Human Dignity and Bioethics

500 | Daniel P. Sulmasy, O.F.M.
The theory of intrinsic value outlined in this essay, however, following Holmes
Rolston III, Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988),
aligns with the views of Kant, Brentano, Broad, Ross, and others, that whatever is
intrinsically good is worthy of being valued in itself.
17
See Sulmasy, “Death, Dignity, and the Theory of Value.”
18
Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 116.
19
Credit for initiation of the discussion of natural kinds is usually given to Saul
Kripke, in his two essays, “Identity and Necessity,” in Identity and Individuation
ed. Milton K. Munitz (New York: New York University Press, 1971), pp. 135-164,
and “Naming and Necessity,” in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Gilbert Harman
and Donald Davidson (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1972), pp. 253-355.
For a good contemporary approach to the concept of natural kinds, see David
Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1980), pp. 77-101, and his Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
20
Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, p. 169.
21
Tom L. Beauchamp, Philosophical Ethics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), pp.
5-21.
22
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095b, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Indiana:
Hackett, 1985), p. 7.
23
H. Tristram Englehardt, Jr., The Foundations of Bioethics (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 213.
24
Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983).
25
Raymond G. Frey, “Pain, Vivisection, and the Value of Life,” Journal of Medical
Ethics 31 (2005): 202-204.
26
Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Ak 421, p. 30.
27
Richard M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Methods, and Point (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 107-116.
28
Thomas F. Hack, et al., “Defining Dignity in Terminally Ill Cancer Patients: A
Factor-analytic Approach,” Psychooncology 13 (2004): 700-708.
29
Garth Baker-Fletcher, Somebodyness: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Theory of
Dignity, Harvard Dissertations in Divinity, No. 31 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress
Press, 1993), p. 23.
30
J. David Velleman, “A Right to Self-Termination?” Ethics 109 (1999): 605-628.
31
Daniel P. Sulmasy, “Dignity, Rights, Health Care, and Human Flourishing,” in
Human Rights and Health Care, ed. G. Diaz Pintos and David N. Weisstub (Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Springer, in press 2007).
32
Daniel P. Sulmasy, “Diseases and Natural Kinds,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics
26 (2005): 487-513.
33
Harriet McBryde Johnson, “Unspeakable Conversations,” New York Times Sunday
Magazine, February 16, 2003, p. 50. The philosopher was Peter Singer.
34
Judith Jarvis Thompson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs
1 (1971): 47-66.