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Moral Status

Series
Bio-Ethics Bites
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A stone on the beach, we assume, has no moral status. We can kick or hammer the stone, and we have done the stone no harm. Typical adult human beings do have moral status. We shouldn't, without a very good reason, kick a man or woman.
Often, contentious moral issues, such as embryo research, or abortion, or whether to turn off a life-support machine, turn on disagreement about moral status. So the key questions are, who or what has moral status, and why? Jeff McMahan, of Rutgers University, has spent years trying to unravel the answers.

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Designer Babies

The term 'designer baby' is usually used in a pejorative sense - to conjure up some dystopian Brave New World. There are already ways to affect what kind of children you have - most obviously by choosing the partner to have them with.
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Licence
Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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Episode Information

Series
Bio-Ethics Bites
People
Jeff McMahan
Keywords
ethics
philosophy
law
morality
Department: Faculty of Philosophy
Date Added: 31/05/2011
Duration: 00:18:54

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