Michael Boylan

Gun control in the United States: ethical perspectives for the twenty-first century.

The current author will explore the way we should think about the ethical implications of gun control in the United States today. The generating pedagogy will be: (1) an explication of worldview perspectives, personal and community as per the authors recently published writings; (2) a discussion of the worldviews of both sides of the gun control debate; (3) a critical appraisal of the positions of each side; and (4) some suggestions about a future that is without ordinary citizen ownership of guns. The author argues that based on an ethical rights model of analysis, an ordinary citizens right to bear arms is outweighed by other competing rights claims.

Debate: Gun control in the United States

The issue of gun control in the United States generates heated and passionate debate whenever it comes up. To provide a brief glimpse into the wide spectrum of opinions on this topic, the symposium’s guest editors have invited two prominent and opposing voices on this subject. Michael Boylan PhD is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Marymount University in Arlington, VA, and has been a staunch advocate for more stringent gun control. Don Kates JD is a retired professor of constitutional and criminal law, criminologist, and research fellow with The Independent Institute in Oakland, CA. Kates has fervently argued against firearm regulation. As you will appreciate, both contributors provide rational support for their positions with little common ground. We believe that the absence of common ground here is, in fact, part of the problem. If we are to have any chance of solving the problems of civilians maiming and killing other civilians with firearms, individuals on both sides of the gun-control debate — as well as those in the broad, moderate middle — will need to see the issue as complicated, nuanced, and, for many, laden with emotion. It is our sincerest hope that even those on the extremes begin to look for areas of agreement, and use those areas as a point of departure for sensible approaches to minimize the dreadful harm that gunshot injuries cause.

The duty to rescue and the limits of confidentiality.

doctor in the first place, which thereby prevents her from performing her public health function). The fallaciousness of this dichotomy is clearly obvious. There is likely a large third group that would prefer absolute confidentiality (at least for themselves) but are willing to get treated nonetheless, even under a qualified confidentiality regime. Kipnis’s argument depends on ignoring this third category, which may turn out to be the vast majority of potential patients. Many patients will likely agree to a qualified confidentiality relationship long before they have any particular reason to fear disclosure. In this sense, the decision to accept a medical relationship under a qualified confidentiality regime is at least sometimes made from behind a veil of ignorance; one does not know whether he is likely to benefit from, or lose from, the doctor’s disclosure. For example, in the infected spouse scenario, when the two first sought treatment from the doctor, neither of them knew which one would eventually have a dangerous secret that the other needed to know. Indeed, for many (or most?) people the prospect of a harmful disclosure under a qualified confidentiality regime is so unlikely and remote that it will not even be a significant consideration in choosing whether to get medical treatment. Still, those same people who agreed to the confidentiality regime in advance may later withhold additional consent for a specific disclosure. That’s why the qualified confidentiality regime relies on an advance warning, and a binding advance consent, rather than a later one at the point of disclosure. Altogether then, Kipnis leaves us wondering whether a qualified confidentiality regime deters a significant number of patients, such that it creates sufficient negative consequences to outweigh the public health benefits of qualified confidentiality. Beyond the infected spouse scenario, one can imagine more trenchant cases where a patient has an extremely contagious and deadly disease that threatens an entire population. Given that a disclosure can save thousands or millions of lives, it seems that the only possible justification for absolute confidentiality would be an absolutist, categorical moral theory. But then, in the great back-and-forth tradition of moral discourse, such a theory would be weakened for its very support of such an unsavory conclusion.

Introduction: International Public Health: Morality, Politics, Poverty, War, Disease

This chapter has four main points. First, I argue that the human rights approach to public health ethics, championed by Jonathan Mann and others, needs to engage with philosophical accounts of moral human rights. Second, I argue that, while both interest-based and agency accounts of moral human rights are defensible as philosophical accounts of human rights, and both have advantages as the foundation for a human rights approach to public health ethics, the interest-based approach is a natural fit for this approach. Third, I illustrate how engagement with the philosophical accounts of the structure of moral rights can help respond to the criticism that certain rights underpinning the human rights approach to public health ethics, such as the right to health, cannot be justified. Finally, I argue that the human rights approach to public health ethics promises to contribute to our understanding of both health and human rights.

First Order Metaethical Principles: Boylan’s Philosophical Work on Ethics and Personhood Theory

We begin our express voyage into ethical theory with an examination of first order ethical principles as set out by this author. As mentioned earlier, there are two forms of metaethics: first and second order. In the first order the author sets out intellectual presuppositions that are necessary in order to structure some normative theory. These principles can apply to any of the realistic, naturalistic theories that are set out in the subsequent chapters: virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology.

To the Promised Land

To the Promised Land is the third installment of philosopher-novelist Michael Boylan’s ingenious four volume exploration of some of life’s great quandaries. Each of the De Anima Novels views fundamental challenges through the lens of the world’s great religious perspectives, letting the reader slip into the characters’ lives as they grapple with such issues as sudden wealth, racial identity, politics, and fate. To the Promised Land gives us powerful individuals wrestling with the conflict between responsibility to ourselves and others, as their tales are paired with insights from the Jewish idea of forgiveness.

Virtue Ethics with Selections from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle was the first systematic writer on ethical theory from the ancient Greek world. Today, we classify his general approach as virtue (arete) ethics or ethics of character. This approach is aimed more at creating good decision-makers rather than creating a decision theory mechanism which will allow anyone to plug in the relevant data and derive an action recommendation. The presupposition is this: people of good character make right choices. These spring out of their well-formed disposition so that they can merely appeal to their habits to act rightly.

Medical pharmaceuticals and distributive justice.

There are deep structural conflicts between the mission of healthcare as cooperative care to the sick and injured and that of healthcare as a business whose mission is maximizing profits. These conflicts come to the fore in the medical pharmaceutical industry. I first set these out in a context that addresses the mission of healthcare, then examine the relative roles of competitive and cooperative systems of distributive justice, and then argue for the creation of nonprofit pharmaceutical companies and the transformation of many for-profit companies into companies subject to public oversight and profit curbs. The recommendations are aspirational for the United States (because it does not yet offer universal health coverage) but it is meant to be action guiding for those industrialized countries wealthy enough to provide universal health coverage.