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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.
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Politics
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Ethics & Life’s Ending: An Exchange
Ethics & Life’s Ending: An Exchange by Robert D. Orr & Gilbert Meilander. Published in the August/September issue of First Things.
Robert Orr, MD, Director of Ethics for Fletcher Allen Health Care and Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, states that:
The moral debate about the use or non-use of feeding tubes hinges on three important considerations: the distinction between what in the past was called “ordinary” and “extraordinary” treatments; the important social symbolism of feeding; and a distinction between withholding and withdrawing treatments.
Gilbert Meilaender, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, disagrees:
“Choosing life” does not mean doing whatever is needed to stay alive as long as possible. But choosing life clearly means never aiming at another’s death—even if only by withholding treatment. I am not persuaded that Dr. Orr has fully grasped or delineated what it means to choose life in the difficult circumstances he discusses.
Read the whole discussion here.
Capital Punishment: The Case for Justice
J. Budziszewski’s article in First Things is finally online. Good stuff.
So weighty is the duty of justice that it raises the question whether mercy is permissible at all. By definition, mercy is punishing the criminal less than he deserves, and it does not seem clear at first why not going far enough is any better than going too far. We say that both cowardice and rashness miss the mark of courage, and that both stinginess and prodigality miss the mark of generosity; why do we not say that both mercy and harshness miss the mark of justice? Making matters yet more difficult, the argument to abolish capital punishment is an argument to categorically extend clemency to all those whose crimes are of the sort that would be requitable by death.
Reading
- BlogsForDummies :)
Web resources
- Arts & Letters Daily
- Ravi Zacharias
- Southern Adventist University
- The SAU Biology Deptartment - where I work with a bunch of very neat people.
- Venezuelan news—FROM Venezuela