Should people with deeply held objections to certain practices be allowed to opt out of involvement with them? Should a Christian baker who objects to homosexuality be allowed to deny service to a customer seeking a cake for a gay wedding? Should a Catholic nurse be able to refuse to contribute to the provision of abortions without losing her job? The law increasingly answers no to such questions. But David Oderberg argues that this is a mistake. He contends that in such cases, opting out should be understood as part of a right of dissociation – and that this right needs better legal protection than it now enjoys.
How can health services in the UK and Europe be improved? And can costs be reduced at the same time? Over the years, many ideas have been put forward – from increased spending on preventive healthcare to the better use of technology to reduce bureaucracy and ‘pay for performance’ schemes. But author Nima Sanandaji says this is merely tinkering at the margins. What’s needed, he argues, is a completely new approach – one which embraces disruptive innovations from a new breed of entrepreneurs. Allowing true entrepreneurialism in healthcare might be considered extreme in a Western setting – but he points to a spectacular wave of success in the East to support his case. In India, Thailand, China and the Middle East, entrepreneurs have drawn inspiration from the motor industry to streamline procedures and create economies of scale. In areas such as heart surgery, they’ve dramatically driven down costs – and dramatically improved outcomes. So much so that the new market economies of the East are now, he contends, many steps of ahead of the West. In The Henry Fords of Healthcare Sanandaji outlines the lessons the West can now learn from the East, making a radical, compelling and controversial contribution to the debate on our own ailing health systems.
Freedom of Conscience. A Comparative Law Perspective addresses the timeliest of topics. Across the European continent as well as in the Anglophone world (including the United States), “freedom of conscience” is at the forefront of issues addressed by judges and legislators. It is also a perennial matter of great importance. Public authorities throughout the ages have struggled to understand, and properly to meld, the necessities of political order and the freedom of competent adults to author their own actions and to constitute themselves by making, and acting upon, their conscientious decisions about what moral truth requires of them. The urgency and gravity of the issues presented by “freedom of conscience” is also matched by their intrinsic complexity. For all these reasons, only a multi-disciplinary, full-orbed approach to these questions will do them justice. This volume rises to the occasion. The comparative perspective supplied by the editor’s recruitment of an international group of scholars, and also by his assignment to some of them the task of investigating additional countries, is utterly invaluable. The papers deftly blend what I might call “lawyer’s law” – that is, a careful presentation of the facts and holdings of courts or the precise details of a particular statutory scheme – with genuine philosophical depth. I should like to emphasize this virtue of the collection by observing that collections of this general sort tend to be either all sail or all anchor, either drowned in the minutiae of law without a care for the big picture, or all philosophy untethered to the reality of the positive law. Blicharz’s book has broken this mold. It promises to appeal to working lawyers, students, judges, and scholars. Gerard V. Bradley, Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame, USA This edited volume will be a useful resource to scholars in this area. It has a rich national variety, covering Poland (extensively), Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, and three Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, and Finland). Anyone interested in the state of the freedom of conscience in notable Western democracies will benefit from this work. Those particularly interested in Poland, a country not always focused on in the literature, will find this book of great value. And that is the hallmark of scholarship – a conversation in the search for truth. James C. Phillips, PhD, Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center, USA
Explores the multifaceted debate on the interconnection between conscientious objections, religious liberty, and the equality of women and sexual minorities.
The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil – the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds of goodness, showing how they fit into the Scholastic theory. The privation theory of evil is given its most comprehensive contemporary defence, including an account of truthmakers for truths of privation and an analysis of how causation by privation should be understood. In the end, all evil is deviance – a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing’s essential nature. Key Features: Offers a comprehensive defence of a venerable metaphysical theory, conducted using the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy. Revives a much neglected approach to the question of good and evil in their most general nature. Shows how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory has more than historical relevance to a fundamental philosophical issue, but can be applied in a way that is both defensible and yet accessible to the modern philosopher. Provides what, for the Scholastic philosopher, is arguably the only solid metaphysical foundation for a separate treatment of the origins of morality.
Fifteen essays aimed at voters on a variety of topics such as faithful citizenship, how Catholics perceive and talk about issues such as war, life issues, character issues, and how our bishops teach.
This book is a systematic introduction to moral philosophy (or as it is also called: ethics) that aims at raising its readers’ ethical literacy and competence. Starting from the nature and end of this science it examines the fundamental questions and concepts of ethics. The core chapters familiarise the reader with the elements of a human act, outline how these elements influence the ethical quality of such act and shed light on the standard of morality, i.e. the good. The book furthermore clarifies the concepts of duty, right as well as responsibility and explicates the moral duties and rights of the human person. In doing so it also elucidates the notions of human dignity and the common good. Last but not least, the book contains a range of practical tools that help the reader put ethical theory into practice. The comprehensive appendix contains chapters on the virtues, propositional logic and arguments.
In this book, Christian Erk examines the ethical (im)permissibility of killing human beings in general and of selected killings in particular, namely suicide, lethal selfdefence, abortion and euthanasia, as well as organ transplantation and assisted suicide. He does so by addressing a range of important ethical questions: What does it mean to act? Of what elements is an action comprised? What is the difference between a good or evil action and a permissible or impermissible action? How can we determine whether an action is good or evil? Is there a moral duty not to kill? Is this duty held by and against all human beings or only persons? What and who is a person? What is human dignity and who has it? What is it that is actually taken when somebody is killed, i.e. what is life? And closely related to that: What and when is death? By integrating the answers to these questions into an argumentative architecture, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of one of the most fundamental questions of mankind: Under which conditions, if any, is killing human beings ethically permissible?
Today should be a Golden Age for free speech – with technology providing more ways of communicating ideas and opinions than ever before. Yet we’re actually witnessing a growing wave of restrictions on freedom of thought and expression. In Having Your Say a variety of authors – academics, philosophers, comedians and more – stress the fundamental importance of free speech, one of the cornerstones of classical liberalism. And they provide informed and incisive insights on this worrying trend, which threatens to usher in a new, intolerant and censorious era.
