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Jeff McMahan

Publications and source records attributed to Jeff McMahan.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

The morality of screening for disability.

Many people object to preimplantation or prenatal screening for disability on the grounds that it is discriminatory, has pernicious effects on the lives of existing disabled people, expresses a hurtful view of disabled people, and reduces human diversity. I argue that if these objections are held to be strong enough to show that screening is wrong, they must also imply the permissibility of causing oneself to have a disabled rather than a non-disabled child. Indeed, those who object to screening on these grounds and also claim that it is not worse to be disabled than not to be, seem to be committed to accepting the permissibility of deliberately causing disabling prenatal injury, even for frivolous reasons. If we cannot accept these implications, we cannot accept that the objections to screening show that it is wrong.

Persons with Disabilities↗
PubMed1995

The metaphysics of brain death.

The dominant conception of brain death as the death of the whole brain constitutes an unstable compromise between the view that a person ceases to exist when she irreversibly loses the capacity for consciousness and the view that a human organism dies only when it ceases to function in an integrated way. I argue that no single criterion of death captures the importance we attribute both to the loss of the capacity for consciousness and to the loss of functioning of the organism as a whole. This is because the person or self is one thing and the human organism is another. We require a separate account of death for each. Only if we systematically distinguish between persons and human organisms will we be able to provide plausible accounts both of the conditions of our ceasing to exist and of when it is that we begin to exist. This paper, in short, argues for a form of mind-body dualism and draws out some of its implications for various practical moral problems.

Beginning of Human Life↗
PubMed1993

Killing, letting die, and withdrawing aid.

One of the aims of this article is to contribute to the identification of the empirical criteria governing the use of the concepts of killing and letting die. I will not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the concepts but will limit the inquiry to certain problematic cases -- namely, cases involving the removal or withdrawal of life-supporting aid or protection. The analysis of these cases will, however, shed light on the criteria for distinguishing killing and letting die in other cases as well. My overall aims in the article are partly constructive and partly skeptical. I hope to advance our understanding of the nature of the distinction between killing and letting die. This, I believe, will enable us to defend the moral relevance of the distinction against certain objections -- in particular, objections that claim that the distinction fails to coincide with commonsense moral intuitions. Yet I will suggest that, as we get clearer about the nature of the distinction and the sources of its intuitive appeal, it may seem that the intuitions it supports are not so well grounded as one could wish.

Abortion, Induced↗