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Potentiality

Metaphysical and Bioethical Dimensions

edited by John P. Lizza

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Classic articles and newly commissioned chapters analyze the nature of potentiality in bioethics.

What is the moral status of humans lacking the potential for consciousness? The concept of potentiality often tips the scales in life-and-death medical decisions. Some argue that all human embryos have the potential to develop characteristics—such as consciousness, intellect, and will—that we normally associate with personhood. Individuals with total brain failure or in a persistent vegetative state are thought to lack the potential for consciousness or any other mental function. Or do they?

In Pote...

Classic articles and newly commissioned chapters analyze the nature of potentiality in bioethics.

What is the moral status of humans lacking the potential for consciousness? The concept of potentiality often tips the scales in life-and-death medical decisions. Some argue that all human embryos have the potential to develop characteristics—such as consciousness, intellect, and will—that we normally associate with personhood. Individuals with total brain failure or in a persistent vegetative state are thought to lack the potential for consciousness or any other mental function. Or do they?

In Potentiality John Lizza gathers classic articles alongside newly commissioned chapters from leading thinkers who analyze the nature of potentiality in bioethics, a concept central to a number of important debates. The contributors illustrate how considerations of potentiality and potential persons complicate the analysis of the moral consideration of persons at the beginning and end of life. A number of works explicitly uncover the Aristotelian background of the concept, while others explore philosophical issues about persons, dispositions, and possibility. The common assumption that potentiality is intrinsic to whatever has the potentiality is challenged by a relational view of persons, an extrinsic account of dispositions, and attention to how extrinsic factors affect realistic possibilities.

Although potentiality has figured prominently in bioethical literature, it has not received a great deal of logical, semantic, and metaphysical analysis in contemporary philosophical literature. This collection will bring these thorny philosophical issues to the fore.

Incorporating cutting-edge research on the topic of potentiality, this thought-provoking collection will interest bioethicists, philosophers, health care professionals, attorneys engaged in medical and health issues, and hospital and governmental committees who advise on policy and law concerning issues at the beginning and end of life.

Reviews

Reviews

This book is a very precious work that contributes vigorously to philosophical research.

I highly recommend this collection to anyone interested in the potentiality debate at the margins of life’s beginnings and endings.

In sum, both for the richness of its content and for the challenging questions it raises, this volume offers an enjoyable reading about potentiality and its implications in debates concerning the beginning and end of life.

Lizza is exactly right about the importance of potentiality in bioethical debates about the status of forms of early human life and disputes about the understanding of death. His collection of essays examines reproduction, maternal-fetal relationship, embryo research, stem cell harvesting, organ procurement, and other end-of-life discussions. This book will help readers—scholars, medical practitioners, and the public—better understand and discuss these bioethical dilemmas.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x
9.25
Pages
288
ISBN
9781421411743
Illustration Description
1 line drawing
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part I: The Nature of Potentiality
1. Aristotle's Theory of Potentiality
2. Dispositions and Potentialities
3. The Paradoxes of Potentiality
4. Physical Possibility and

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part I: The Nature of Potentiality
1. Aristotle's Theory of Potentiality
2. Dispositions and Potentialities
3. The Paradoxes of Potentiality
4. Physical Possibility and Potentiality in Ethics
5. Abortion: Listening to the Middle
Part II: Potentiality at the Beginning of Life
6. Persons with Potential
7. The Moral Status of Stem Cells
8. Potential
9. Abortion and the Margins of Personhood
10. Revisiting the Argument from Fetal Potential
Part III: Potentiality at the End of Life
11. Are DCD Doners Dead?
12. The Irreversibility of Death: Metaphysical, Physiological, Medical or Ethical?
13. On the Ethical Relevance of Active versus Passive Potentiality

List of Contributors
Index

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

John P. Lizza, Ph.D.

John P. Lizza is a professor and the chair of the Department of Philosophy at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania.