Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics

361 Pages·2007·2.39 MB·English

Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy
In teaching and research, philosophy makes progress through argumentation and
debate. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy presents a forum for students and
their teachers to follow and participate in the debates that animate philosophy
today in the western world. Each volume presents pairs of opposing viewpoints on
contested themes and topics in the central subfields of philosophy. Each volume is
edited and introduced by an expert in the field, and also includes an index,
bibliography, and suggestions for further reading. The opposing essays,
commissioned especially for the volumes in the series, are thorough but accessible
presentations of opposing points of view.
1. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion edited by Michael L. Peterson
and Raymond J. VanArragon
2. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science edited by Christopher Hitchcock
3. Applied Ethics edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman
4. Epistemology edited by Matthias Steup and David Sosa
Forthcoming Contemporary Debates are in:
Aesthetics edited by Matthew Kieran
Cognitive Science edited by Robert Stainton
Metaphysics edited by Ted Sider, Dean Zimmerman, and John Hawthorne
Moral Theory edited by James Dreier
Philosophy of Mind edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen
Social Philosophy edited by Laurence Thomas
CONTEMPORARY
DEBATES IN
APPLIED ETHICS
Edited by
Andrew I. Cohen and
Christopher Heath Wellman
© 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
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First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contemporary debates in applied ethics / edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher
Heath Wellman.
p. cm. — (Contemporary debates in philosophy; 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4051-1547-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4051-1548-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.
Applied ethics. I. Cohen, Andrew I. II. Wellman, Christopher Heath. III. Series.
BJ1031.C597 2005
170 — dc22
2004016921
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
ABORTION 11
1 The Wrong of Abortion Patrick Lee and Robert P. George 13
2 The Moral Permissibility of Abortion Margaret Olivia Little 27
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION 41
3 A Defense of Affirmative Action Albert Mosley 43
4 Preferential Policies Have Become Toxic Celia Wolf-Devine 59
ANIMALS 75
5 Empty Cages: Animals Rights and Vivisection Tom Regan 77
6 Animals and Their Medical Use R. G. Frey 91
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 105
7 A Defense of the Death Penalty Louis P. Pojman 107
8 Why We Should Put the Death Penalty to Rest Stephen Nathanson 124
CLONING 139
9 Why I Oppose Human Cloning Jeremy Rifkin 141
10 The Poverty of Objections to Human Reproductive Cloning John Harris 145
EUTHANASIA 159
11 In Defense of Voluntary Active Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide
Michael Tooley 161
12 A Case Against Euthanasia Daniel Callahan 179
IMMIGRATION 191
13 Immigration: The Case for Limits David Miller 193
14 The Case for Open Immigration Chandran Kukathas 207
PORNOGRAPHY 221
15 The Right to Get Turned On: Pornography, Autonomy, Equality
Andrew Altman 223
16 “The Price We Pay”? Pornography and Harm Susan J. Brison 236
PRIVACY AND CIVIL SOCIETY 251
17 The Limits of Privacy Amitai Etzioni 253
18 The Case for Privacy David D. Friedman 263
VALUES IN NATURE 277
19 The Intrinsic Value of Nature in Public Policy: The Case of the
Endangered Species Act J. Baird Callicott 279
20 Values in Nature: A Pluralistic Approach Bryan G. Norton 298
WORLD HUNGER 311
21 Famine Relief: The Duties We Have to Others Christopher Heath
Wellman 313
22 Famine Relief and Human Virtue Andrew I. Cohen 326
Index 343
vi Contents
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Bernard R. Boxill, Dorothy Denning, R. G. Frey, Deborah G. Johnson,
Hugh LaFollette, and Jeffrey Rosen for advice in the early stages. Jeff Dean and Nirit
Simon at Blackwell have been immensely supportive and patient. Most importantly,
we would like to thank Adam Adler, Brad Champion, and Ryan McWhorter for pro-
viding crucial research and editorial assistance throughout the project.
Notes on Contributors
Andrew Altman is Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. He special-
izes in legal and political philosophy and applied ethics. Professor Altman’s publica-
tions include Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique (Princeton University Press,
1989) and Arguing About Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy, 2nd edn.
(Wadsworth, 2001). His articles have appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs and
Ethics, among other leading philosophy journals. Currently he is working on issues
of international criminal law.
Susan J. Brison is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College and
has held visiting appointments at Tufts, New York University, and Princeton. She is
author of Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self(Princeton University Press,
2002) and Speech, Harm, and Conflicts of Rights (Princeton University Press,
forthcoming) and co-editor of Contemporary Perspectives on Constitutional Interpre-
tation (Westview Press, 1993).
Daniel Callahan a cofounder of the Hastings Center, is now its Director of Interna-
tional Programs and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Medical School. He has a Ph.D.
in philosophy, and is the author, most recently, of What Price Better Health: Hazards
of the Research Imperative (University of California Press, 2003).
J. Baird Callicott is Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies in the Institute of
Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. From 1997 to 2000 he served as
President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. He is author of Earth’s
Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin
to the Australian Outback (University of California Press, 1994), In Defense of the
Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (State University of New York Press,
1989), Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1999), American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa
Case Study (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), and more than a hundred book chapters,
journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews. Callicott’s research proceeds
on four major fronts: theoretical environmental ethics, land ethics, the philosophy of
ecology and conservation, and comparative environmental philosophy.
Andrew I. Cohen is Associate Director of the Jean Beer Blumenfeld Center for
Ethics and teaches in the philosophy department at Georgia State University. He spe-
cializes in ethics and political philosophy and has published papers on topics such as
Hobbesian moral and political theory, the ethics of friendship, and rights theory.
Amitai Etzioni is the author of 20 books, including Genetic Fix: The Next
Technological Revolution (Macmillan, 1973), The Moral Dimension: Toward a New
Economics (Free Press, 1988), The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a
Democratic Society (Basic Books, 1996), My Brother’s Keeper: A Memoir and a
Message (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and most recently, From Empire to Commu-
nity (Palgrave Macmillan 2004). He served as a Senior Advisor to the White House
on domestic affairs; he taught at Columbia University, Harvard Business School, Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley, and was named the first University Professor at
George Washington University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Commu-
nitarian Policy Studies.
R. G. Frey is Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. He special-
izes in ethical and political philosophy and is the author of numerous books and arti-
cles on applied ethics, normative theory, and the history of eighteenth-century British
moral philosophy. His latest books are Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide
(with Gerald Dworkin and Sissela Bok; Cambridge University Press, 1998), A Com-
panion to Applied Ethics (with Christopher Heath Wellman; Blackwell, 2003), and
Ethics, Animals, and Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
David D. Friedman is a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University; his specialty is
the economic analysis of law and his current interests include the effect of technol-
ogy on the world over the next few decades. His most recent book is Law’s Order:
What Economics has to do with Law and Why It Matters (Princeton University Press,
2000). You can learn more than you want to know about both him and his ideas at
<www.daviddfriedman.com>.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James
Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is
a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and served from 1993 to 1998 as
a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a
former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received
the 1990 Justice Tom C. Clark Award. Among his books are In Defense of
Natural Law(Clarendon Press, 1998) and Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public
Morality (Clarendon Press, 1993). His articles have appeared in the Harvard Law
Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago
Notes on Contributors ix