Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Forced Sterilization Of Individuals With Developmental Disabilities: Protection Or Dehumanization?, Kelly J. Schaffter

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

The civil rights of individuals with development disabilities have been a great challenge to protect throughout the United States’ history. The United States has not held the protection of this population’s civil rights with proper priority. The country’s actions towards the population of individuals with development disabilities carried into the 20th century, when individuals with mental disabilities were involuntarily sterilized in the name of eugenics. Currently, the goal of the sterilization of this population is for their protection, yet forced sterilization continues to be a questionable practice in regards to ethics. In this paper, I will claim that the forced …

Persisting Substance And Human Dignity: When Is A Human A Person?, Jacob Countryman

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

Peter Singer believes that only humans have value when they become self-conscious. This assertion implies that infants, as beings unable to be self-conscious, are acceptable for scientific experimentation. All humans, however, have intrinsic value in every stage of development. Embryos, fetuses, infants, and adults belong to one kind. This kind is rational. Since it is human nature to be rational, humans have greater value than other organisms. When a new person is formed at conception, a new primary substance is made and this substance persists throughout the entire life of the new human. Humans are not made of temporal parts; …

Luther's Existential Imago Dei, The Deprivation Thesis, And Sanctity Of Life, Tyler M. John

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

On Ryan Peterson’s reading of Martin Luther, the imago Dei (iD) is a human’s capacity to experience God. Traditionally, Christians have understood the iD to be a property that a) qualitatively separates all human beings from all non-human animals and b) gives humans a greater moral worth than non-human animals. If Peterson’s Luther is right, humans made in the iD and no other material created things have the capacity to experience God, and this capacity makes them worth more, morally, than non-human animals.

I defend this conception of the distinctness of humans by demonstrating the following: For any human being …