David William Archard

Queen's University Belfast | QUB · School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy

Background The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for clinical ethics support provision to ensure as far as possible fair decision making and to address healthcare workers’ moral distress. Purpose To describe the availability, characteristics and role of clinical ethics support services (CESSs) in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method A...

This article provides a philosophical analysis of a putative right of the child to have their expressed views considered in matters that affect them. Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 is an influential and interesting statement of that right. The article shows that the child’s ‘right to a voice’ is complex....

The pace of change and, indeed, the sheer number of clinical ethics committees (not to be confused with research ethics committees) has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Committees were formed to support healthcare professionals and to operationalise, interpret and compensate for gaps in national and professional guidance. But as the role o...

I consider whether political deference by a citizen within a liberal democracy to moral experts is morally problematic. I compare and contrast deference in the political and personal domains. I set to one side consequentialist worries about political deference and evaluate its possible intrinsic wrongness, expressed as a worry that deference is inc...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented challenge for the provision of critical care. Anticipating an unsustainable burden on the health service, the UK government introduced numerous legislative measures culminating in the Coronavirus Act, which interfere with existing legislation and rights. However, the existing standards and legal fra...

Four-year-old Tafida Raqeeb suffered a sudden and catastrophic brain injury resulting from a rare condition. UK doctors would not agree to a transfer of Tafida to a hospital in Italy in circumstances that they considered to be contrary to her best interests. Her parents applied for judicial review of the hospital decision and the hospital Trust app...

Much contemporary writing on 'family' and 'family law' cites extensive changes to the family as evidence that the very concept of the 'family' is redundant, or that the family has disappeared. Conceptual questions (What counts as a family?) should be distinguished from normative ones (Is the family a good thing? Are some families better than others...

The methodology of applied philosophy may consist in its mode of application; or it may serve applied philosophy's purpose of speaking to practical matters. There may be no single method that is shared by all sub-fields of applied philosophy; applied ethics, the dominant form of applied philosophy, should be thought of as neither “top-down” nor “bo...

I explore the implications of a view – that children and adults enjoy a markedly different moral and political status, wherein the latter can and should be permitted to make choices as to how they lead their lives, whereas the former should not be permitted to make such choices – for how we think about the relationship between autonomy and welfare,...

I contrast a liberal and a conservative approach to the morality of sex, endorsing the former with a concession as to the special nature of sex, and note Pruss' philosophical and theological endorsement of the latter. I criticize his argumentative strategy in three regards: first, he defends Christian love as equivalent to benevolence; second, he a...

This article examines what is wrong with some expressive acts, ‘insults’. Their putative wrongfulness is distinguished from the causing of indirect harms, aggregated harms, contextual harms, and damaging misrepresentations. The article clarifies what insults are, making use of work by Neu and Austin, and argues that their wrongfulness cannot lie in...

This article seeks, first, to disarm some of the principal criticisms of the best interests principle as having an indeterminate content. It then considers how a best interests principle stands in relation to other principles, in particular according to the child a 'voice' on matters affecting its interests. It seeks to show that there is an import...

The statement, frequently made some years ago, that nationalism and patriotism are neglected topics in moral and political philosophy is now dated. Since the 1990s, a wealth of relevant material has been published. Although by no means universally sympathetic to its subject the work has nevertheless not, on the whole, shared the disparaging tone th...

It is common to distinguish between three separate subdisciplines within moral philosophy: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics (but see Darwall 1998: 12; Kagan 1998: 5).

Any discussion of children's rights must ask whether children do have rights and, if they do, what rights they have. It should at the outset acknowledge the basic distinction between moral and legal or positive rights (see Rights). The latter are those rights which, as a matter of fact, have been accorded to persons in law or by existing institutio...

The alleged problem of the dirty hands of politicians has been much discussed since Michael Walzer’s original piece (Walzer 1974). The discussion has concerned the precise nature of the problem or sought to dissolve the apparent paradox. However there has been little discussion of the putative complicity, and thus also dirtying of hands, of a democ...

