In this concise and accessible introductory text, Gómez-Lobo and Keown introduce a "human goods" approach to bioethics as an alternative to the dominant principle-based method in the field (best illustrated by Beauchamp and Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, OUP). Following Aristotle and the natural law tradition, the authors demonstrate how an emphasis on human goods--such as health, life, family, friendship, work and play, the experience of beauty, knowledge, and integrity--provides a necessary context for medical decisions and can help us (...) understand critical issues at the beginning and end of life. The manuscript includes two parts: Foundations and Issues. In the Foundations section the authors explain how one can think about bioethics, offering definitions of ethics and ontology (the study of being) and prudential reasoning. In the Issues section they address genetics, abortion, infanticide, suicide and physician-assisted suicide, nutrition and hydration, and transplantation ethics. The book includes appendices featuring personal statements by Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and criteria for the determination of death. (shrink)

: This response to Nikolaus Knoepffler's paper in the same issue of the Journal agrees that if the arguments supporting the first two of the eight human embryonic stem cell research policy options discussed are unsound, as Knoepffler argues, then it seems natural to move to the increasingly permissive options. If the arguments are sound, however, then the more permissive options should be rejected. It is argued that three of the rejected arguments, taken together, constitute very good reasons to hold (...) that a human embryo is endowed with dignity from fertilization onward. Thus, countries that want their public policies to match the moral imperative of respect for human beings should refrain from allowing destructive human embryo research and should devote considerable energy and public funds to research and clinical trials using non-embryonic ("adult") stem cells. (shrink)

Self-interest theories hold that rationality requires one always to choose what is best for oneself. Where these theories differ is in their accounts of what is best for one. Hedonism is a typical self-interest theory, distinguished from other versions by the claim that what is best for one is what gives one the greatest net balance of pleasure over pain. Gómez-Lobo thinks that Socrates is a self-interest theorist: Socrates believes that “a choice is rational if and only if (...) it is a choice of what is best for the agent”. Gómez-Lobo also thinks that Socrates holds that “something is good for an agent if and only if it is morally right” ; this distinguishes his theory from hedonism and other self-interest theories. Finally, Gómez-Lobo thinks that Plato defends Socrates’ in arguing at Gorgias 506c5-507a3 that “a being is good if and only if it has the order proper to it”: follows from and other Socratic principles. These three claims constitute the “foundations” of Socratic ethics mentioned in Gómez-Lobo’s title. (shrink)

Respect for human embryos is often defended on the basis of the potentiality argument: embryos deserve respect because they already possess potentially the features that in adults are fully actualized. Opponents of this argument challenge it by claiming that if embryos should be respected because they are potentially adults, then gametes should be respected because they are potentially embryos. This article rejects this reductio ad absurdum argument by showing that there are two different types of potentiality involved so that the (...) transitivity of potentiality does not hold up in this case. Respect for embryos does not logically entail respect for gametes. (shrink)

In this provocative new work, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo proposes that the earliest Platonic writings, in particular Apology, Crito, and sections of Gorgias, contain an underlying moral philosophy that can be attributed to Socrates with some degree of assurance. His aim is to show that Socratic moral philosophy is a reasonably systematic construction generated by a small number of principles or axioms.

The main claim of this paper is that the ergon inference (NE I 7) does not entail a step from the characteristic activity of man to the good of man. The speciílcation of the ergon is required for the evaluation of anything that has a function, but the evaluation itself is logically independent of that specification.

El fin de este trabajo es examinar unas cuantas doctrinas en la historia de la ética antigua que podrían considerarse válidas hoy. La motivación moral para los estoicos y para Sócrates se basa en el auto-interés, con la presuposición ulterior de que las virtudes morales son los verdaderos bienes. Pero las estrategias de justificación estoica y socrática son diferentes. Luego se llama la atención sobre el tipo protagónico de relativismo que subyace a las pretensiones liberales contemporáneas. El artículo termina sugiriendo (...) que sólo una teoría de los bienes objetivos humanos puede resolver el problema de la motivación moral y de la indeterminación del principio del daño en el liberalismo moderno. (shrink)

In order to understand the nature of human embryos I first distinguish between active and passive potentiality, and then argue that the former is found in human gametes and embryos (even in embryos in vitro that may fail to be implanted) because they all have an indwelling power or capacity to initiate certain changes. Implantation provides necessary conditions for the actualization of that prior, active potentiality. This does not imply that embryos are potential persons that do not deserve the same (...) respect as actual persons. To claim that embryos become persons is to understand the predicate person as a phase sortal, roughly equivalent to adult person. This entails that we would not be essentially persons. In order to explain the traditional understanding of person as a proper sortal rather than a phase sortal, the author distinguishes between proximate and remote potentiality, and shows that, unlike feline embryos, human embryos, by their genetic constitution, possess the remote potentiality to later exercise the typically human activities. It follows that they are already persons essentially. (shrink)

When does a human being begin to exist? Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard have argued that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. In their view, a human individual begins to exist at gastrulation, i. e. at about sixteen days after fertilization. In this paper we argue that even granting Smith and Brogaard's ontological commitments and biological assumptions, the existence of a human being can be shown to (...) begin much earlier, viz., with fertilization. Their interpretative claim that a zygote divides immediately into two substances and therefore ceases to exist is highly implausible by their own standards, and their factual claim that there is no communication between the blastomeres has to be abandoned in light of recent embryological research. (shrink)

: This paper starts from three assumptions: that we are essentially human organisms, that we start to exist at conception, and that we retain our identity throughout our lives. The identity claim provides the background to argue that it is irrational for a person to claim that it would be impermissible to kill her now but permissible to have killed her at an earlier age. The notion of "full moral status" as an ascertainable property is questioned and shown to be (...) dependent on previously accepted moral norms. It is concluded that the exclusion of the very young from the scope of the norm o f common morality that prohibits the killing of the innocent amounts to discrimination on the basis of age. (shrink)

I would like to challenge this view on various grounds, but before I do so, I wish to provide a broader setting for the problems discussed in this paper.

The author argues that individuality does not require indivisibility and that twinning can be explained as the reprogramming of blastomeres that already have begun to differentiate in accordance with the needs of the unified organism that originates at conception.

In a recent article published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, David DeGrazia criticized the two pivotal assumptions that underlie President Bush’s policy on funding stem cell research. Those assumptions are that we originate as single-cell zygotes at the time of conception and that we have full moral status as soon as we originate.In this paper, I would like to concentrate on the first of those assumptions and show in light of recent findings in embryological development that DeGrazia’s (...) criticisms have to be rejected. I shall save my discussion of DeGrazia’s critique of the second assumption for a later article that can take into account DeGrazia’s further elaboration of his position. (shrink)

IN THE first chapter of the second book of the Analytica Posteriora Aristotle offers a fourfold classification of objects of inquiry He refers to each of them by means of a shorthand expression.

The author’s declared goal in this book is to convey “what has registered with [her] as crucial for the understanding of Aristotle’s ethics”. There is no lack of direct philosophical argumentation in this valuable work, but if we had to classify it by its contents, we would be well advised to place it on our shelves among the commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics.