Bioetica, sacralità della vita e virtù. Osservazioni critiche su un recente libro di M. La Torre

In this paper, some critical remarks on M. La Torre’s book, Bioetica in tempo di pandemia are exposed. These remarks concerns: 1) the justification of paternalism according to La Torre’s liberal account of bioethics. If paternalism is justified then it is open to debate in which sense his proposal can be labelled as “liberal”; 2) what one earns with assuming that in order to solve conflicts of values we should prefer moral specificationism in front of Alexy’s balancing between legal principles. We will show that in arguing for specificationism La Torre tries to avoid the phenomenon of tragic choice, without succeeding; 3) the lack of clarity in depicting the idea of “sacred life”. This idea is in tension with the liberal vindication of the right to interrupt pregnancy