Faculty publications - Department of Philosophy
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/104564
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Item The Mohist Dialectics(Oxford University Press, 2020) Fraser, ChrisItem ‘Half in love with easeful Death’: Rational Suicide and the Elderly(2021) Sumner, L.W.If we are lucky, the aging process eventuates in old age. But old age brings its own concerns, including how to manage the inevitable end. This question can be particularly acute for the population often labeled the ‘frail elderly’: those without any single life-threatening medical condition but with a multiplicity of less serious complaints—physical, psychological, and social—which can combine to rob life of all further meaning and encourage the thought that it is ‘time to go’. For them the issue can become whether, and how, to hasten the end. This paper will explore four related questions: (1) whether, and when, suicide might be rational for the elderly; (2) whether it can be ethical for a second party to assist in a rational suicide; (3) whether medical practitioners, in particular, can reasonably be expected to provide this assistance; and (4) whether jurisdictions that permit legal access to a medically-assisted death should expand their eligibility criteria to accommodate those who are ‘tired of life’.Item Advance Requests for Medically-assisted Dying(2021-03-18) Sumner, WayneWhen medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was legalized in Canada in June 2016, the question of allowing decisionally capable persons to make advance requests in anticipation of later incapacity was reserved for further consideration during the mandatory parliamentary review originally scheduled to begin in June 2020 (but since delayed by COVID-19). In its current form the legislation does not permit such requests, since it stipulates that at the time at which the procedure is to be administered the patient must give “express consent” to receiving it. Since express consent presupposes decisional capacity, this requirement rules out administering MAiD to a patient who has lost capacity. Amendments to the legislation passed by Parliament in March 2021 open the door slightly by allowing advance requests by patients after they have been approved for MAiD, if they fear losing capacity before the procedure can be administered. But this provision would apply only to patients whose natural death was deemed to be “reasonably foreseeable”, and would continue to exclude (a) requests made after diagnosis of a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” but in advance of approval for MAiD, and (b) requests made before such a diagnosis. My aim in this paper is twofold: to explore the ethical and legal issues concerning advance requests for MAiD, and to argue for expanding provision for such requests to include both of these further scenarios.Item University Governance and Campus Speech(2021) Sumner, WayneHate speech, understood broadly, is any form of expression intended to arouse hatred or contempt toward members of a particular social group. When university administrators have reason to believe that a planned speaking event on campus may feature hate speech (at least in the eyes of some), how should they respond? In this paper I address this question as it arises for Canadian universities. I argue that, where the regulation of campus speech is concerned, the right course of action for university administrators is nearly always to do absolutely nothing. They will have reason to become actively involved only in order to ensure that a speaking event proceeds safely, or when it threatens to disrupt the functioning of the university, or when it is itself threatened with disruption by protesting groups. In those instances the justification for intervention will be to protect and facilitate speech, not to shut it down.