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In Incognito: The Principle Of Double Effect In American Constitutional Law, Edward Lyons
In Incognito: The Principle Of Double Effect In American Constitutional Law, Edward Lyons
Edward C. Lyons
In Vacco v. Quill, 521 U.S. 793 (1997), the Supreme Court for the first time in American case law explicitly applied the principle of double effect to reject an equal protection claim to physician-assisted suicide. Double effect, traced historically to Thomas Aquinas, proposes that under certain circumstances it is permissible unintentionally to cause foreseen evil effects that would not be permissible to cause intentionally. The court rejected the constitutional claim on the basis of a distinction marked out by the principle, i.e., between directly intending the death of a terminally ill patient as opposed to merely foreseeing that death as …
Balancing Acts: Intending Good And Foreseeing Harm - The Principle Of Double Effect In The Law Of Negligence, Edward C. Lyons
Balancing Acts: Intending Good And Foreseeing Harm - The Principle Of Double Effect In The Law Of Negligence, Edward C. Lyons
Edward C. Lyons
In this article, responding to assertions that the principle of double effect has no place in legal analysis, I explore the overlap between double effect and negligence analysis. In both, questions of culpability arise in situations where a person acts with no intent to cause harm but where reasonable foreseeability of unintended harm exists. Under both analyses, the determination of whether such conduct is permissible involves a reasonability test that balances that foreseeable harm against the good intended by the actor's conduct. In both, absent a finding that the foreseeable harm is unreasonable in light of that intended good, no …