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Liberal Rights and the Ethics of Homicide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Conrad G. Brunk
Affiliation:
Conrad Grebel College, University of Waterloo

Extract

According to its author, Engineered Death is not a book about the morality of homicide but about intellectual self-consistency—in particular about the self-consistency of the “liberal” view of homicide. The “liberal” view is defined by Woods as the view that murder is morally wrong because, and only because, it is a violation of rights. He tells us that he is concerned to defend neither liberalism in general nor its notion of individual rights in particular, but only to work out the implications of these assumptions for the problems of abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and senecide. It is only in this sense that Woods' disclaimer about the non-ethical nature of his book can be taken seriously. In every other respect it is a treatise on ethics. It puts forward and defends moral theses that are independent of, and in some cases even contrary to, traditional ethical liberalism.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1983

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References

1 Woods, John, Engineered Death: Abortion, Suicide, Euthanasia and Senecide (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1978), pp. xiii, 167, $6.00.Google Scholar