Jonathan Glover Essay

Jonathan Glover (born 1941) is a British philosopher known for his studies on ethics. He was educated at Tonbridge School, later spill on to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford. He currently teaches ethics at Kings College London. Glover is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics question institution in the United States.Glovers book Causing demolition and Saving Lives, first published in 1977, addresses practical clean questions nearly biography and death decisions in the areas of abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia, choices between people, capital punishment, and war. His approach is generally consequentialist, though he gives signifi gouget weight to questions of individual autonomy, the Kantian mental picture that we ought to treat other people as ends in themselves rather than only as means.He criticises the idea that mere consciousness or life itself are intrinsically valuable these st ates matter, he argues, because they are pre-requisites for other things that are valuable and make for a life worth living. There is, then, no absolute sanctity of human life. 1 He criticises the principle of double effect2 and the acts and omissions doctrine,3 the belief that there is a huge moral difference between cleanup position someone and intentionally letting them die.In his discussion of real cases of moral decisions about killing he draws on insights from history and literature as well as philosophy. Throughout, the emphasis is on the consequences of moral choices for those affected, rather than on abstract principles applied impersonally. In Humanity A Moral account statement of the Twentieth Century, published in 1999, Glover considers the psychological factors that predispose us to bear down barbaric acts, and suggests how man-made moral traditions and the cultivation of moral imagination flush toilet work to restrain us from a ruthlessly selfish preaching of oth ers.Gaining greater understanding of the monsters within us, he argues, is part of the process of caging and containing them. 4 He examines the various types of atrocity that were perpetrated in the 20th century, including Nazi genocide, communist atomic pile killings under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and more recent slaughter in Bosnia and Rwanda, and examines what fork of bulwarks there could be against them. He allows that religion has provided bulwarks, which are getting eroded. He identifies three types of bulwark.The two more dependable are sympathy and honor for human dignity. The less dependable third is Moral Identity I belong to a kind of person who would not do that mien of thing. This third is less dependable because notions of moral identity can themselves be warped, as was done by the Nazis. 5 In The End of Faith, surface-to-air missile Harris quotes Glover as saying Our entanglements with people close to us erode mere(a) self-interest. Husbands, wives, lovers, pare nts, children and friends all blur the boundaries of selfish concern.Francis Bacon rightly said that people with children choose given warrantors to fortune. Inescapably, other forms of friendship and love hold us hostage too Narrow self-interest is destabilized. citation needed In 1989 the European Commission leased Glover to head a panel on embryo research in Europe. 6 He is married to Vivette Glover, a prominent neuroscientist. Jonathan is father to three and granddaddy to one (father to Ruth, Daniel and David Glover and grandfather to Samuel Glover).