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What makes killing wrong?
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  • Published on:
    Dead people ARE totally and irreversibly disabled people

    I would argue that a totally and irreversibly disabled person HAS ceased to exist. Personhood, medically, exists in the brain. If the brain has been made permanently incapable of sustaining coherent thought or experience, it no longer belongs to a person. This view seems to be widely held by relatives of those with Alzheimer's disease, who speak very vividly of the gradual loss the person they once knew and loved. Many p...

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    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.
  • Published on:
    What's wrong about "what makes killing wrong?"

    In a recent article by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin G. Miller, the argument is made that ability should be the metric of value among human life and thus the determining factor on what constitutes moral harm when killing. Someone who has permanently lost all abilities no longer has value and killing them would not only fail to add more harm and it would also fail to take away any more value.

    In the author...

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    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.
  • Published on:
    Dead people are not totally and irreversibly disabled people

    Dear sir

    I believe all the commentaries on the piece by Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller miss a really fundamental problem with their account of the wrongness of killing. Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller claim that what makes killing wrong is that it totally and irreversibly disables the person killed. They then infer from this that, if someone is universally and irreversibly disabled, they cannot be wronged if they ar...

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    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.