Identity, personhood and the law: a response to Ashcroft and McGee

Journal of Medical Ethics Recent Issues 44 (1):73-74 (2017)
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Abstract

We are very grateful to Richard Ashcroft 1 and Andrew McGee 2 for their thoughtful and articulate criticisms of our views. 3 Ashcroft has disappointingly low aspirations for the law. Of course he is right to say that the law is not a ‘self-sufficient, integrated and self-interpreting system of doctrine’. The law is often philosophically incoherent and internally contradictory. But it does not follow from this that all areas of the law are philosophically unsatisfactory. And if that were true, the response should not be Ashcroft’s contemptuous despair, but a determination to make it better. Ashcroft would say that such idealism is unrealistic in the light of the very nature of ‘the Law’: ‘...a complex assemblage of institutions, rules, accredited persons, practices and systems’. That isa radically ‘legal realist’ position and is plainly unsustainable. We can demonstrate its unsustainability while demonstrating both that he is wrong...

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reprint Foster, Charles; Herring, Jonathan (2018) "Identity, personhood and the law: a response to Ashcroft and McGee". Journal of Medical Ethics 44(1):73-74

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Citations of this work

Do Not Risk Homicide: Abortion After 10 Weeks Gestation.Matthew Braddock - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (4):414-432.
Law and the perils of philosophical grafts.Richard E. Ashcroft - 2018 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (1):72-72.
Reasons, causes and identity.Andrew McGee - 2018 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (1):70-71.

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References found in this work

Law and the perils of philosophical grafts.Richard E. Ashcroft - 2018 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (1):72-72.
Law and the perils of philosophical grafts.Richard E. Ashcroft - 2017 - Journal of Medical Ethics Recent Issues 44 (1):72-72.
Reasons, causes and identity.Andrew McGee - 2018 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (1):70-71.
Reasons, causes and identity.Andrew McGee - 2017 - Journal of Medical Ethics Recent Issues 44 (1):70-71.

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