James Rachels

1941-2003 · American · Ethics, Bioethics, Applied Ethics, Animal Ethics, Metaethics

There is a deep difference between having a life and merely being alive.

When James Rachels published Active and Passive Euthanasia in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1975, he wasn't addressing philosophers — he was addressing doctors who assumed letting a patient die was always morally cleaner than killing one. His argument: if a man drowns his cousin in the bathtub and another stands by while the child drowns, both with the same motive, the bare difference between killing and letting die makes no moral difference. If passive euthanasia is permissible, active euthanasia must be too.

Topics James Rachels addresses

• the Minimum Conception of Morality
• reason and impartiality in ethics
• the Equivalence Thesis
• active and passive euthanasia
• the Bare Difference Argument
• the Smith and Jones drowning thought experiment
• killing and letting die
• biographical life vs biological life
• having a life vs being alive
• moral individualism
• the critique of speciesism
• the Argument from Marginal Cases
• the moral implications of Darwinism
• human dignity as discredited metaphysical idea
• the moral argument for vegetarianism
• the Cultural Differences Argument as invalid
• the critique of cultural relativism
• the rejection of subjectivism in ethics
• Divine Command Theory critique
• ethical egoism refutation
• the Two Arguments Against Ethical Egoism
• psychological egoism vs ethical egoism
• Multiple-Strategies Utilitarianism
• desert-based reasoning in utilitarianism

Converse with James Rachels on Simposeum. Every reply is grounded in James Rachels's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.