Main description:

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.

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 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