Oliver Hallich

Sperm Donation and the Right to Privacy

Sperm donation is an increasingly common method of assisted reproduction. In the debate on sperm donation, the right to privacy — construed as a right that refers to the limits of the realm of information to which others have access — plays a pivotal role with regard to two questions. The first question is whether the sperm donor’s right to privacy implies his right to retain his anonymity, the second is whether the gamete recipients’ right to privacy entitles them to withhold information about the circumstances of their conception from their donor-conceived offspring. In this contribution, I tackle these two interrelated questions. In part (1), I defend the view that there is a prima facie right of sperm donors to remain anonymous. Part (2) widens the perspective by taking into consideration the welfare of donor-conceived offspring. I argue that anonymity may harm the child only if the gametes’ recipients decide to disclose information about the circumstances of her birth to the child. Non-disclosure of these circumstances, however, is morally problematic because it may not necessarily harm, but wrong the child. In section (3), I attempt to rebut some arguments in defense of non-disclosure. In part (4), I defend the view that the best practice of sperm donation would be ‘direct donation’, i.e. that the identity of the donor is known from the time of conception. Part (5) concludes.

“I Cannot Forgive You.” The Unforgivable as an Example of a Practical Necessity

Statements about practical necessity (“I must do X”) can be recast in terms of practical impossibility (“I cannot do not X”). With the utterance “I cannot forgive you,” the speaker expresses the impossibility to forgive an act of wrongdoing, that is, the practical necessity of harboring negative emotions toward a wrongdoer. How, if at all, can we make sense of the idea that it is sometimes impossible to forgive an act of wrongdoing? Can there be acts of wrongdoing that are unforgiveable? “I cannot forgive you” is construed as a counterfactual evaluative judgment about the speaker (“If I forgave you, I would be morally blameworthy”); to call a deed unforgiveable is not to say that it is impossible to forgive it but that to forgive it would be a sign of a (very) bad character. Hallich tentatively suggests that this analysis of the unforgiveable can be generalized to cover all statements of practical necessity. Statements like “I can do no other” or “I must do this” or “It is impossible for me (not) to do X” are “systematically misleading expressions” in the Rylean sense. They should be conceptualized as counterfactual evaluative statements about the subject who claims he “must” or “cannot” do something. If this is true, Hallich argues, we would do well to abandon the notions of practical necessity and practical impossibility from our moral discourse. To forestall confusion, we should reformulate statements of practical necessity and analyze them as evaluative judgments.

Tom Buller on the principle of precedent autonomy and the relation between critical and experiential interests

As I sympathise with the main thesis of Tom Bullers article1—the thesis that if we are prepared to accept advance directives in the context of treatment then we should also accept them in the context of research—I shall focus my commentary on a premise of his argument which he accepts for the sake of argument: the principle of precedent autonomy. In short, the principle claims that it is the right of a competent individual to make decisions for a later time once competence has been lost. Whether we accept it or not crucially hinges on how we assess the relation between critical and experiential interests. Buller writes: “The authority and legitimacy of critical interests are not negated by contradictory experiential interests. Accordingly, to respect the wishes of the now incompetent patient is to override a legitimate exercise of the individuals autonomy”. I shall argue that the first sentence does not hold true sans phrase . Rather, it needs some specification. Different scenarios can be distinguished: 1. There may be a simultaneous contradiction between critical and experiential interests. Leading a healthy life may be central to my conception of a good life, but while having a critical interest in living healthily I may at the same time feel a pressing need to smoke a cigarette. In this case the authority of critical interests is left untouched by contravening experiential interests because, as Buller rightly writes, ‘this is precisely their function’: critical interests are (in part) defined as interests whose function is to control experiential interests that run contrary to our present critical interests. 2. There may, however, also be a non-simultaneous contradiction between critical and experiential interests: it may occur that while a person loses her ability to have critical interests she still has experiential interests, and these latter interests may …