Courses

Steven Luper

Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy

Trinity University

Professor Steven Luper specializes in epistemology and ethics. Epistemology: In “The Epistemic Predicament” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1984) 26-50, p. 38, he defended the condition that has come to be called the safety condition for knowledge.
Ethics: Much of Luper’s work on ethics concerns the philosophy of death. In “Annihilation” The Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1985) 233-252, Luper argues that Epicurus’s position that death is not bad for us makes sense only if life is not good for us. In The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) he argues that death is sometimes bad for its victims both in a timeless sense and also retroactively.

Blog Posts

The right to die: Anti-euthanasia laws make no sense

December 9, 2016
|
Civil Liberties

Do you have a right to die? The answer is not straightforward. You can allow yourself to die. In the 1990s the Supreme Court ruled that if you are a competent adult you have a constitutional right to refuse all medical treatment, even if that treatment is keeping you alive. Say you cannot breathe on your own, and physicians have attached you to a machine that breathes for you: you may insist that this machine be removed. In other words, you may allow yourself to die, even when lifesaving medical treatment is available. You may even refuse food and water, if that is your preference. Roughly, this