Interview with Jonathan Glover: Looking Back at Questions of Life and Death

Abstract

A few months after the publication of the French translation of his book Causing Death and Saving Lives (in French Questions de vie ou de mort, Labor et fides, 2017), Jonathan Glover was kind enough to return to some of the theses defended in this book. In forty years, this work has become a classic of applied ethics in the English-speaking world. Glover tackled a series of questions involving the lives of men and women, including abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia, the death penalty and war. We asked him here about the method he considers the best in moral philosophy, and returned to his criticism of certain dominant ideas at the time (doctrine of sacred life, the distinction between acts and omissions, the principle of double effect, etc.). Jonathan Glover also discusses some of the positions of his former students Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan.