Alexander Pruss's Blog

Drawings: Adobe stock; Photos: elephant and human

Start with this: Dignity is an essential property of anything that has it. Necessarily, something has dignity if and only if it is a pers...

At some point in pregnancy it is widely acknowledged that fetuses start to feel pain. Estimates of this point vary from around seven to thi...

There are two main kinds of arguments against abortion: Those based on the idea that we begin existing at conception and those based on the...

Unless something like the Bohmian interpretation or a spatial collapse theory is right, quantum mechanics gives us good reason to think that...

Love (of the relevant sort) is appropriately only a relation towards a person. Someone appropriately has an unconditional love for another...

We owe our children at least a normal degree of effor for their welfare. For instance, we owe it to them to provide food, water, education a...

I just got permission from the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly to post my 2006 paper on fetal tissue and vaccines. It is here .

A number of Catholic authorities have made a moral distinction between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, on the one hand, and the AstraZeneca...

It is traditional Christian teaching, as far back as we can trace it, that: Abortion is always wrong. Nonetheless, historically many Chr...

According to Rawlsians, it is wrong to make decisions in the public arena based on controversial comprehensive doctrines. Here is a counter...

After listening to a talk by Christopher Kaczor, and the ensuing discussion, I want to offer a defense of a moderate position on the state n...

At a recent pro-life event that I participated in, the question was asked the panel how to convince a pastor that one’s church should suppor...

Until recently, I assumed everyone agreed to something like this principle: If performing an action constitutes you as a bad person, the a...

I’ve been thinking about Thomson’s Violinist case. I should say about that case that it seems utterly obvious to me that in the case where ...

A fellow philosopher just sent me this very interesting quote from an article in a reputable medical journal: [I]f it was conclusively sho...

Suppose that a contraceptive has the following properties: Fewer than 1% of users have a pregnancy annually. At least 5% of users annuall...

Without having done any scientific survey, I get the impression that philosophical pro-choicers tend to agree with philosophical pro-li...

Suppose Belgium is being attacked by a vicious enemy who is particularly targetting civilians—especially children—in a terroristi...

No one is saved who does not have a love for God in this life. If materialism is true, early human embryos do not have a love for God...