Preserving Beneficence

Procreative Beneficence, Obligation, and Eugenics

The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible....

Therapeutic beneficence and placebo controls.

Poverty Measurement and Theories of Beneficence

This note points to certain similarities of orientation and outcome between Derek Parfit’s quest for a theory of beneficence and Amartya Sen’s quest for a suitable realvalued representation of poverty. It suggests that both projects, in a certain sense, have been instructive failures. Using Sen’s own work, the note also suggests a logically natural way of dealing with some of the problems in po...

The affective beneficence of vigorous exercise revisited.

OBJECTIVES: High exercise intensity may be associated with reduced adherence to exercise programmes, possibly because it is perceived as aversive. However, several authors have suggested that an intensity as high as 60% or 70% of maximal aerobic capacity (VO(2max)) is necessary for exercise to elicit positive affective changes. To elucidate this discrepancy, the affective responses to increasin...

Wrongful Beneficence: Exploitation and Third World Sweatshops

Much of the merchandise produced by U.S. companies and sold to U.S. consumers is manufactured by workers in third world countries who earn as little as 12 cents per hour drudging away in harsh and even dangerous work environments. Such workplaces are referred to as sweatshops and are especially common in the apparel and shoe industries and in toy making. Many critics object to sweatshops on the...