High-Risk Religion

Journal ArticleAmong some of the more colorful groups on the American religious spectrum, the religious faith of believers seems to involve a willingness to take substantial physical risks"risks to health, to physical functioning, even the risk of death. These groups include several in which the risks a believer takes are indirect (as in refusing blood transfusions or in refusing all medical treatment), and a few in which the risks are immediate and direct (for instance, in handling live poisonous snakes). We may think of these practices as extraordinary tests of religious commitment, or we may think of this willingness to risk death as a demonstration of the extraordinary value religious goals can have for believers. Indeed, willingness to risk death for religious reasons is often extolled as the highest test of faith. But I also think that the willingness o f the members of religious groups to risk death reveals a set of disturbing moral issues, issues concerning the ways in which religious groups "bring it about" that their adherents are willing to take such risks. In what follows, I want to take a careful look at the influence of religious groups on their adherents' choices, focusing on high-risk decision making which can result in death. To address these issues is not to suggest that a religious believer's willingness to risk death may not be sincere and devout, but rather to cast a morally skeptical eye on the way in which these sincere, devout beliefs are engendered by the religious institutions within which they arise

(Re)Moralizing the suicide debate

Contemporary approaches to the study of suicide tend to examine suicide as a medical or public health problem rather than a moral problem, avoiding the kinds of judgements that have historically characterised discussions of the phenomenon. But morality entails more than judgement about action or behaviour, and our understanding of suicide can be enhanced by attending to its cultural, social, and linguistic connotations. In this work, I offer a theoretical reconstruction of suicide as a form of moral experience that delineates five distinct, yet interrelated domains of understanding – the temporal, the relational, the existential, the ontological, and the linguistic. Attention to each of these domains, I argue, not only enriches our understanding of the moral realm, but provides a heuristic for examining the moral traditions and practices which constitute contemporary understandings of suicide. Keywords: Suicide; philosophy; social values; humanitie

2016-2017 Georgia State University Law Review Symposium: Exploring the Right To Die In The U.S.

This transcript is a reproduction of the Keynote Presentation at the 2016–2017 Georgia State University Law Review Symposium on November 11, 2016. Margaret Battin, is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah

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Collection of Short Stories (1st); Margaret Pabst Battin, The Astonishing Possibilities of Lov

Sex and consequences: world population growth vs. reproductive rights?

The 54th Annual Frederick Reynolds Lectur