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Author: Stephen Wilkinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-02-18
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 0199273960
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTo what extent should parents be allowed to use reproductive technologies to determine the characteristics of their future children? Is there something morally wrong with choosing what their sex will be, or with trying to 'screen out' as much disease and disability as possible before birth? This book offers answers to such questions.
Author: Christine Overall
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012-02-03
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 0262300516
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA wide-ranging exploration of whether or not choosing to procreate can be morally justified—and if so, how. In contemporary Western society, people are more often called upon to justify the choice not to have children than they are to supply reasons for having them. In this book, Christine Overall maintains that the burden of proof should be reversed: that the choice to have children calls for more careful justification and reasoning than the choice not to. Arguing that the choice to have children is not just a prudential or pragmatic decision but one with ethical repercussions, Overall offers a wide-ranging exploration of how we might think systematically and deeply about this fundamental aspect of human life. Writing from a feminist perspective, she also acknowledges the inevitably gendered nature of the decision; the choice has different meanings, implications, and risks for women than it has for men. After considering a series of ethical approaches to procreation, and finding them inadequate or incomplete, Overall offers instead a novel argument. Exploring the nature of the biological parent-child relationship—which is not only genetic but also psychological, physical, intellectual, and moral—she argues that the formation of that relationship is the best possible reason for choosing to have a child.
Author: Peter Singer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-02-21
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 1139496891
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live.
Author: Priscilla Alderson
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2011-02-09
Total Pages: 177
ISBN-13: 0857021370
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEthical questions are at the centre of research with children and young people. This clear and practical text informs students and researchers about the relevant laws and guidelines and current debates in research ethics. Priscilla Alderson and Virginia Morrow cover ethics at every stage of research, and with all kinds of young research participants, particularly those who are vulnerable or neglected. They break down the process of research into ten stages, each with its own set of related questions and problems, and they show how these need to be addressed. This practical book is essential reading for anyone who conducts or reviews research with children or young people. Priscilla Alderson is Emerita Professor of Childhood Studies at the Institute of Education University of London. Virginia Morrow is Senior Research Officer in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford.
Author: Timothy F. Murphy
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 195
ISBN-13: 0262018055
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA critical review of the debate over the still-hypothetical possibility of prenatal intervention by parents to select the sexual orientation of their children. Parents routinely turn to prenatal testing to screen for genetic or chromosomal disorders or to learn their child's sex. What if they could use similar prenatal interventions to learn (or change) their child's sexual orientation? Bioethicists have debated the moral implications of this still-hypothetical possibility for several decades. Some commentators fear that any scientific efforts to understand the origins of homosexuality could mean the end of gay and lesbian people, if parents shy away from having homosexual children. Others defend parents' rights to choose the traits of their children in general and see no reason to treat sexual orientation differently. In this book, Timothy Murphy traces the controversy over prenatal selection of sexual orientation, offering a critical review of the literature and presenting his own argument in favor of parents' reproductive liberty. Arguing against commentators who want to restrict the scientific study of sexual orientation or technologies that emerge from that study, Murphy proposes a defense of parents' right to choose. This, he argues, is the only view that helps protect children from hurtful family environments, that is consistent with the increasing powers of prenatal interventions, and that respects human futures as something other than accidents of the genetic lottery.
Author: Chris Kaposy
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-04-06
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 0262037718
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn argument that more people should have children with Down syndrome, written from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective. The rate at which parents choose to terminate a pregnancy when prenatal tests indicate that the fetus has Down syndrome is between 60 and 90 percent. In Choosing Down Syndrome, Chris Kaposy offers a carefully reasoned ethical argument in favor of choosing to have such a child. Arguing from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective, Kaposy makes the case that there is a common social bias against cognitive disability that influences decisions about prenatal testing and terminating pregnancies, and that more people should resist this bias by having children with Down syndrome. Drawing on accounts by parents of children with Down syndrome, and arguing for their objectivity, Kaposy finds that these parents see themselves and their families as having benefitted from having a child with Down syndrome. To counter those who might characterize these accounts as based on self-deception or expressing adaptive preference, Kaposy cites supporting evidence, including divorce rates and observational studies showing that families including children with Down syndrome typically function well. Himself the father of a child with Down syndrome, Kaposy argues that cognitive disability associated with Down syndrome does not lead to diminished well-being. He argues further that parental expectations are influenced by neoliberal ideologies that unduly focus on the supposed diminished economic potential of a person with Down syndrome. Kaposy does not advocate restricting access to abortion or prenatal testing for Down syndrome, and he does not argue that it is ethically mandatory in all cases to give birth to a child with Down syndrome. People should be free to make important decisions based on their values. Kaposy's argument shows that it may be consistent with their values to welcome a child with Down syndrome into the family.
Author: Harry Brighouse
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-08-02
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 0691173737
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children.
Author: John A. Robertson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1996-03-24
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780691036656
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this wide-ranging account of the reproductive technologies currently available, John Robertson goes to the heart of issues that confront increasing numbers of people - single individuals or couples, donors or surrogates, gays or heterosexuals - who seek to redefine family, parenthood, the experience of pregnancy, and life itself.
Author: Norvin Richards
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-07-06
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 0199774269
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Ethics of Parenthood Norvin Richards explores the moral relationship between parents and children from slightly before the cradle to slightly before the grave. Richards maintains that biological parents do ordinarily have a right to raise their children, not as a property right but as an instance of our general right to continue whatever we have begun. The contention is that creating a child is a first act of parenthood, hence it ordinarily carries a right to continue as parent to that child. Implications are drawn for a wide range of cases, including those of Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, prenatal abandonment, babies switched at birth and sent home with the wrong parents, and families separated by war or natural disaster. A second contention is that children have a claim of their own to have their autonomy respected, and that this claim is stronger the better the grounds for believing that what the child's actions express is a self of the child's own. A final set of chapters concern parents and their grown children. Views are offered about what duties parents have at this stage of life, about what is required in order to treat grown children as adults, and about what obligations grown children have to their parents. In the final chapter Richards discusses the contention that parents sometimes have an obligation to die rather than permit their children to make the sacrifices needed to keep them alive, arguing that a leading view about this undervalues both love and autonomy.
Author: John Tillson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-06-13
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 135006680X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence, John Tillson develops a theory concerning which kinds of formative influence are morally permissible, impermissible or obligatory. Applying this theory to the case of religion, he argues that religious initiation in childhood is morally impermissible whether conducted by parents, teachers or others. Tillson addresses questions such as: how we come to have the ethical responsibilities we do, how we understand religion, how ethical and religious commitments can be justified, and what makes children ethically special.
