Explore how human rights instruments have audiences and constituencies narrower than humanity itself. The constituency of human rights instruments-those for whom the instruments speak-are the worst ...off internationally with respect to different rights. The audience of human rights instruments-those whom the instruments address-are again narrower than humanity. Audience and constituency, but especially constituency, are more important to the justification of human rights than the domain of human rights instruments-humanity itself. The notions of the worst off in a jurisdiction and the Worst Off internationally require empirical measures that are partially sketched. Reprinted by permission of Carfax Publishing, Taylor & Francis Ltd.
As medical technology advances and severely injured or ill people can be kept alive and functioning long beyond what was previously medically possible, the debate surrounding the ethics of ...end-of-life care and quality-of-life issues has grown more urgent.In this lucid and vigorous new book, Craig Paterson discusses assisted suicide and euthanasia from a fully fledged but non-dogmatic secular natural law perspective. He rehabilitates and revitalises the natural law approach to moral reasoning by developing a pluralistic account of just why we are required by practical rationality to respect and not violate key demands generated by the primary goods of persons, especially human life.Important issues that shape the moral quality of an action are explained and analysed: intention/foresight; action/omission; action/consequences; killing/letting die; innocence/non-innocence; and, person/non-person. Paterson defends the central normative proposition that 'it is always a serious moral wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human person, whether self or another, notwithstanding any further appeal to consequences or motive'.
Hobbes often wrote as if his particular contribution to political philosophy was to make the requirements of justice precise and authoritative for both subjects ans sovereigns. This makes it appear ...as if his theory of justice and his arguments from justice for mass obedience to the sovereign are the centerpiece of his political philosophy.
Most academic papers on ethics in pandemics concentrate on the duties of healthcare professionals. This paper will consider non-professional healthcare workers: do they have a moral obligation to ...work during an influenza pandemic? If so, is this an obligation that outweighs others they might have, e.g., as parents, and should such an obligation be backed up by the coercive power of law? This paper considers whether non-professional healthcare workers—porters, domestic service workers, catering staff, clerks, IT support workers, etc.—have an obligation to work during an influenza pandemic. It uses data collected as part of a study looking at the attitudes of healthcare workers to working during a pandemic to suggest the philosophical arguments explored. These include: being in a position to do good, the ethics of work, competing obligations to family members and in particular to children and the obligations of citizens in a state of national emergency. We also look at whether compulsory measures are justified to support a national health service during a health emergency. We conclude that even if they are, compulsion should not be restricted to non-professionals who happen to be working in the health service at the time. Rather, compulsion involving a larger pool of people with the relevant skills and abilities is more equitable.
In welfare states, no typical user of health care services is only a patient; and no typical provider of these services is simply a doctor, nurse or paramedic. Occupiers of these roles also have ...distinctive relations and responsibilities--as citizens--to medical services, responsibilities that are widely acknowledged by those who live in welfare states. Outside welfare states, this fusion of civic consciousness with involvement in health care is less pronounced or missing altogether. But the globalization of a very comprehensive understanding of human rights, including rights to state-provided health care, will make welfare state thinking--for better or worse--more of an orthodoxy worldwide than it is now. Medical ethics needs to reflect this.
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