This book examines the question of what parental obligations procreators incur by bringing children into being. Prusak argues that parents, as procreators, have obligations regarding future children that constrain the liberty of would-be parents to do as they wish. Moreover, these obligations go beyond simply respecting a child’s rights. He addresses in turn the ethics of adoption, child support, gamete donation, surrogacy, prenatal genetic enhancement, and public responsibility for children.

: In the new "liberal eugenics," children could be genetically improved as long as the enhancements let children choose from among a wide range of ways to live their lives. The German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas has opened a debate with the proponents of this view. Habermas suggests that a person could not really regard her life as her own if she lived with a body that somebody else had, without asking her opinion, "enhanced" for her.

As media reports have made widely known, in November 2009, the ethics committee of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, permitted the abortion of an eleven-week-old fetus in order to save the life of its mother. This woman was suffering from acute pulmonary hypertension, which her doctors judged would prove fatal for both her and her previable child. The ethics committee believed abortion to be permitted in this case under the so-called principle of double effect, but Thomas J. Olmsted, the (...) bishop of Phoenix, disagreed with the committee and pronounced its chair, Sister Margaret McBride, excommunicated latae sententiae, “by the very commission of the act.” In this article, I take the much discussed Phoenix case as an occasion to subject the principle of double effect to another round of philosophical scrutiny. In particular, I examine the third condition of the principle in its textbook formulation, namely, that the evil effect in question may not be the means to the good effect. My argument, in brief, is that the textbook formulation of the principle does not withstand philosophical scrutiny. Nevertheless, in the end, I do not claim that we should then “do away” with the principle altogether. Instead, we do well to understand it within the context of casuistry, the tradition of moral reasoning from which it issued. (shrink)

I make two arguments in this paper. First, I argue briefly that the ticking time bomb case is unrealistic and as such is liable to mislead us badly on the ground. Second, after conceding that the conditions of the ticking time bomb case might someday be realized, I argue that it may in fact be morally permissible to torture a terrorist in this case on the grounds of self-defense. My reason for making this argument is that rejecting torture in even (...) the ticking time bomb case risks discrediting objections to torture in other, more realistic cases. Yet the principle established by the ticking time bomb case is of extremely limited application. Given the extreme improbability that the conditions of this case could ever be realized, public authorities who sanction torturing someone should have to bear a heavy burden of proof that this decision was justified on the grounds of self-defense. (shrink)

At least some (perhaps the most serious) moral problems, public as well as private, concern the ways in which we should construe and specify the problems we face. The present paper, as the subtitle indicates, reexamines the conscience of Huckleberry Finn, which means both that I provide a close reading of key chapters of Mark Twain’s great novel and that I engage Jonathan Bennett’s well-known and oft-cited paper, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.” Bennett tells us, early in his paper, that (...) an episode in chapter 16 of the novel “brilliantly illustrates how fiction can be instructive about real life.”1 I agree that fiction can teach us about life—though of course living beings must judge fiction’s .. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explain why the debate over the personhood of the embryo goes nowhere and is more likely to generate confusion than conviction. The paper presents two arguments. The first aims to establish that the question of the personhood of the embryo cannot be resolved by turning to science, althoughthe debate about the embryo has largely been a debate about the scientific facts. It is claimed that the rough facts on which the parties to the debate agree admit (...) ofmultiple more refined accounts, among which science is powerless to adjudicate. So what happens is that the arguments go round and round, neither party convincing the other, both infuriating each another. The second argument concerns the implications of this claim for the many controversies involving the embryo. Here the question is how people who do not know what to make of the embryo might go about deciding how it should be treated. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy offers two main accounts of how parental obligations are acquired: the causal and the voluntarist account. Elizabeth Brake's provocative paper "Fatherhood and Child Support: Do Men Have a Right to Choose?" seeks to clear the way for the voluntarist account by focusing on the relevance of abortion rights to parental obligations. The present paper is concerned with rebutting Brake's argument that, if a woman does not acquire parental obligations to an unborn child just by having voluntarily acted in (...) such a way that had the reasonably foreseeable consequence of bringing him or her into being, neither does a man acquire parental obligations to a child once he or she is born just by having voluntarily acted in the same way. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders whether Aquinas is rightly read as a double-effect thinker and whether it is right to understand him as concurring with Paul’s dictum that evil is not to be done that good may come. I focus on what to make of Aquinas’s position that, though the private citizen may not intend to kill a man in self-defense, those holding public authority, like soldiers, may rightly do so. On my interpretation, we cannot attribute to Aquinas the position that aiming (...) to kill in self-defense is prohibited where so aiming is the only way to stay alive. Instead, for the private citizen though not for the public authority, it is aiming to kill as an end in itself, over and above the aim of saving one’s life, that is prohibited. Accordingly, we also cannot attribute to Aquinas the third condition of the principle of double effect in its textbook formulation. (shrink)

