Notes

  1. . JohnRawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,Philosophical Review  64 (1955): 3–32. Rawls says that by a “practice” he means “any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure,” adding that “as examples one may think of games and rituals, trials and parliaments.”
  2. . I shall ignore the technical point that an action may not square with justice and still be the right act from a moral point of view, as, for instance, when one denies the demands of justice and bestows mercy. Though such actions are not, strictly speaking, just, we hesitate to call them unjust. This point does not, of course, diminish the validity and significance of justice as an ethical ideal. On this subject see William K. Frankena, “The Concept of Social Justice,” in Social Justice, ed. Richard B. Brandt (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‐Hall, Inc., 1962).
  3. . There are three distinct areas of justice theory: (1) distributive justice, which concerns the just allocation of things of positive value; (2) retributive justice, which concerns just punishment; and (3) compensatory justice, which concerns just compensation for injury or services rendered. The focus in this paper is on distributive justice.
  4. . John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971), p. 102.
  5. . E.g., one could claim that, although the prevention of an expected genetic defect is not required by justice, it is required by the ideal of beneficence, or by charity, or by kindness, or by special duties stemming from some role such as that of parent.
  6. . Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 226.
  7. . Even the critics of this book have lavished it with praise. E.g., Nozick says: “A Theory of justice is a powerful, deep, subtle, wide‐ranging, systematic work in political and moral philosophy which has not seen its like since the writings of John Stuart Mill, if then. It is a fountain of illuminating ideas, integrated together into a lovely whole. Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls' theory or explain why not” (p. 183).
  8. . I have used the formulation of the first principle given on p. 60 and the formulation of the second principle given on p. 83 in Theory of Justice. Rawls's strategy is to reformulate the principles as analysis requires.
  9. . This is what Rawls terms a “pure procedural” account of justice. Instead of specifying a criterion for just distributions in advance, we specify a fair procedure for determining distributions, and we call the actual results of that procedure, whatever they may be, just.
  10. . Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 7.
  11. . Ibid., pp. 107–8; italics added.
  12. . Daniel Callahan, “The Sanctity of Life,” in Updating Life and Death, ed. Donald K. Cutler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 181–223.
  13. . I am indebted to Callahan for this general framework of analysis. However, I have altered his typology and made applications in ways he may not approve. E.g., I have abbreviated the framework considerably by collapsing his five different aspects into the three just described: respect for human species, respect for family lines, respect for persons.
  14. . Paul Ramsey, Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 8. One should not conclude from this quote, however, that Ramsey is a harbinger of genetic control.
  15. . Ibid., pp. 151–52.
  16. . This term is used byH. J.McCloskey,“Rights,Philosophical Quarterly  (April 1965), PD. 115–27.
  17. . For a state‐of‐the‐art account of the methods of genetic control see, Joseph Fletcher, The Ethics of Genetic Control (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Press, 1974).
  18. . R. S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer, Respect for Persons (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).
  19. . There is a parallel formulation. The two distinct types of normative ethical theories are the teleological, which holds that rightness is purely a matter of the good produced by the consequences of an act, and the deontological, which holds that right‐ness is related to some formal or other property of the act itself. Now the deontologist subverts his principles if he takes action the consequences of which make pursuing a deontological ethic impossible, even if such action was called for by a myopic reading of those principles.