Jeff McMahan - Podsumowanie książki "The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life"

"There are important moral problems for which we ought not to expect reliable guidance from our untutored moral intuitions. Conspicuous among these are problems involving the killing of beings whose metaphysical or moral status is deeply uncertain or controversial—beings such as human embryos and foetuses, new-born infants, anencephalic infants, human beings that are by nature radically cognitively impaired, human beings who have become profoundly demented or irreversibly comatose, and animals, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, with comparatively high cognitive capacities. There is considerable divergence of intuition about such beings both within and across different societies and many people find, on reflection, that their own intuitions about such beings are weak, unstable, or even conflicting. To understand the morality of killing such beings, or of allowing them to die, we therefore need help from both metaphysics and ethical theory..."...