At some point in the future - perhaps within the next few decades - it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there is a right to the death of the foetus. Our strategy in this essay is to consider and reject three arguments in favour of this latter right. The first claims that women have a right not to be biological mothers, the second that women have a right to genetic privacy, and the third that a foetus is one's property. Furthermore, we argue that it follows from rejecting the third claim that genetic parents also lack a right to the destruction of cryopreserved embryos used for in vitro fertilization. The conclusion that a woman possesses no right to the death of the foetus builds upon the claims that other pro-choice advocates, such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, have made.

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In an article, “The Paradox of Vote Trading,” (APSR 67 [December, 1973]) William H. Riker and Steven J. Brams have argued that systematic logrolling among all members of a legislature produces a paradox: While each trade is individually rational, the effects of externalities offset the potential gains from exchanging votes and each voter finds himself worse off than he would have been by voting sincerely. We extend the results of Riker and Brams to a unanimity decision rule and find that a paradox of vote trading holds for that decision rule as well as for simple majority rule. Under a unanimity rule, however, trades which would be collectively rational (i.e., which would produce a Pareto optimal result) are not individually rational; the non-trader is the beneficiary under such a decision rule. Finally, we pose the question Riker and Brams suggested: Is the paradox of vote trading inescapable? Except under very restrictive conditions, we find that it is. However, given certain assumptions about the distributions of individual utilities, we present proofs of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the Pareto optimality of vote trading and argue that in actual legislative situations, when vote trading is Pareto optimal, learning behavior should serve to extricate the members from the paradox of vote trading.

Most people who defend physician-assisted death (PAD) endorse the Joint View, which holds that two conditions-autonomy and welfare-must be satisfied for PAD to be justified. In this paper, we defend an Autonomy Only view. We argue that the welfare condition is either otiose on the most plausible account of the autonomy condition, or else is implausibly restrictive, particularly once we account for the broad range of reasons patients cite for desiring PAD, such as "tired of life" cases. Moreover, many of the common objections to an Autonomy Only view fail once we understand the extent of the autonomy condition's requirements-in particular, the importance of one's values for autonomous choices. If our view is correct, then the scope of permissible PAD is broader than is currently accepted in both the philosophical literature and the law, and therefore poses an important challenge to this widely accepted view on justified PAD.