Life\u27s Sacred Value—Common Ground or Battleground

A Review of Life\u27s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom by Ronald Dworki

Daubert and the Quest for Value-Free Scientific Knowledge in the Courtroom

In a world that grows more technologically complex every day and in which scientific research continually expands both our understanding of, and our questions about, the operation of the natural and man-made world, it is hardly surprising that science should show up with increasing frequency in our court-rooms. Science itself is sometimes at issue, for example, in proceedings on allegations of scientific misconduct or in disputes over the ownership or patentability of technologies. But more frequently, science enters in aid of resolving a case in which a complex question of causation is at issue. To establish or rebut causation, each side may seek to introduce evidence from expert witnesses. With crowded dockets, the simpler cases are more likely to settle, while more complex ones-especially class actions and mass tort suits-go to trial, which may explain why in some jurisdictions, experts take part in upwards of eighty percent of all trials

Punishing Reproductive Choices in the Name of Liberal Genetics

When the four American moral philosophers who individually have already made the most significant contributions to the ethical analysis of contemporary health care and medicine collaborate, it should come as no surprise that their joint effort is a lucid and powerful analysis of the principles that a just and humane society would employ in setting policies about how the new tools of molecular genetics should be used for human betterment. In From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler aimed to steer a middle course between two extreme models. The first model is what they termed the public health model, which measures good in terms of improving the genetic health of society. The second model is the personal services model, which measures good in the satisfaction of individual choices. Although the public health model led to the racist and classist eugenics that marred the Progressive Movement in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century and then culminated in the crimes of Nazism, the reaction to those excesses created the present devotion to “nondirective genetic counseling” that produces excesses of personal autonomy. According to this excess of personal autonomy, all choices are equally legitimate, without regard for justice or equality, and are no different than choices about any goods purchased in a marketplace