Fiona Woollard presents an original defence of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, according to which doing harm seems much harder to justify than merely allowing harm. She argues that the Doctrine is best understood as a principle that protects us from harmful imposition, and offers a moderate account of our obligations to offer aid to others.

This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller charts in the United States, and the many headlines devoted to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has assisted dozens of patients to die. The essays address the range of questions involved in this issue pertaining especially to the fields of medical ethics, public policymaking, and social philosophy. The discussions consider the decisions facing medical and public policymakers, how those decisions will affect the elderly and terminally ill, and the medical and legal ramifications for patients in a permanently vegetative state, as well as issues of parent/infant rights. The book is divided into two sections. The first, "Euthanasia and the Termination of Life-Prolonging Treatment" includes an examination of the 1976 Karen Quinlan Supreme Court decision and selections from the 1990 Supreme Court decision in the case of Nancy Cruzan. Featured are articles by law professor George Fletcher and philosophers Michael Tooley, James Rachels, and Bonnie Steinbock, with new articles by Rachels, and Thomas Sullivan. The second section, "Philosophical Considerations," probes more deeply into the theoretical issues raised by the killing/letting die controversy, illustrating exceptionally well the dispute between two rival theories of ethics, consequentialism and deontology. It also includes a corpus of the standard thought on the debate by Jonathan Bennet, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, John Harris, Philipa Foot, Richard Trammell, and N. Ann Davis, and adds articles new to this edition by Bennett, Foot, Warren Quinn, Jeff McMahan, and Judith Lichtenberg.

This book explores whether affluent people in the developed world have stringent responsibilities to help fight poverty abroad.

Doing harm seems much harder to justify than merely allowing harm. If a boulder is rushing towards Bob, you may refuse to save Bob's life by driving your car into the path of the boulder if doing so would cost you your own life. You may not push the boulder towards Bob to save your own life. This principle—the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing—requires defence. Does the distinction between doing and allowing fall apart under scrutiny? When lives are at stake, how can it matter whether harm is done or allowed? Drawing on detailed analysis of the distinction between doing and allowing, Fiona Woollard argues that the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing is best understood as a principle that protects us from harmful imposition. Such protection against imposition is necessary for morality to recognize anything as genuinely belonging to a person, even that person's own body. As morality must recognize each person's body as belonging to her, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing should be accepted. Woollard defends a moderate account of our obligations to aid, tackling arguments by Peter Singer and Peter Unger that we must give most of our money away and arguments from Robert Nozick that obligations to aid are incompatible with self-ownership.

"Reading F.M. Kamm's latest book is like watching a brilliant astronomer map an uncharted galaxy--the meticulousness and the display of mental stamina must inspire awe. There is a kind of beauty in the performance alone. Intricate Ethics is a major event in normative ethical theory by a living master of the subject.... In the end, professional moral philosophers cannot reasonably ignore Intricate Ethics.... Kamm continues to prove herself the most imaginative, detail-oriented deontologist writing in English today... Professor Kamm is in a class by herself."--Jeffrey Brand-Ballard, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "The operative word in this masterful work is 'intricate.' Watching Kamm's mind dissect and reconstruct different cases is like watching a juggler, riding a unicycle, carrying on a conversation, while getting dressed. It is a glorious celebration of what moral philosophy does best, and what one of its most gifted practitioners can do to enlighten our understanding of the most pressing ethical issues of our time. But it is also a rich playground for empirically minded philosophers and psychologists who want to play with the clever class of dilemmas that Kamm has created, dilemmas that will both amuse and torture generations of people."--Marc Hauser is a Harvard College Professor and author of "Moral Minds" "Frances Kamm once again proves herself to be an astonishingly subtle and creative defender of a deontological outlook. Anyone at all interested in normative ethics will find something of value in Intricate Ethics. There are striking and original views on a wide range of topics. And no one--absolutely no one--compares to Kamm when it comes to constructing relevant test cases and carefully assessing our intuitive reactions to them. This is a master at work, at the height of her powers."--Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy, Yale University "Intricate Ethics fully justifies its title. It is as deep, subtle, imaginative, and analytically rigorous as any work in moral philosophy written in a great many years. It is dense with highly original and fertile ideas supported by powerful and ingenious arguments. This book amply confirms Frances Kamm's standing as one of the greatest living philosophers.--Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University "Kamm's virtuosity in hypothesizing cases in defense or refutation of moral principles remains unsurpassed. Intricate Ethics is also a testament to the fruitfulness of this rarefied method of ethics. One might have thought that, having already devoted several hundred path-breaking pages to the topic of nonconsequentialism in her earlier two-volume Morality, Mortality, it would have been impossible to break much new ground in this sequel. Yet what Kamm has to say here on the topics of harming and saving from harm is as novel, arresting, and insightful as ever."--Michael Otsuka, Professor of Philosophy, University College London "Kamm ...is the most sophisticated of the contemporary exponents of "intuitionist" or "nonconsequentialist" ethics...No one else makes such extraordinarily meticulous and penetrating attempts to extract the principles behind our ordinary moral intuitions...I highly recommend it as an inclusive and subtle attempt to work out nonconsequentialism on an intuitionist basis. As a bonus, Intricate Ethics also offers searching analyses of the work of Peter Unger, Peter Singer, Bernard Gert, T.M. Scanlon, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky."--Ingmar Persson, Times Literary Supplement

Most of us believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand of us. We also think that certain types of acts are simply forbidden, even when necessary for promoting the overall good. Here Kagan argues that attempts to defend these sorts of moral limit are inadequate. In thus rejecting two of the most fundamental features of commonsense morality, the book offers a sustained attack on our ordinary moral views.

“Crammed with provocative insights, raw emotion, and heartbreaking dilemmas,” (The New York Times) First, Do No Harm is a powerful examination of how life and death decisions are made at a major metropolitan hospital in Houston, as told through the stories of doctors, patients, families, and hospital administrators facing unthinkable choices. What is life worth? And when is a life worth living? Journalist Lisa Belkin examines how these questions are asked and answered over one dramatic summer at Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas. In an account that is fascinating, revealing, and almost novelistic in its immediacy, Belkin takes us inside a major hospital and introduces us to the people who must make life and death decisions every day. As we walk through the hallways of the hospital we meet a young pediatrician who must decide whether to perform a risky last-ditch surgery on a teenager who has spent most of his fifteen years in a hospital; we watch as new parents battle with doctors over whether to disconnect their fragile, premature twins from the machine that keeps them breathing; we are in the operating room as a poor immigrant, paralyzed from a gunshot in the neck, is asked by doctors whether or not he wishes to stay alive; we witness the worry of a kidney specialist as he decides whether or not to transfer an uninsured baby to the county hospital down the road. We experience critical moments in the lives of these real people as Belkin explores challenging issues and questions involving medical ethics, human suffering, modern technology, legal liability, and financial reality. As medical technology advances, the choices grow more complicated. How far should we go to save a life? Who decides? And who pays?