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One often hears Catholic and non-Catholic politicians and private citizens claim 'I am personally opposed to abortion ...' but add that it is morally permissible for others to accept abortion. We consider a Rawlsian defense of this position based on the recognition that one's opposition to abortion stems from a comprehensive doctrine which is incompatible with Public Reason. We examine a second defense of this position based upon respecting the autonomy of others and a third grounded in the harm to the unwilling mother overriding that to the aborted fetus. We look at a fourth and fifth defense based upon our epistemic ignorance regarding the burdens on others of unwanted pregnancies and the ontological and moral status of embryo. We find most versions of these defenses to be wanting and conclude that only if the proponents of the position are subjectivist about morals, which few are, can they offer a coherent defense.

Lockeans, as well as their critics, have pointed out that the memory criterion is likely to mean that none of us were ever fetuses or even infants due to the lack of direct psychological connections between then and now. But what has been overlooked is that the memory criterion leads to either backward causation and a violation of Locke's own very plausible principle that we can have only one origin, or backward causation and a number of overlapping people where we thought there was just one. I will argue that such problems cannot be avoided by replacing direct psychological connections with overlapping chains of connectedness--what has been called 'psychological continuity.'

Shoemaker maintains that when a functionalist theory of mind is combined with his belief about individuating properties and the well-known cerebrum transplant thought experiment, the resulting position will be a version of the psychological approach to personal identity that can avoid The Problem of Too Many Thinkers. I maintain that the costs of his solution--that the human animal is incapable of thought--are too high. Shoemaker also has not provided an argument against there existing a merely conscious being that is not essentially self-conscious but is spatially coincident with a person who is essentially self-conscious. Both the person and the merely sentient being will be transplanted when the cerebrum is. And another thought experiment will make it impossible for Shoemaker to identify the person and the merely conscious being.

Most definitions of death--whether cardiopulmonary, whole brain and brain stem, or just upper brain--include an irreversibility condition. Cessation of function is not enough to declare death. Irreversibility should be limited to an organism's ability to 'restart' itself after vital organs have ceased to function. However, this would mean that every hour people who cannot be revived without the intervention of medical personnel and their technology are coming back from the dead. However, the alternative of irreversibility being dependent upon technology will lead to even more counterintuitive results such as: some people are dead at a particular time and place, but others in more technologically advanced eras and locations are alive despite their being in identical physical states; in the future, millions of cryogenically frozen human beings could spend centuries in a non-dead state because of the future technological breakthroughs; or large numbers of 'frozen' people are dead for aeons but coroners are not able to declare them so because they are unaware of what biological conditions science will never be able to reverse. So death should be defined only in non-relational biological terms with a self-starting condition similar to that once advocated by Lawrence Becker.