Christopher Cowley 1 has recently put forward three arguments against the legal accommodation of a general practitioner’s conscientious objection to abortion referrals. i He claims that the adoption of these arguments does not undermine a more general right to CO to involvement in abortion. I argue that Cowley is seriously mistaken. His three arguments, especially the second and third, proceed on a path directed towards the outright rejection of a right to CO in healthcare contexts. A common problem with Cowley’s (...) three arguments is that they overlook the peremptory significance for CO analysis of both the internal, deliberating perspective of those with a CO and the good of moral integrity. This paper supports the view that either there are strong prima facie grounds for holding that a right to CO extends in principle to the issue of referrals or the claim of a general right to CO is easily assailable. (shrink)

An intriguing though little noticed trend within moral theology over the last half century or so is the move towards re-conceptualising moral norms previously considered mandatory into ideals. The ideal-normative turn has been taken by official Catholic and Anglican ecclesial documents, in both cases as regards the closely related matters of marital permanence and extra/post-marital unions. Yet the turn has occurred with little or no scrutiny of the distinction at its heart, that between ideal and mandatory norms. This article applies (...) the distinction to an analysis of New Testament moral normativity, with particular focus on teachings on marriage. Through this examination core elements of New Testament normativity are clarified and the credibility of the ideal-normative turn as it pertains to marital permanence is thereby challenged. (shrink)

Slippery slope argumentation features prominently in debates over assisted suicide. The jurisdiction of Oregon features prominently too, especially as regards parliamentary scrutiny of assisted suicide proposals. This paper examines Oregon’s public data (including certain official pronouncements) on assisted suicide in light of the two basic versions of the slippery slope argument, the empirical and moral-logical versions. Oregon’s data evidences some normatively interesting shifts in its assisted suicide practice which in turn prompts consideration of two elements of moral-logical slippage that are (...) not widely discussed. One is slippage from an initial autonomy-based public justification for assisted suicide which does not include burden-based concerns within its operative account of voluntariness to an evolved public justification that does. The other is an expansion of a terminal illness ground to include chronic illnesses effectively rendered terminal via a refusal of treatment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT“Ideals” are often invoked in contemporary theological discussion of moral norms, especially but not exclusively regarding norms of marriage/sex ethics. Seemingly absent from the discussion, however, is focused critical analysis of the distinction between ideal and mandatory normativity. Attempting to address this oversight, the following paper begins by highlighting a serious inconsistency between recent Catholic magisterial documents. It is proposed that the inconsistency is largely due to understanding the respective norms—relating to marriage and euthanasia—in divergent ways: per the very different (...) orders of ideal and mandatory normativity. After a philosophical clarification of the distinguishing features of ideal and mandatory normativity, one particularly indebted to the work of Joseph Raz, the paper illustrates how divergence between them operates to create the aforementioned magisterial inconsistency. This inconsistency is paralleled by neglect of—and consequent incoherence around—the ideal-mandatory norm distinction within wider moral theology. The last section considers how the distinction bears upon and helps illuminate the relationship between principles, rules, and rules' exceptions. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal Jonathan Pugh critiques the idea of intermediate ‘moral respect’ which some say is owed to embryos. This concept is inherent within the ‘principle of proportionality’, the principle that destructive research on embryos is permissable only if the research serves an important purpose. Pugh poses two specific questions to proponents of the idea of intermediate moral respect. This article argues that while the questions posed by Pugh are certainly pertinent to the debate, the hypothetical (...) responses he suggests to these questions do not quite get to the core of what is troublesome about the concept. The article suggests alternative responses to Pugh's questions in order to focus attention on more fundamental problems facing the idea of intermediate moral respect, while also pointing to how the intermediate moral respect proponent might best develop these responses. It goes on to argue that these hypothetical responses fail to answer convincingly the questions posed. More specifically, this article challenges two possible justifications for the distinct idea of intermediate moral respect, namely the argument from potentiality and an argument from the proportionality of fundamental moral status. The article also raises a dilemma inherent in the application of the principle of proportionality to cases involving beings to which intermediate moral respect is owed even where it is allowed, ex hypothesi, that both the category of intermediate moral respect and the general proportionality reasoning underpinning the principle of proportionality are basically cogent. This article thus develops and adds to the challenge laid down by Pugh to proponents of the idea of intermediate moral respect. (shrink)

The contemporary debate in phenomenology concerning the 'theological turn' raises the issue of the relationship between faith and reason. One of the foremost statements on the theological turn, that of Dominique Janicaud, is an affirmation of the faith—reason dichotomy in the context of phenomenology, specifically in relation to how thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas have abused the phenomenological project of its founder, Edmund Husserl. This article challenges the faith—reason dichotomy and shows that the role of faith in Levinas need not mark (...) him out as a deviant from Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)