A moral compromise is a compromise on moral matters; it is agreement in the face of moral disagreement but where there is agreement on the importance of consensus – namely that it secures a morally desirable outcome. It is distinguishable from other forms of agreement, and an important distinction between moral compromise with public agreement and...

Much is said about the decline of the family, often in connection with the prevalence of certain social problems. In this article I consider two kinds of fear: (i) that the traditional family is disappearing; (ii) that new forms of family emerging are, in some or other respect, not worthy of the title. In themselves, neither fear, I argue, should g...

Reviews - Cultural Identity and Political Ethics. By GilbertPaul. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780748623884, pb. £19.99 - Volume 86 Issue 4 - David Archard

Procreating means nothing more than the creation of human beings. ‘To procreate’ can of course be loosely employed to mean ‘to have sex’. However, strictly speaking, procreation is the generation of new lives. Heterosexual sexual activity can be procreative, but it need not be. Equally, and conversely, non-sexual acts and practices might be procrea...

An account of the nature and value of the family within a liberal society. It defines 'family', and assesses the right to have a family, whether the family promotes injustice, and what future there is for the family in the face of significant changes.

This article addresses the difficult matter of interpreting the best interest principle, and offers advice for those who must make laws, and those who make decisions within the constraints of those laws. Our approach rests on an assumption that conclusions about best interest are best reached through a reasoned deliberative process. We suggest that...

The book offers new and original chapters on the ethics of procreation and parenthood. The introduction provides an overview of the current debates in this area. In his chapter, Tim Bayne evaluates current thinking about the ethics of bringing people into existence. David Benatar argues that the right of reproductive freedom, although important, mu...

The chapter distinguishes between the parental obligation to ensure that the child has a parent and the responsibilities of acting as a parent. It argues that a causal theory of parental obligation-that those who cause children to exist thereby incur an obligation to ensure that they are adequately cared for-can be defended independently of a theor...

Introduction Imagine that Dr Smith makes a terrible decision that has a disastrous outcome. The disastrous outcome is the death of her patient; the decision is terrible in that it displays a woeful failure on her part to respond appropriately to the particular circumstances of the patient’s case. Should she be subject to the penalties of the crimin...

In the Introduction I contrasted optimists with pessimists with respect to the family. The latter divide into those who bemoan the demise of the traditional family, and those who believe social and biotechnological developments threaten the existence of anything like a family. In response to the first kind of pessimist I have consistently argued th...

The principle of liberal legitimacy — that coercive exercises of power need justification in the form of the freely given consent of those over whom the power is exercised — was mentioned in the last chapter as deriving from the work of John Locke. Locke expounded and defended this principle in his Second Treatise of Government. His First Treatise,...

Chapter 1 offered a minimal definition of ‘the family’ as a multigenerational group, normally stably co-habiting, whose adults take primary custodial responsibility for the dependent children. On such a definition there will be numerous and varied familial forms — ones in which there is one adult, where there is a pair of adults, or perhaps several...

Chapter 1 carefully distinguished between matters having to do with a definition of ‘the family’ and claims about the ideal form of the family. I offered a minimal and functional definition of ‘the family’ as a multigenerational group, normally stably co-habiting, whose adults take primary custodial responsibility for the dependent children. I crit...

Liberals who are committed to the ideal of a just society should worry about the existence of the family. This is because the existence of families seems to be incompatible with the realisation of justice. There are in fact three distinct ways in which this incompatibility threatens, and it is important to distinguish them. First, families are subs...

This book is concerned to offer a defence of the family. More particularly it is concerned to offer a liberal defence of the family, and to defend the kinds of family that are appropriate within a liberal society. By a liberal society I mean one defined by a set of recognisable principles and priorities: equal individual liberty; a fair distributio...

Given that in our view the child has a fundamental right to be heard in all collective deliberative processes determining his or her future, we set out, firstly, what is required of such processes to respect this right – namely that the child's authentic voice is heard and makes a difference – and, secondly, the distance between this ideal and prac...

abstract I consider the putative originality of applied philosophy and seek to defend a version of it often called ‘bottom up’. I review ways in which imagined cases may cause us to reconsider our normative commitments, and endorse a general attentiveness to the matter of how the world is and how it might reasonably be imagined. This is important i...

Professional philosophers are members of bioethical committees and regulatory bodies in areas of interest to bioethicists. This suggests they possess moral expertise even if they do not exercise it directly and without constraint. Moral expertise is defined, and four arguments given in support of scepticism about their possession of such expertise...

We consider the problem of reconciling the two commitments to hear a child and to promote a child's best interests by identifying the principal issues at stake and illustrating them by reference to legal decision-making in the domains of health in the United Kingdom and custody and child protection in Norway. We agree that a child's views are not a...

abstract Martha Nussbaum's concern is to limit the role that emotions can legitimately play in the definition of the criminal law. She would allow nuisance laws to curtail the occasioning of disgust but only disgust of a certain kind. Problems arise for her account when she extends this analysis to the prevention of offensiveness. Unavoidable is an...

Contested Commodities: The trouble with Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts, and Other Things, RadinMargaret Jane. Harvard University Press, 1996, xiv + 279 pages. - Volume 14 Issue 2 - David Archard

Just between ourselves Anti‐Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy and Myth By Alan Haworth, Routledge, 1994. Pp. x + 154. ISBN 0–415–08253–6. £35.00. Justice Edited by Alan Ryan, Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. 200 ISBN 019–878037–0. £25.00. Justice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Klaus R. Scherer, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. x...

John O'Neill argues in a recent article, ‘Should Communitarians be Nationalists?’, that communitarians are wrong to be committed to the defence of ties of nationhood, both because the nation-state's rise is associated with the disappearance of the ties of community and because the nation is an illusory community. I argue that the evidence that comm...

ABSTRACT I criticise the ‘liberal’view of the proper relationship between the family and State, namely that, although the interests of the child should be paramount, parents are entitled to rights of both privacy and autonomy which should be abrogated only when the child suffers a specifiable harm. I argue that the right to bear children is not abs...

ABSTRACT Mary Midgley asserts that my argument concerning the problem of child-abuse was inappropriately framed in the language of rights, and neglected certain pertinent natural facts. I defend the view that the use of rights-talk was both apposite and did not misrepresent the moral problem in question. I assess the status and character of the nat...

abstract Using the example of an unconsented mouth swab I criticise the view that an action of this kind taken in itself is wrongful in respect of its being a violation of autonomy. This is so much inasmuch as autonomy merits respect only with regard to ‘critical life choices’. I consider the view that such an action is nevertheless harmful or risk...

Liberal eugenics according to one version is distinguished from authoritarian eugenics on the basis that the choice of enhancement is devolved to parents. The argument for liberal eugenics combines a commitment to the right of parents to autonomy - in reproductive decisions and in the upbringing of children - and a parity claim that there is no mor...

IntroductionJohn Rawls and Robert Nozick on JusticeEqualityPluralism and NeutralityCritics of Liberalism: Communitarianism, Feminism, and Analytical MarxismIndividuals and CommunitiesPolitical Philosophy and PoliticsConclusion

sex education;pedagogical skill;degree of agreement;sexual morality;principle of neutrality

Informed ConsentChildren, Parents and the StateChildren and CompetenceConsent to and Refusing Treatment‘Saviour Siblings’Children's Consent to ResearchGenetic Testing of ChildrenChildren's RightsReferences

Prolonging neonatal life The paradox that medicine’s success breeds medicine’s problems is well known to readers of the Journal of Medical Ethics . Advances in neonatal medicine have worked wonders. Not long ago, extremely premature birth babies, or those born with very serious health problems, would inevitably have died. Today, neonatologists can...

If rape is evaluated as a serious wrong, can it also be defined as non‐consensual sex (NCS)? Many do not see all instances of NCS as seriously wrongful. I argue that rape is both properly defined as NCS and properly evaluated as a serious wrong. First, I distinguish the hurtfulness of rape from its wrongfulness; secondly, I classify its harms and c...

This article examines the charge that nationalism is simply mistaken about the way the world is. It argues that it would be better to talk of national myths which are not myths proper, nor complete falsities, and which bear a complex relation to the truth. They may contain some truth, and give rise to true beliefs. National myths may also be justif...