This blog’s Matthew Flannagan has had his paper “Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique” accepted for the 65th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (“ETS”). The abstract for Matt’s paper is as follows: Abstract “Defenders of the permissibility of feticide commonly argue that killing an organism is not homicide unless the organism’s brain has […]
Entries Tagged as 'Sentience'
Matt to speak at the 2013 Evangelical Theological Society in Baltimore on Feticide
September 19th, 2013 3 Comments
Tags: Abortion · Baltimore · David Boonin · ETS · Evangelical Theological Society · Feticide · Sentience
Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique Part II
July 16th, 2009 Comments Off on Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique Part II
In Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique Part I, I noted that a defender of the permissibility of feticide, who does not also want to endorse infanticide and who defends the sentience criterion, must “identify a reason for holding that the potential of a human brain is morally relevant after” the fetus acquires […]
Tags: Abortion · David Boonin · Don Marquis · Ethics and Medicine · Feticide · Sentience
Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique Part I
July 15th, 2009 3 Comments
This two-part series was originally published as: Matthew Flannagan “Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique” Ethics and Medicine – An International Journal of Bioethics Vol 25:2 (Summer 2009) 95-106. It is reproduced on this blog with permission. Abstract Defenders of the permissibility of feticide commonly argue that killing an organism is not homicide […]
Tags: Abortion · David Boonin · Don Marquis · Ethics and Medicine · Feticide · Sentience
Sentience Part 2
November 2nd, 2008 2 Comments
Following on from Sentience Part 1, I will now address the conclusion of Bonnie Steinbock’s argument. Steinbock’s Conclusion Similar ambiguities affect Steinbock’s conclusion. Steinbock asserts that for killing an individual to be unlawful homicide, the individual must be sentient. However, this is ambiguous; as Don Marquis points out, this could mean that the individual will […]
Tags: Abortion · Bonnie Steinbock · Don Marquis · Feticide · Sentience
Sentience Part 1
November 1st, 2008 Comments Off on Sentience Part 1
Following on from my series on the illiberality of Abortion, discussion in the comments section turned to the issue of sentience. Commenters asked whether perhaps sentience is the property that a newborn possesses and a fetus does not that warrants such unequal application of the non-initiation of force principle by liberals. Is sentience the property […]
Tags: Abortion · Bonnie Steinbock · Feticide · Harry Gensler · Michael Tooley · Sentience
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
