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Deliberating on Death1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

L. W. Sumner
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

As a distinct academic subdiscipline medical ethics is only about fifteen years old, but during that brief lifespan it has managed to generate a literature so vast that only specialists and speedreaders can now hope to keep up with more than a small fraction of it. When a literature has achieved this density new contributions must bear the burden of showing that they advance the existing state of the art. Eike-Henner W. Kluge's book joins a well-established continuing debate on the morality of euthanasia. Unfortunately, however, it fails to add much of importance to that debate.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1984

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References

2 Throughout the book Kluge follows the annoying practice of using masculine nouns and pronouns to refer to persons of both genders. Surely by now we should all know better.

3 For reasons which remain unexplained, Kluge reverses the meanings commonly assigned in the literature to involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia. This practice produces the somewhat odd result that disconnecting the life support system of an irreversibly comatose patient counts as involuntary euthanasia.