Debate continues over the acts/omissions doctrine, and over the concepts of duty and charity. Such issues inform the debate over the moral permissibility of euthanasia. Recent papers have emphasised moral sensitivity, medical intuitions, and sub-standard palliative care as some of the factors which should persuade us to regard euthanasia as morally unacceptable. I argue that these lines of argu...

Articulating the public's widespread unease about animal biotechnology has not been easy, and the first attempts have not been able to provide an effective tool for navigating the moral permissibility of this research. Because these moral intuitions have been difficult to cash out, they have been belittled as representing nothing more than fear or confusion. But there are sound philosophical re...

The controversy surrounding the dead donor rule and the adequacy of neurological criteria for death continues unabated. However, despite disagreement on fundamental theoretical questions, I argue that there is significant (but not complete) agreement on the permissibility of organ retrieval from heart-beating donors. Many disagreements are rooted in disputes surrounding language meaning and use...

In this paper, we present a conditional argument for the moral permissibility of some kinds of infanticide. The argument is based on a certain view of consciousness and the claim that there is an intimate connection between consciousness and infanticide. In bare outline, the argument is this: it is impermissible to intentionally kill a creature only if the creature is conscious; it is reasonabl...

THE MORAL PERMISSIBILITY OF AUTOMATED RESPONSES DURING CYBERWARFARE David Danks a b & Joseph H. Danks c a Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States b Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Pensacola, FL, United States c Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States Version of record first published: 17 ...

BACKGROUND To determine whether the public and scientists consider common arguments (and counterarguments) in support (or not) of animal research (AR) convincing. METHODS After validation, the survey was sent to samples of public (Sampling Survey International (SSI; Canadian), Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT; US), a Canadian city festival and children's hospital), medical students (two second-yea...

continuance is one of the most important reasons for the permissibility of primary emulation of a deceased mujtahid regarding those issues for which he has a fatwa. it has been reported in four different formulations. and in its critique, various notions have been suggested: the abrogation of the matter or subject, its being suspended, the continued matter or ruling (the mustashab) being neithe...