Citation

Donagan A. Ethics 1985; 95(4): 874-886.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1985, University of Chicago Press)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

11658637

Abstract

Responding to accompanying articles by Dan W. Brock and Terrence Reynolds that criticize specific conclusions in his book, The Theory of Morality, Donagan clarifies and defends his arguments concerning the morality of taking innocent human life. The greater part of his article is devoted to a rejoinder to Brock's contention that a "duty-based" theory of the conditions under which it is morally permissible to take human life must be inferior to a "rights-based" one because rights-based theories credit rational beings with more control over what will happen to them, and hence with more autonomy, and because the implications of duty-based theories can be made tolerable only by recourse to the false thesis that, while it is always wrong to kill the innocent, it is not always wrong to let the innocent die. His briefer response to Reynolds expands upon the analysis of a case involving the death of a fetus resulting from a hysterectomy performed on a woman with cancer.

Language: en