A Heinous Act

Berkich, Don

doi:10.1080/05568640903420921

Cited by 18 publications

References 8 publications

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Beyond Infanticide: How Psychological Accounts of Persons Can Justify Harming Infants

Cooper

Blackshaw²,

Miller

2018

The New Bioethics

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It is commonly argued that a serious right to life is grounded only in actual, relatively advanced psychological capacities a being has acquired. The moral permissibility of abortion is frequently argued for on these grounds. Increasingly it is being argued that such accounts also entail the permissibility of infanticide, with several proponents of these theories accepting this consequence. We show, however, that these accounts imply the permissibility of even more unpalatable acts than infanticide performed on infants: organ harvesting, live experimentation, sexual interference, and discriminatory killing. The stronger intuitions against the permissibility of these 'pre-personal acts' allow us to re-establish a comprehensive and persuasive reductio against psychological accounts of persons.

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Beyond Infanticide: How Psychological Accounts of Persons Can Justify Harming Infants

Cooper

Blackshaw²,

Miller

2018

The New Bioethics

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Sexual Misconduct on a Scale: Gravity, Coercion, and Consent

Dougherty¹

2021

Ethics

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Consent under Duress

Dougherty

2024

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Consent can make actions morally permissible. But consent can lose its moral force when it is given under duress. Understanding how this happens requires answering the question of which types of duress undermine consent. Uncontroversially, severe coercion, like threats of violence, can prevent consent from creating moral permissions. But what about minor duress? Duress from natural causes? Duress from social norms? Duress that is merely apparent to the consent-giver with no objective basis in reality? To answer these questions, Consent under Duress defends an account that follows two key approaches. First, it adopts an expansive approach that broadens the class of misconduct that is constituted by acting on someone’s consent that is given under duress. Second, it adopts a scalar approach that allows that consent can be invalidated to varying degrees, which in turn can track the degrees of the severity of the duress to which the consent-giver is subject. The expansive and scalar approaches work in tandem. Once there is an expansion of the aforementioned class of misconduct, additional theoretical resources are needed to draw moral distinctions within this heterogeneous class. By providing these resources, the scalar approach supplements the expansive approach. Meanwhile, once it is recognized that consent can be partially invalidated by minor duress, it is necessary to expand the class of what constitutes misconduct that is constituted by acting on someone’s consent that is given under duress. By arguing independently for these mutually reinforcing approaches, Consent Under Duress offers a robust defense of their combination.

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A Heinous Act

Cited by 18 publications

References 8 publications

Beyond Infanticide: How Psychological Accounts of Persons Can Justify Harming Infants

Beyond Infanticide: How Psychological Accounts of Persons Can Justify Harming Infants

Sexual Misconduct on a Scale: Gravity, Coercion, and Consent

Consent under Duress

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