Dennis R. Cooley

A Kantian Moral Duty for the Soon-to-be Demented to Commit Suicide

It has been argued that, on Kantian grounds, pedophiles, rapists and murderers are morally obligated to take their own lives prior to committing a violent action that will end their moral agency. That is, to avoid destroying the agents moral life by performing a morally suicidal action, the agent, while he still is a moral agent, should end his bodys life. Although the cases of dementia and the morally reprehensible are vastly different, this Kantian interpretation might be useful in the debate on the permissibility of suicide for those facing dementias effects. If moral agents have a duty to act as moral agents, then those who will lose their moral identity as moral agents have an obligation to themselves to end their physical lives prior to losing their dignity as persons.

Good enough for the Third World.

Over the past two years, much has been made by some governments and the media about the possible callous and racist distribution of Quinacrine by two Americans to sterilize women in the Third World. The main criticism of the practice is that though Quinacrine is unapproved by the developed worlds health regulatory agencies for this particular use in the developed world due to inadequate testing for long-term side effects, it is used on defenseless women in the developing world.I argue that the distribution of unapproved medical and other products is morally permissible if it satisfies two conditions: agent-centered utilitarianism and Kants Categorical Imperative. Roughly, I contend that if the situation will probably improve and no one is treated as a mere means, then it is ethical either to give or to sell the products to those who choose to have them, regardless of where in the world they live.

The Moral Paradigm Test

Teaching business ethics classes can often be difficult because many students memorize enough of the moral theories to pass their tests, but never understand the motivating spirit underlying the theories. The result is that students are able to apply the moral principles to various situations, but produce the wrong results due to their illicit biases and rationalizations.What is needed is a practical test, which will strip away as many biases and rationalizations as possible, while at the same time emotionally connecting the students to why morality is important in business. My suggestion is the Moral Paradigm Test, which is a version of the Ideal Person Standard.

A Kantian care ethics suicide duty

Standard arguments for a duty to die or to commit suicide generally rely upon contractarian or other form of justice or the Principle of Beneficence. Even though some of these arguments might appear deontological, there is an explicit or implicit consequentialist common thread in all of them in which utility of some sort is maximized only through the taking of ones own life. Hence, most arguments for a suicide duty are consequentialist in nature. There are a number of relatively unexplored deontological arguments that make plausible cases for the mandatory taking of ones own life. For example, although Kant is widely thought to prohibit all suicides, a careful reading of his work can show a plausible case based on the Categorical Imperative. If it is necessary to preserve the individuals moral life, then everyone could will the generalized maxim governing the situation as a law of nature. Unfortunately, Kants argument is weakened by his poor understanding of moral psychology. To strengthen Kants case, care-relationship ethics can be combined with the argument to produce a plausible case that people are obligated to kill themselves if a number of criteria are satisfied.

Technology, Transgenics and a Practical Moral Code

No wonder you activities are, reading will be always needed. It is not only to fulfil the duties that you need to finish in deadline time. Reading will encourage your mind and thoughts. Of course, reading will greatly develop your experiences about everything. Reading technology transgenics and a practical moral code is also a way as one of the collective books that gives many advantages. The advantages are not only for you, but for the other peoples with those meaningful benefits.

Death's values and obligations : a pragmatic framework

A Pragmatic Method.- A Pragmatic Framework of Values and Principles: The Beginning.- Defining and Valuing Properties and Individuals.- What harm does death do to the decedent?.- How should we feel about our own death?.- How should we feel about anothers death?.- Is there a duty to die?.- A duty to suicide.

What Harm Does Death Do to the Decedent

The vast majority of people believe that death harms the person who dies. After all, it seems to be common sense that death is a bad thing, and bad things happening to people are generally injurious in some direct way to those individuals; therefore, death must harm the people who undergo it. The trouble with the common sense view is that it fails to recognize that in order to be injured a person must exist. Since death annihilates the person by destroying an essential characteristic the person has, then no person can ever experience her own death, and if she cannot experience it, then it cannot harm her. In what follows, I examine various ways that philosophers and others have argued that death harms the person who has the misfortune of dying (Calling it a misfortune assumes the common sense view is correct without critical evaluation of it). Firstly, options incorporating an afterlife are found wanting. Secondly, Cambridge changes , Priorism , and other attempts to show that a person is injured when she dies are considered. These attempts are shown to be either based on fundamentally flawed reasoning that creates the illusion of existence when all that actually exists are ideas and reflections in the survivors’ minds, or the entity that is harmed is not that which common sense says is injured.

How Should We Feel About Our Own Death

Sigmund Freud argued that people believe in God because they fear their own death. If there is a divine entity that takes a very positive personal interest in you, and has the power to keep your personality alive after your body has died, then death need not concern you because you will never undergo it. Hence, since death is unable to harm those God preserves, then fear and other feelings and emotions should alter accordingly. Fear, for instance, should be assuaged by the belief in this god, although in reality it might be simply repressed. In this chapter, I examine the morality of some of the most significant feelings and emotions we have toward our own deaths. Depending upon which view is adopted for understanding emotions and feelings—and I advocate for a pluralistic, pragmatic approach—we can not only have morally right/bad or wrong/bad emotional reactions and emotions, we can also have obligations to feel a certain way at a certain time.

Defining and Valuing Properties and Individuals

One of the largest controversies in death and dying focuses on what dies and what is lost when that entity is dead. For the most part, those who work in the field are interested in the death of people, but it is a reasonable position that people are not the only things that matter in the discussion. Properties other than being a human person can confer intrinsic value on those beings that instantiate them. For example, in the animal rights debate, some argue that anything that is living deserves moral consideration based upon that fact. Others draw the line among the entities we must respect somewhere between those beings with the ability to feel pleasure or pain and those who can feel neither. Other folks have a different standard that will create bigger or smaller groups depending on what properties they think are relevant. In this chapter, I will argue that an adequate, pragmatic value theory must be very, very complex. First, it should view value as hierarchical . Some properties being instantiated matter more than others, although each is worthy of consideration in its own right. In addition, how we value life depends on the context we have carved out to consider the living thing. Sometimes, we focus on the general properties it has, whereas in other cases, its individuality should be of main concern.

Is There a Duty to Die

Most discussions about someone terminating her own life tend to focus either on utilitarian considerations or rights. For the latter, a number of people argue over whether we have a right to die , which I take to mean an entitlement to choose to end one’s own life. I see at least two problems with the right to die approach. Unfortunately, many arguments and positions are based primarily on the intuitions of those engaged, and therefore often turn into intuition pump battles. Secondly, basing arguments on rights gets us mired in the same problems that any rights talk encounters including, but not limited to, whether they are positive or negative, whether they can be overridden, and what justifies such a right. In this chapter, I am going to argue for a position that makes worries about a right to die moot. If there is an obligation at certain times and in certain circumstances to die, then a right to die is irrelevant. Moreover, if an obligation to die is possible, then it necessarily follows that choosing to die is morally right on some occasions. Doing what is right generally cannot be proscribed by others so it does not matter if there is a right to die.