Abstract

This dissertation centers on the extended investigation of three cases which should be of interest to philosophical bioethicists. The first case concerns a physician's killing a patient with end-stage cancer although the patient has demanded that he not be killed; the second concerns a physician's killing a suicidally depressed patient who asks to be killed; and the third concerns killing a healthy father to transplant his heart into a dying son so that the son might live. ;The cases are not posed as "dilemmas" in the sense that there is uncertainty about the moral propriety of the killings. I presuppose that there is a firm, widely-held pretheoretical judgment that killing in each case would be wrong, and that the task for moral philosphy is to discover rational foundations to explicate these judgments. ;I argue on this basis that neither act-utilitarianism in various of its forms nor Brandt's rule-utilitarianism is a tenable moral theory. I argue furthermore that, although it is true that the foundations we seek are in a theory of moral rights, some of the most influential rights theories thus far proposed fare little better than utilitarianism. Beneficiary and claimant theories of rights are explained, and their shortcomings exposed. ;In the end I argue for moral rights grounded in gifts. Seeing human life as gift provides the most adequate explication of the wrongness of killing people in cases such as those investigated. ;On the way to this conclusion there are important ancillary treatments of several issues currently under discussion in bioethics, such as paternalism, treating the body as property, and the killing/letting die distinction