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A time to kill: Ronald Dworkin and the ethics of euthanasia

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References

  1. SeeRodriguez v.British Columbia (Attorney General) (1993) 107 D.L.R. (4th) 342;Airedale NHS Trust v.Bland [1993] 2 W.L.R. 316; andCruzan v.Director Missouri Department of Health (1990) 110 Supreme Court Reports 2841.

  2. Increasingly, especially in the lower courts, our judges lack any significant education in moral philosophy. The leading Canadian political philosopher, the late George Grant, cautioned that “When society puts power into the hands of the courts, they had better be educated ... The more the justices quote philosophy or religious tradition the less they give the sense they understand what they are dealing with.” (“The Triumph of the Will”, inA Time to Choose Life: Women, Abortion and Human Rights, ed. Ian Gentles (Stoddart: Toronto, 1990), 9-18, endnote 3 at p.213, as cited in Iain Benson, “Medical and Legal Ethics: Objective Truth and Subjective Schooling”,Focus 15/1 (1994), 12–23).

  3. Rodriguez, supra n.1, SeeRodriguez v.British Columbia (Attorney General) (1993) 107 D.L.R. (4th) 342;Airedale NHS Trust v.Bland [1993] 2 W.L.R. 316; andCruzan v.Director Missouri Department of Health (1990) 110 Supreme Court Reports 2841. at 389.

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  8. I do not provide any defence of natural law theory here, and I will attempt only a brief summary of some key concepts. By “natural law theory” I mean the particular restatement developed largely by John Finnis and Germain Grisez. References to works by Finnis, Grisez, Robert George and others should point the reader towards a satisfactory exposition and defence of this tradition.

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Miller, B.W. A time to kill: Ronald Dworkin and the ethics of euthanasia. Res Publica 2, 31–61 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02335709

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