roberts

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9780847689019

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Child Versus Childmaker investigates a 'person-affecting' approach to ethical choice. A form of consequentialism, this approach is intended to capture the idea that agents ought both do the most good that they can and respect each person as distinct from each other. Focusing on cases in which a conflict of interest arises between 'childmakers'_parents, infertility specialists, embryologists, and others engaged in the task of bringing new people into existence_and the children they aim to create, the author considers what we today owe those who will come into existence tomorrow. Topics addressed include: what the person-affecting intuition is and how it differs from other forms of consequentialism; the consistency of the person-affecting intuition; the non-identity problem; wrongful life; and human cloning and other new reproductive technologies. This book is intended for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in philosophy, law and economics and for anyone interested in bioethics, population policy, normative theory, children's rights, constitutional privacy, or family law.

The Risk of a Lifetime
The Risk of a Lifetime

Author: Rivka Weinberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0190695994

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This original, comprehensive theory of procreative ethics explains what kind of act procreation is and when we may permissibly engage in it. In order to ascertain when the procreative risk is permissible to impose, Weinberg proposes contractualist principles to fairly attend to the interests prospective parents have in procreating and the interests future people have in a life of human flourishing. The book presents a solution to the non-identity problem as well as dilemmas regarding our liberal principles of autonomy, consent, and equality, which may seem to be in tension with our procreative practices.

The Non-identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People
The Non-identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People

Author: David Boonin

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199682933

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

David Boonin presents a new account of the non-identity problem: a puzzle about our obligations to people who do not yet exist. Our actions sometimes have an effect not only on the quality of life that people will enjoy in the future, but on which particular people will exist in the future to enjoy it. In cases where this is so, the combination of certain assumptions that most people seem to accept can yield conclusions that most people seem to reject. The non-identity problem has important implications both for ethical theory and for a number of topics in applied ethics, including controversial issues in bioethics, environmental ethics and disability ethics. It has been the subject of a great deal of discussion for nearly four decades, but this is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to its examination. Boonin begins by explaining what the problem is, why the problem matters, and what criteria a solution to the problem must satisfy in order to count as a successful one. He then provides a critical survey of the solutions to the problem that have thus far been proposed in the sizeable literature that the problem has generated and concludes by developing and defending an unorthodox alternative solution, one that differs fundamentally from virtually every other available approach.

What We Owe to Future People
What We Owe to Future People

Author: Elizabeth Finneron-Burns

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-18

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0197653251

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What do we owe future people? Intergenerational ethics is of great philosophical and practical importance, given human beings' ability to affect not only the quality of life of future people, but also how many of them there will be (if any at all). This book develops a distinctly contractualist answer to this question--we need to justify our actions to them on grounds they could not reasonably reject. The book explores what future people could or could not reasonably reject in terms of intergenerational resource distribution, individual procreative decisions, optimal population size, and risk imposition.

Harming Future Persons
Harming Future Persons

Author: Melinda A. Roberts

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-07-31

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1402056974

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman 1 Purpose of this Collection What are our obligations with respect to persons who have not yet, and may not ever, come into existence? Few of us believe that we can wrong those whom we leave out of existence altogether—that is, merely possible persons. We may think as well that the directive to be “fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” 1 does not hold up to close scrutiny. How can it be wrong to decline to bring ever more people into existence? At the same time, we think we are clearly ob- gated to treat future persons—persons who don’t yet but will exist—in accordance with certain stringent standards. Bringing a person into an existence that is truly awful—not worth having—can be wrong, and so can bringing a person into an existence that is worth having when we had the alternative of bringing that same person into an existence that is substantially better. We may think as well that our obligations with respect to future persons are triggered well before the point at which those persons commence their existence. We think it would be wrong, for example, to choose today to turn the Earth of the future into a miserable place even if the victims of that choice do not yet exist.

Defending the Genetic Supermarket
Defending the Genetic Supermarket

Author: Colin Gavaghan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-03-12

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1135392927

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The controversial topic of the technology of Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis, and the muddled approach to this subject adopted by the UK Parliament, is explored in detail in this volume. The author takes the viewpoint that the HFEA has taken insufficient notice to date of certain core ethical principles and makes the case for a much more ethically consistent and humane system than has been managed so far. Arguing that many of the fears and objections levied against Robert Nozick’s notion of the ‘Genetic Supermarket’ by disability activists, christian bioethicists and radical feminists, amongst others, are internally inconsistent, philosophically unsound or merely highly improbable, the author considers a number of individual policy decisions of the HFEA and addresses such questions as: Can a case be made out for state involvement in such decisions? Who stands to be harmed by a supermarket model? Are any ethical principles or societal interests threatened by it? This book is an essential resource for law students of all levels and professionals working within or interested in medical and healthcare law and medical genetics.

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 2
Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 2

Author: Mark Timmons

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0199662959

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this volume, leading philosophers advance our understanding of a wide range of moral issues and positions, from analysis of competing normative theories to questions of how we should act and live well.

What is Intergenerational Justice?
What is Intergenerational Justice?

Author: Axel Gosseries

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1509525750

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Can people alive now have duties to future generations, the unborn millions? If so, what do we owe them? What does “justice” mean in an intergenerational context, both between people who will coexist at some point, and between generations that will never overlap? In this book, Axel Gosseries provides a forensic examination of these issues, comparing and analyzing various views about what we owe our successors. He discusses links between justice and sustainability, and looks at the implications of the fact that our successors’ preferences are heavily influenced by what we will actually leave them and by the education they receive. He also points to how these theoretical considerations apply to real-life issues, ranging from pension reform and Brexit to biodiversity and the climate crisis. He ends by outlining how intergenerational considerations may translate into institutional design. Anyone grappling with the dilemmas of our obligations to the future, from students and scholars to policy makers and active citizens, will find this an invaluable theoretical and practical guide to this moral and political minefield.

The Existence Puzzles
The Existence Puzzles

Author: M. A. Roberts

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0197544142

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Melinda A. Roberts introduces the newcomer to population ethics and investigates the key issues in a way that will be of interest to professional philosophers, economists, lawyers, and students in all those areas who seek to understand what a cogent, intuitively plausible theory of population will look like. To that end, Roberts presents five perplexing but telling existence puzzles that already are or shall soon become important parts of the population ethics literature: the Asymmetry Puzzle, the Pareto Puzzle, the Addition Puzzle, the Anonymity Puzzle, and the Better Chance Puzzle. Roberts develops solutions to the puzzles that together form a partial theory of population, a collection of principles grounded in intuition but highly sensitive to the formal demands of consistency and cogency.