Alexander Pruss's Blog

Years ago, I read a clever argument against physician assisted suicide that held that medical procedures need informed consent, and informed...

If physician assisted suicide is permissible, then it would have been permissible for early Christians facing being tortured to death by th...

Some thinking that to turn off a patient’s ventilator would not be to kill but “to let die”. But it seems obvious that to turn off a spacecr...

I once gave an argument against euthanasia where the controversial center of the argument could be summarized as follows: Euthanasia woul...

One way to look at the difference between the deaths of humans and brute animals is to say that the death of a human typically deprives the ...

(Premise) It is wrong to euthanize a patient who does not give valid consent for euthanasia. (Premise) Valid consent is not th...

Murder is wrong because it harms the victim in a particularly serious way. But what sort of harm does it impose on the victim? Some will ...

Some think that the life of a human being who has permanently and irreversibly lost consciousness has no value. Here are three a...

Compare the metalworker and the swordsmith. The metalworker's profession is defined by a particular technique for achieving h...

Consider this argument: (Premise) It is not professional for a physician to perform a procedure when there is not sufficient scien...

In this post, I am not going to distinguish between a doctor's "helping" a patient kill herself and the doctor...

Derek Humphry wrote, as part of a defense of Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS): The help of a physician [in PAS] is imperative, b...

In an earlier post this week, I argued that if one accepts the Interest Thesis (IT) that what makes a killing of an innocent per...

This post is based on the argument of the previous . I am going to argue for the following (material) conditional: If killing an...

Note: Portions of the argument below sound like I accept consensual euthanasia. I don't: intentionally killing juridically innoc...