Throughout his British Medical Journal series of 25 articles on medical ethics, Gillon frequently used the Arthur case (which involved a British physician who faced criminal charges for allowing a Down's syndrome newborn to die) to illustrate moral arguments concerning approaches to clinical dilemmas. He returns to the Arthur case in this essay on the obligations of physicians toward all patien...

Progressive advancements in the fields of medicine, oncology and palliative care have seen significant gains in the life expectancy but have also resulted in patients living longer with the burdens of cancer. It is within the sphere of end-of-life care that the role of palliative rehabilitation comes into its own in addressing the effects of increased physical and psychological morbidity that a...

The “self,” or “person” is an intriguing but challenging topic in the social sciences. Relationships and interactions among self/person, body, mind, and sociality are universal cultural preoccupations, although these categories are not delineated in identical ways across cultures, or even within the same culture, and they do not remain the same over time. Local concepts of personhood or “self” ...

Questioning what it means to be human is perennial, going back millennia. The Psalm often quoted is, “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:4, NIV). It is an analytical as well as an existential question, with implications for understanding not only what we are (descriptively) but also what we are to become (ethically) in light of our purpose...

This Article interprets the debate about abortion and the debate about embryonic research and therapeutic cloning as aspects of a larger history of ideas. The Article suggests that embryos increasingly stand for different truths in discourse about abortion on the one-hand and about embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning on the other. More specifically, the Article suggests that th...

Synopsis – The prospect of midwifery legislation in the Canadian Province, Ontario, is investigated in light of other reproductive legislation, especially that concerning new reproductive technologies. The idea that midwifery symbolizes a woman-centered approach to birth is criticized and related to a number of reproductive issues in the hope that the lack of concern for and control by women ca...

The President's Council on Bioethics has addressed the moral status of human preembryos in its reports on stem cell research and human therapeutic cloning. Although the Council has been criticized for being hand-picked to favor the right-to-life viewpoint concerning human preembryos, it has embraced the idea that the right-to-life position should be defended in secular terms. This is an importa...

The prominence of neuroscience in the public sphere has escalated in recent years, provoking questions about how the public engages with neuroscientific ideas. Commentaries on neuroscience's role in society often present it as having revolutionary implications, fundamentally overturning established beliefs about personhood. The purpose of this article is to collate and review the extant empiric...

Abstract According to Kant’s ethics, at least on one common interpretation, persons have a special worth or dignity that demands respect. But personhood is not coextensive with human life; for example, individuals can live in severe dementia after losing the capacities constitutive of personhood. Some philosophers, including David Velleman and Dennis Cooley, suggested living loss their might of...

This essay integrates queer, anti-Blackness, Indigenous, and psychoanalytic theories of temporality to explore fetal personhood. It is argued that personhood reflects a form temporally-based affect regulation in which the fetus represents promise vulnerability tenuous future, rendering uterus only environment lawmakers seem protect. In face climate crisis, displacing annihilation anxieties onto...