Beyond Price: Essays on Birth and Death

In nine lively essays, bioethicist J. David Velleman challenges the prevailing consensus about assisted suicide and reproductive technology, articulating an original approach to the ethics of creating and ending human lives. He argues that assistance in dying is appropriate only at the point where talk of suicide is not, and he raises moral objections to anonymous donor conception. In their place, Velleman champions a morality of valuing personhood over happiness in making end-of-life decisions, and respecting the personhood of future children in making decisions about procreation. These controversial views are defended with philosophical rigor while remaining accessible to the general reader. Written over Velleman's 30 years of undergraduate teaching in bioethics, the essays have never before been collected and made available to a non-academic audience. They will open new lines of debate on issues of intense public interest.

J. David Velleman is a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. A fellow the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has published numerous articles on the self, moral psychology, and practical reasoning, as well as monographs on the foundations of morality and moral relativism, including Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge, co-authored with Herlinde Pauer-Studer  (Palgrave 2015) and a second extended editions of Foundations for Moral Relativism published by Open Book in 2015.