Culture of Death
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Wesley J. Smith. Culture of Death
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OTHER BOOKS BY WESLEY J. SMITH
The Lawyer Book: A Nuts and Bolts Guide to Client Survival
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The person/nonperson moral distinction is generally accepted throughout bioethics and increasingly applied to animals, as Singer has advocated. Writing in the influential Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Institute of Medicine, Law, and Bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, defines a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence,” which he opines could include people, animals, extraterrestrials, and machines but does not include some humans, including infants “during the neonatal period.” To Harris, only the lives of persons are morally important. It is not wrong to kill nonpersons or fail to save their lives:
[T]o kill or to fail to sustain the life of a person is to deprive that individual of something that they value. On the other hand, to kill or to fail to sustain the life of a nonperson, in that it cannot deprive that individual of anything that he, she, or it could conceivably value, does that individual no harm. It takes from such individuals nothing that they would prefer not to have taken from them. . . . Nonpersons and potential persons cannot be wronged in this way [killing them against their will] because death would not deprive them of anything they can value. If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed.55
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