Further Developments on Previous Symposia the Rhetoric of Neutrality and the Philosophers’ Brief: a Critique of the Amicus Brief of Six Moral Philosophers in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill

In an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court in the companion assisted suicide cases of Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, and Judith Jarvis Thomson describe themselves as “six moral and political philosophers who differ on many issues of public morality and policy.” Perhaps a distinction exists between Rawls’s veil of ignorance and Nagel’s higher order impartiality, but it is hard to imagine what the word “differ” might mean for these philosophers who are all engaged in the same liberal political discourse regarding contractarian democracy and all teach at elite American universities. Include a communitarian such as Michael Sandel, a Catholic like Alasdair MacIntyre, an evangelical Christian such as David Smolin, or a pragmatist like Richard Rorty and then one could arguably have a group that “differ[s] on many issues of public morality and policy” because such a group would differ on the very paradigm from which its members approached “public morality and policy.” Since its first medical symposium in 1939, Law and Contemporary Problems has sustained an analysis of questions pressing on the intersection of law and medicine. At other times, Law and Contemporary Problems has addressed the challenges of religion in public life and the legal questions raised by old age.