Moral Rights and Causal Casuistry

The primary goal of this essay is to examine the character of and problems within the translation of a particular type of moral doctrine into the sort of particular moral judgments we all must make as professional moralists and even as human beings. In particular, I shall be examining the translation or application of certain of the moral dictates of the type of individualistic moral rights theory which is now commonly designated as ‘libertarian’. However, I shall approach this issue of the application of moral dictates to concrete cases within the context of medical ethics and, more specifically, within the context of life-and-death medical decisions. This means that I shall not be concerned with the application to concrete cases of the whole panoply of libertarian rights, e.g., rights to this or that economic good. I will only be concerned with instances in which the relevant right is the right to life and the relevant question is whether a physician’s (or nurse’s, etc.) action violates this right to life. I believe that the main claim which I wish to make about the application of this right to life to concrete medical cases applies very broadly to the application to specific cases of libertarian-type rights at large. That main claim is that the identification of the rights involved in particular cases, i.e., the identification of what the relevant parties have rights to, only provides half of what is needed to reach a judgment about the moral permissibility or impermissibility of a particular action.