The authors look closely at the often cited Rule of Double Effect and argue that, in some cases, a physician can legitimately claim to have acted within the Rule's parameters. In other cases, however, physicians can abuse the notion of unintended consequences. The test case they offer concerns palliative care that causes foreseeable death.
A common utilitarian argument in favor of abortion for fetal defects rests on some controversial assumptions about what counts as a life worth living. Yet critics of abortion for fetal defects are also in need of an argument free from controversial assumptions about the future child's quality of life. Christopher Kaczor (in: Kaczor (ed), The ethics of abortion: women's rights, human life, and the question of justice, Routledge, New York, 2011) has devised an analogy that apparently satisfies this condition. On close scrutiny, however, Kaczor's analogy is too weak to debunk the common-morality intuition that at least some abortions for fetal defects are morally permissible. The upshot of this discussion is that, on the moral permissibility of abortions for fetal defects, a case-by-case approach is to be preferred.
Anti-individualism and privileged self-knowledge may be incompatible if the attempt to hold both has the absurd consequence that one could know a priori propositions that are knowable only empirically. This would be so if such an attempt entailed that one could know a priori both the contents of one's own thoughts and the anti-individualistic entailments from those thought-contents to the world. For then one could also come to know a priori (by simple deduction) the empirical conditions entailed by one's thoughts. But I shall argue that there is no construal of 'a priori knowledge' that could be used to raise an incompatibilist objection of this sort.Note first that knowledge of one's own thought-contents would not count as a priori according to the usual criteria for knowledge of this kind. 1 Surely, then, incompatibilists are using this term to refer to some other, stipulatively defined, epistemic property. But could this be, as suggested by McKinsey (1991: 9), the property of being knowable 'just by thinking' or
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