Table Of ContentPhilosophical Reflections on Medical Ethics
Also by Nafsika Athanassoulis
MORALITY, MORAL LUCK AND RESPONSIBILITY
Fortune’s Web
THE MORAL LIFE
Essays in Honour of John Cottingham (co-edited with Samantha Vice)
Philosophical Reflections
on Medical Ethics
Edited by
Nafsika Athanassoulis
Lecturer in Ethics, Centre for Professional Ethics, Keele University
Editorial matter, selection, introduction and chapter 8 © Nafsika Athanassoulis
2005
All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2005
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First published in hardback 2005
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Philosophical reflections on medical ethics / edited by Nafsika Athanassoulis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Medical ethics. 2. Medical ethics – Philosophy. I.
Athanassoulis, Nafsika, 1973–
R725.5.P48 2005
174.2–dc22 2005043760
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Transferred to Digital Printing 2010
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Nafsika Athanassoulis
1 Benefit, Disability and the Non-Identity Problem 24
Hallvard Lillehammer
2 ‘Designer Babies’, Instrumentalisation and the Child’s 44
Right to an Open Future
Stephen Wilkinson
3 Why There is no Right to Know One’s Genetic Origins 70
Heather Draper
4 Compromise and Moral Complicity in the Embryonic 88
Stem Cell Debate
Katrien Devolder and John Harris
5 Towards a Natural Law Critique of Genetic Engineering 109
David S. Oderberg
6 Autonomy Inducements and Organ Sales 135
James Stacey Taylor
7 The Role of Conscience in Medical Ethics 160
Piers Benn
8 The Treatment that Leaves Something to Luck 180
Nafsika Athanassoulis
9 Passive Death 198
Ray Frey
Index 208
v
Acknowledgements
This volume is the result of four years of thinking about and teaching
medical ethics, so my greatest debt is owed to the hundreds of students
at the University of Leeds who have stimulated my own research with
their arguments and ideas. I am also particularly grateful to all the con-
tributors to this volume for their hard work and excellent papers.
vii
Notes on the Contributors
Nafsika Athanassoulis is Lecturer in Ethics at Keele University.
She is the author of Morality, Moral Luck and Responsibility: Fortune’s
Web(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and has published articles on moral
luck, virtue ethics and consent. She teaches medical ethics to any-
one who will listen, including philosophy students, medical stu-
dents, biomedical sciences students and professionals returning to
education.
Piers Bennis Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Law, Imperial College. He
is the course organiser for the new MSc in Medical Ethics and has
general interests in moral theory, meta-ethics and applied ethics. His
research interests in medical ethics include issues at the beginning and
end of life, including the metaphysics of ‘personhood’ and the debate
about brain death; ethical issues in psychiatry, especially the moral
responsibility of psychopaths; the nature and defensibility of paternal-
ism in medicine; lying and deception in medicine and the interplay of
secular and theological approaches to biological concerns. His publica-
tions include Ethics, (1998); ‘Morality, the Unborn and the Open
Future’, in Questions of Time and Tense, edited by R. LePoidevin (1998);
‘New Issues: Health Care Ethics’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 18:2 (2001);
‘Medicine, Lies and Deceptions’, Journal of Medical Ethics 27:2 (2001).
He is currently working on a book on death.
Katrien Devolder is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research
Foundation – Flanders and is based at the Bioethics Institute Ghent at
Ghent University, Belgium. Her chief interests are in bioethics, more
particularly in cloning, stem cell research and genetics. She is the
author, together with Johan Braeckman, of a book on human cloning,
which was published in 2001. She is currently writing a book on the
ethics of human embryonic stem cell research and has published
extensively on this topic.
