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This contribution provides a summary description and analysis of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s multiple publications on medical interventions that result in death, including abortion, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, and the limitation of life-prolonging treatment. In two different stages of his career, Engelhardt has taken very different positions on the morality of these interventions. From 1973 through 1990, Engelhardt defended the rights of physicians and patients to provide and receive these life-ending interventions in most circumstances. His arguments during this period appeal to the Kantian doctrine for respect for the freedom of moral agents and to a distinction between human biological and human personal life. In writings since 1990, Engelhardt condemns all medical interventions whose intent is to cause death, based on the prohibition of killing in any form in the doctrines of traditional Christianity. This is a remarkable shift in the thinking of one of the pioneers of the modern field of bioethics. At one level, the two positions Engelhardt defends are clearly inconsistent. At another level, they illustrate two different types of moral reasoning that are both acknowledged by Engelhardt. A secular pluralist ethic requires tolerance for the actions of "moral strangers' who hold very different moral beliefs from one's own. In contrast, communities of shared belief, like that of traditional Christianity, embrace specific moral beliefs based on Church doctrine and on individual religious experience.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-18965-9_3

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