Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War

This work explains an increasingly popular view dubbed the Consistent Life Ethic, which holds that all life deserves reverence, so all social support for actions that destroy life should be withdrawn. The call is for opposition to abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia and other forms of killing to be consistent. Supporters of this view, shared widely in these pages, include figures from the Dalai Lama and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malread Corrifon Maguire to actor Martin Sheen and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff. It is at once an ethical, religious and political ideology, explored here in its application to actions from treatment of unborn humans to infants, the disabled, the poverty-stricken, war combatants and animals.

RACHEL M. MACNAIR is Director of the Institute for Integrated Social Analysis. A Psychologist and Sociologist, she is also author ofPsychology of Peace: An Introduction (Praeger 2003) and Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing (Praeger, 2002).

STEPHEN ZUNES is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he chairs the Middle East studies program. He serves as a member of the advisory committee for the Tikkun Community and as the chair of the board of academic advisors for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. Previous books includeTinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (2003) and Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective (1999).