Heather Draperis Reader in Biomedical Ethics, Centre for Biomedical
Ethics, Primary Care Clinical Sciences, at the University of Birmingham,
UK. One of her primary research interests is the ethics of human repro-
duction and the role in ethics and policy of genetic relatedness in
viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
determining parental rights and responsibilities. Published papers
related to the one in this collection include: ‘Paternity Fraud and
Compensation for Misattributed Paternity’ Journal of Medical Ethics
(2007), ‘Gametes, Consent and the Point of No Return’ Human Fertility
(2007), and with Jonathan Ives ‘Testing for Fatherhood: Two Paradoxes
of Paternity Testing’ Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law (forth-
coming) and ‘Becoming a Father/Refusing Fatherhood: An Empirical
Bioethics Approach to Paternal Responsibilities and Rights’ Clinical
Ethics(2008).
Ray Frey is Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green University. He is
the author of numerous articles and books on ethical theory, applied
ethics, the history of ethics and social and political theory, including
Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (1998, with Gerald Dworkin
and Sissela Bok), Awaiting publication are books on Joseph Butler, an
edition of Butler’s ethical writings, a volume of essays on topics in
applied ethics and a volume on utilitarianism. He teaches courses in all
the areas of his research, including legal philosophy. Previously, he
tutored students at Oxford and taught in the Universities of Liverpool
and Toronto. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Social Philosophy and
Policy Center in Bowling Green, a Senior Research Fellow of the
Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, and a Senior
Research Fellow of the Westminster Institute of Ethics and Public
Policy at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
John Harrisis Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics, School of Law,
University of Manchester and is joint Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of
Medical Ethics. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical
Sciences (FMedSci) in 2001 and has been a member of the Human
Genetics Commission since its foundation in 1999. Recent books
include: Clones Genes and Immortality (1998); Bioethics(2001); A Com-
panion to Genethics: Philosophy and the Genetic Revolution (2002 and
2004); and On Cloning(2004).
Hallvard Lillehammer is Fellow of King’s College and Lecturer in
Philosophy at Cambridge University. He is co-editor of Real Metaphysics
(2003) and Genetics, Persons, and Responsibility(2001). He has published
a number of papers on medical ethics, including ‘Voluntary Euthanasia
and the Logical Slippery Slope Argument’, The Cambridge Law Journal
(2002), and ‘Who Needs Bioethicists?’, Studies in the History and Philo-
sophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2004).
x Notes on the Contributors
David S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Reading. He is the author of many articles in metaphysics, ethics,
philosophical logic and other subjects. His publications include Moral
Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach (2000); Applied Ethics: A Non-
Consequentialist Approach (2000); and Human Lives: Critical Essays on
Consequentialist Bioethics(co-editor with Jacqueline A. Laing, 1997).
James Stacey Taylor is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at The
College of New Jersey, USA. He is the editor of Personal Autonomy: New
Essays (2005, paperback 2008), and the author of both Stakes and
Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts are Morally Imperative (2005)
and Practical Autonomy and Bioethics (2009). He is also the author of
over 30 articles in academic journals, including Social Philosophy &
Policy, Public Affairs Quarterly, American Philosophical Quarterly, the
Journal of Applied Ethics, and the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
His work has also appeared in many edited collections and has been
widely anthologized. He currently serves as the Managing Editor of the
Journal of Value Inquiry, and is completing two books: Death Unterrible:
Epicurean Thanatology and Contemporary Bioethics and Toxic Trade: An
Unapologetic Defense of Universal Commodification.
Stephen Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Philosophy at
Keele University, where he directs a number of graduate programmes
including the PgDip/MA in Medical Ethics and Law, taught jointly
with Keele University’s Law Department, and the UK’s first professional
doctorate in Medical Ethics (the DMedEth), which was launched in
2002. His recent research papers have addressed topics including the
allocation of health service resources, pre-implantation genetic dia-
gnosis, separating conjoined twins, and the nature of mental illness. A
paper on the latter won the Philosophical Quarterly International
Essay Prize in 1999. He has recently completed a book on the ethics of
commercialising the human body (Bodies for Sale, 2003). This work was
supported by a research grant by the Arts and Humanities Research
Board.
