Duncan Purves

A quiet revolution in organ transplant ethics

A quiet revolution is occurring in the field of transplantation. Traditionally, transplants have involved solid organs such as the kidney, heart and liver which are transplanted to prevent recipients from dying. Now transplants are being done of the face, hand, uterus, penis and larynx that aim at improving a recipients quality of life. The shift away from saving lives to seeking to make them better requires a shift in the ethical thinking that has long formed the foundation of organ transplantation. The addition of new forms of transplants requires doctors, patients, regulators and the public to rethink the risk and benefit ratio represented by trade-offs between saving life, extending life and risking the loss of life to achieve improvements in the quality of life.

Right Intention and the Ends of War

ABSTRACT The jus ad bellum criterion of right intention (CRI) is a central guiding principle of just war theory. It asserts that a country’s resort to war is just only if that country resorts to war for the right reasons. However, there is significant confusion, and little consensus, about how to specify the CRI. We seek to clear up this confusion by evaluating several distinct ways of understanding the criterion. On one understanding, a state’s resort to war is just only if it plans to adhere to the principles of just war while achieving its just cause. We argue that the first understanding makes the CRI superfluous, because it can be subsumed under the probability of success criterion. On a second understanding, a resort to war is just only if a state’s motives, which explain its resort to war, are of the right kind. We argue that this second understanding of the CRI makes it a significant further obstacle to justifying war. However, this second understanding faces a possible infinite regress problem, which, left unresolved, leaves us without a plausible interpretation of the CRI. This constitutes a significant and novel reason for leaving the CRI out of the international law of armed conflict (LOAC).

The Case for Discounting the Future

Abstract Though economists appear to discount future well-being when evaluating the costs of climate change, plausible justifications of this practice have not been forthcoming. The methods of economists thus seem to contravene the requirements of justice by discounting the moral importance of future well-being simply because it exists in the future. I defend the practice of discounting the future against the charge of injustice on grounds that moral theorists of different stripes can accept. I argue that, because public policy choices are ‘identity-affecting’, the probability that some policy choice will constitute a harm for members of a population diminishes the further we look into the future. This constitutes a plausible justification of discounting the future.

Robots and Respect: A Response to Robert Sparrow

Robert Sparrow recently argued in this journal that several initially plausible arguments in favor of the deployment of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) in warfare are in fact flawed, and that the deployment of AWS faces a serious moral objection. Sparrows argument against AWS relies on the claim that they are distinct from accepted weapons of war in that they either fail to transmit an attitude of respect for enemy combatants or, worse, they transmit an attitude of disrespect. In this reply we argue that this distinction between AWS and widely accepted weapons is illusory, and therefore cannot ground a moral difference between AWS and existing methods of waging war. We also suggest that if deploying conventional soldiers in a given situation would be permissible, but we could expect to cause fewer civilian casualties by instead deploying AWS, then it would be consistent with an intuitive understanding of respect to deploy AWS in this situation.

Human–Nonhuman Chimeras: Enhancement or Creation?

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The Significance of Personal Identity for Death

The concept of death is of central importance in bioethics. For instance, whether it is permissible to retrieve a patient’s organs for reallocation depends on whether the patient has died. On the face of it, the question of the concept of death seems closely related to questions of personal identity. Different theories of personal identity seem to yield different definitions of death. In this journal, David Shoemaker has argued that identity is, despite appearances, irrelevant for the concept of death. Shoemaker’s argument for this conclusion goes as follows. First, he assumes that most writers on personal identity reason in the following way to the conclusion that personal identity is important for the concept of death:

Anthropocentric Indirect Arguments and Anthropocentric Moral Attitudes

Anthropocentric indirect arguments (AIAs), which call for specific policies or actions because of human benefits that are correlated with but not caused by benefits to the environment, are gaining increasing traction with those who take a pragmatic approach to environmental protection. I contend that nonanthropocentrists might remain justifiably uneasy about AIAs because such arguments fail to challenge prevailing speciesist moral attitudes. I close by considering whether Elliott can address this concern of nonanthropocentrists by appealing to the ability of AIAs to engender an intrinsic concern for the environment in the people they persuade.