This paper examines the case of Lawrence v. Texas to bring out the philosophical commitments of Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. It is proposed that Justices Kennedy and Scalia, while both Catholics, represent fundamentally different visions of the “ends and reasons” of democratic law. A close reading of the Justices’ opinions in Lawrence indicates that Justice Scalia belongs to the tradition of the “ancients” and Justice Kennedy to the tradition of the “moderns.” The paper focuses in particular on the (...) Justices’ interpretations of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It is claimed that the interpretation of this clause turns on a philosophical commitment regarding the ends and reasons that the Constitution should be understood to serve, and thus that justices cannot help acting as “philosopher kings” here. Which of the two Justices is more consistent with the Catholic tradition is proposed as a question for another day. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question, “What is the responsibility of the philosopher, specifically the Catholic philosopher, in teaching ethics at a Catholic university?” Examination of the constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae reveals that answering this question requires examining in turn the relationship between theology and philosophy. Accordingly, the paper proceeds to an analysis of the late Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio. Th is analysis shows, however, that the very distinction between theology and philosophy seems to become problematic (...) on the encyclical’s terms. The paper thus goes on to indicate a different means of distinguishing these disciplines, and concludes by considering the significance of this distinction for the question of the responsibility of the Catholic philosopher. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that the new natural law has reason to try to integrate Kant’s ethics, not reject it. My argument breaks into two parts. First I provide a critical account of the new natural law, taking as my exemplar of this theory Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis’s 1987 article “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends.” My criticism in the end is that the new natural law is vulnerable to much the same criticism that (...) Boyle has made of Alan Donagan’s Kantian ethics. For the new natural law, the trouble will be specifying the basic goods. Here “compromise, intuition, or decision” appears inescapable. The second part of the paper briefly outlines what “Kant reconstructed” has to bring. The Kant that I advocate is not exactly Donagan’s; but my Kant shares with Donagan’s a patience for more than one reasonable position on disputed moral questions. (shrink)

In his reply to my paper “The Problem with the Problem of the Embryo,” which appeared in the Summer 2008 (82:3) issue of ACPQ, Christopher Tollefsen claims that (1) I muddle matters by failing to keep distinct questions of biology from questions having to do with personhood; (2) I have the science wrong in my account of the debate over the fact that the embryo depends on “maternal donation” for its development; and (3) my so-called “counsel of pragmatism” is unlikely (...) to lead to any progress, since, “[i]f we refuse to accept and be guided by truth when it lies before us, we are unlikely to even seek it in other, more difficult domains.” I reply to each criticism in turn, both by clarifying the argument in my paper—which Tollefsen misrepresents at one point—and by taking up, and considering in the light of my argument, his substantive claims about what biological inquiry can here reveal. (shrink)

Since Kant, the standard response to the commandment to love has been that our affections are not ours to command, and so an obligation to feel lovefor another cannot reasonably be demanded. On this account, we must say that a parent who fails to love his or her child, in the sense of feeling affection for himor her, has not violated any obligation toward that child. Maybe we could say still that the parent is deficient somehow, but we could not (...) characterize this deficiency as a moral failing. Here, then, is the subject of this paper: In the specific context of the parent-child relationship, is the commandment to love reasonable? Are we warranted in saying that the “offices of nature” include an officium caritatis, in a sense exceeding benevolence? My answer is yes, but it is necessary then to come to terms with Kant’s reasons for answering no. (shrink)