Following on from Sentience Part 1, I will now address the conclusion of Bonnie Steinbock’s argument. Steinbock’s Conclusion Similar ambiguities affect Steinbock’s conclusion. Steinbock asserts that for killing an individual to be unlawful homicide, the individual must be sentient. However, this is ambiguous; as Don Marquis points out, this could mean that the individual will […]
Entries Tagged as 'Feticide'
Sentience Part 2
November 2nd, 2008 2 Comments
Tags: Abortion · Bonnie Steinbock · Don Marquis · Feticide · Sentience
Sentience Part 1
November 1st, 2008 Comments Off on Sentience Part 1
Following on from my series on the illiberality of Abortion, discussion in the comments section turned to the issue of sentience. Commenters asked whether perhaps sentience is the property that a newborn possesses and a fetus does not that warrants such unequal application of the non-initiation of force principle by liberals. Is sentience the property […]
Tags: Abortion · Bonnie Steinbock · Feticide · Harry Gensler · Michael Tooley · Sentience
Is Abortion Liberal? Part 2
October 27th, 2008 27 Comments
In my previous post, Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1, I argued that liberals who support the non-initiation of force principle can support abortion only on two grounds; (a) the fetus is a person but its existence inside the mother without her consent constitutes a form aggression, and hence, the mother’s action of killing it is […]
Tags: Abortion · Classical Liberalism · David Boonin · Feticide · Francis Beckwith · Liberalism · Libertarianism · Michael Tooley · Peter Cresswell · Rodney Hide
Praise from our Critics
June 20th, 2008 3 Comments
Despite holding to a somewhat contrary viewpoint and despite having had more than one clash of viewpoints it appears that our critics accord us some praise. I just now stumbled accross this thread on GayNZ.com’s forum discussing Christian blogs and websites and was pleasantly surprised by the comments on our blog. Kay writes: “The M […]
Tags: Abortion · Feticide · GayNZ.com · Homosexual Conduct · Sexual Morality
Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar
March 19th, 2008 26 Comments
David Farrar of Kiwiblog weighs in on the abortion debate. I have met David a couple of times and worked with him on several issues and I have a lot of time for him but on this issue we disagree. Given how widely read Farrar’s blog is, and seeing the ethics of killing a fetus […]
Tags: Abortion · Brain Death · David Farrar · Ethics · Feticide
New Publication
November 21st, 2007 Comments Off on New Publication
I just received word from the Editor of The Journal of Ethics and Medicine that my article “Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criteria: A Critique” has been accepted for publication in a future issue (the exact issue is still being decided). There may be some minor amendments made but at present the following is the […]
Tags: Abortion · David Boonin · Ethics · Feticide · Published
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
